How frequent are large disagreements in human judgement? Miguel Sousa Lobo and his co-author found that the frequency with which an individual judgement differs substantially from the consensus looks less like a bell curve (or a normal distribution, as widely claimed), but instead is asymmetrical (fat-tailed distribution).
The findings have important implications for the aggregation of expert estimates and forecasts, highlighting why we cannot simply rely on averaging. The researchers propose a simple heuristic, which performed well for the range of distributions they studied: 73 data sets from four different sources that included over 169,000 estimates and forecasts.
SOURCE: INSEAD
Categories: Leadership in Psychology
The Future Leadership Institute 