Diverse Personalities Make for Wiser Crowds: How Personality can Affect the Accuracy of Aggregated Judgments

Abstract

One of the biggest sources of diversity in the way people experience, interpret and react to the world is their personality. A substantial literature has concluded that much of the observed variability in personality can be captured by five broad factors (Digman, 1997, which are now often referred to as the Big Five. Since people with different personality types tend to process information differently (Humphreys & Revelle, 1984), we hypothesized that aggregating the judgments of pairs of individuals on the basis of the diversity of their personality profiles would affect the accuracy of the aggregate judgments. Specifically, if members of high (personality) diversity pairs tend to rely on more diverse sets of information when forming their judgments (compared to low diversity pairs), then one should find that their aggregate judgments are more accurate than the aggregate judgments of low diversity pairs.