“Taking a Disagreeing Perspective Improves the Accuracy of People’s Quantitative Estimates”, 2022-06-01 ():
In today’s polarized society, disagreement is associated with conflict and division, but are there also benefits to disagreement? By using people’s ability to take the perspective of others, we propose that disagreement is a powerful tool for producing accurate estimates. In 5 experiments, people made estimates of unknown quantities from various perspectives. Following principles of within-person aggregation, we found that aggregating people’s first estimate with their second estimate, made from the perspective of someone they often disagree with, produced accurate estimates. In explaining this accuracy, we found that taking a disagreeing perspective prompts people to consider estimates they normally would not consider to be viable options, resulting in first and second estimates that are more diverse and independent (and by extension more accurate when aggregated). Together, these results underscore the importance of perspective taking and disagreement as strategies to improve the accuracy of people’s quantitative estimates.
Many decisions rest on people’s ability to make estimates of unknown quantities. In these judgments, the aggregate estimate of a crowd of individuals is often more accurate than most individual estimates. Remarkably, similar principles apply when multiple estimates from the same person are aggregated, and a key challenge is to identify strategies that improve the accuracy of people’s aggregate estimates.
Here, we present the following strategy: Combine people’s first estimate with their second estimate, made from the perspective of someone they often disagree with. In 5 preregistered experiments (n = 6,425 adults; n = 53,086 estimates) with populations from the United States and United Kingdom, we found that:
such a strategy produced accurate estimates (compared with situations in which people made a second guess or when second estimates were made from the perspective of someone they often agree with).
These results suggest that disagreement, often highlighted for its negative impact, is a powerful tool in producing accurate judgments.
[Keywords: cognition(s), decision-making, performance, prediction, judgment, open data, open materials, preregistered]