Social Influence Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Sequential Decision Making

Vincenz Frey
Corresponding Author
Vincenz Frey
[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5665-9697
Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, 9712 TG Groningen, Netherlands;
Search for more papers by this author
,
Arnout van de Rijt
Arnout van de Rijt
[email protected]
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4208-3452
Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, 50014 Florence, Italy; Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, 3584 CH Utrecht, Netherlands
Search for more papers by this author

Vincenz Frey

Corresponding Author

Vincenz Frey

[email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5665-9697

Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, 9712 TG Groningen, Netherlands;

Search for more papers by this author

Arnout van de Rijt

[email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4208-3452

Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, 50014 Florence, Italy; Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, 3584 CH Utrecht, Netherlands

Search for more papers by this author

Published Online:8 Oct 2020https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3713

Supplemental Material

mnsc.2020.3713.sm1.pdf

The replication files for this article are available HERE.

Cited by
- Community-based fact-checking reduces the spread of misleading posts on X (formerly Twitter)
  5 May 2026 | Nature Communications, Vol. 17, No. 1
- Expertise evaluation: a dimensional framework for broad-based theory building
  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 195
- The Pipeline and the Paradox: A Proposal for Timely Field-Wide Inquiry into the Core of Acupuncture Training
  22 June 2026 | Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine
- Searching together versus searching apart: Evidence from Kaggle
  27 January 2026 | Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 47, No. 6
- Unraveling the Status Quo of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
  25 May 2026
- Community Fact-Checks Do Not Break Follower Loyalty
  12 April 2026
- Self-organized social distancing
  9 February 2026 | The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 2
- Evaluating the effectiveness of crowd wisdom and large language models for fantasy cricket team selection
  8 March 2026 | Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 22
- The marginal majority effect: When social influence produces lock-in
  Science Advances, Vol. 12, No. 8
- How attitude consistency influences collaborative knowledge building: insights from group negotiation
  18 December 2025 | Information and Learning Sciences, Vol. 127, No. 1-2
- Collective Performance Induced by Social and Individual Learning in Any Population Structure: An Evolutionary Game Approach
  IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 7, No. 2
- Demand forecasting in cross-border live streaming commerce: An explainable multimodal AI framework for market segmentation
  Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Vol. 88
- Drivers and implications of firm herding behavior: A literature review and research agenda for financial reporting scholars
  FINANCIAL REPORTING, No. 1
- References to unbiased sources increase the helpfulness of community fact-checks
  16 July 2025 | Scientific Reports, Vol. 15, No. 1
- Self-organizing group structure through rewiring for collective decision-making in evolving environments
  14 November 2025 | Scientific Reports, Vol. 15, No. 1
- Formulating opinion dynamics from belief formation, diffusion and updating in social network group decision-making: Towards developing a holistic framework
  European Journal of Operational Research, Vol. 325, No. 3
- Emergent numeracy: How the crowd wisdom of non-rounding survey respondents generates accurate immigration estimates
  17 January 2025 | Acta Sociologica, Vol. 68, No. 3
- The Mere Audience‐Size Effect: How Incidental Audience Non‐Normatively Influences the Perceived Product Quality
  24 June 2025 | Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Vol. 38, No. 3
- KİTLELERİN BİLGELİĞİ: BİR HAKÎKAT MIDIR YOKSA BİR SAFSATA MIDIR?
  22 June 2025 | Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi İşletme Fakültesi Dergisi, Vol. 26, No. 1
- Robust maximum expert consensus model with uncertain cooperative behavior in group decision making
  Computers & Industrial Engineering, Vol. 204
- Modeling dependent group judgments: A computational model of sequential collaboration
  6 January 2025 | Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol. 32, No. 3
- Opting out in computer-supported sequential collaboration
  Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 165
- Does the most popular answer lead to the best answer: The moderating roles of tenure, social closeness, and cultural tightness
  Decision Support Systems, Vol. 191
- Modeling biases in binary decision-making within the generalized nonlinear q-voter model
  15 April 2025 | Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Vol. 35, No. 4
- Inconsistent rating scales decrease social influence bias and enhance crowd wisdom
  Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 164
- Disagreeing Perspectives Enhance Inner-Crowd Wisdom for Difficult (but Not Easy) Questions
  24 March 2025 | Psychological Science, Vol. 36, No. 3
- Conditions for a Valid Consensus
  30 July 2025
- How Wisdom-of-Crowds Research Can Help Improve Deliberative Consensus Methods
  14 December 2024
- Optional disclosure and observational learning
  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 229
- Eliminating bias in pedestrian density estimation: A Voronoi cell perspective
  Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Vol. 657
- Genetically-diverse crowds are wiser
  Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 231
- Collective dynamics behind success
  19 December 2024 | Nature Communications, Vol. 15, No. 1
- The functional aspects of selective exposure for collective decision-making under social influence
  17 March 2024 | Scientific Reports, Vol. 14, No. 1
- Evolution of cooperation with early social influence for explaining collective action
  11 December 2024 | Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Vol. 34, No. 12
- Integrating Paths: Enhancing Deliberative Democracy Through Collective Intelligence Insights
  18 December 2024 | Societies, Vol. 14, No. 12
- The loss outweighs the gain: Myopic risk ignorance in sequential decision making
  15 December 2024 | Advances in Psychological Science, Vol. 32, No. 12
- The interdependence of social deliberation and judgment aggregation
  20 January 2024 | Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 63, No. 3-4
- Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence—But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured
  Douglas Guilbeault,
  Austin van Loon,
  Katharina Lix,
  Amir Goldberg,
  Sameer B. Srivastava
  15 November 2023 | Management Science, Vol. 70, No. 10
- A new sociology of humans and machines
  22 October 2024 | Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 8, No. 10
- Investment in employee developmental climate and employees' continued online learning behaviors: A social influence perspective
  29 May 2024 | Human Resource Management, Vol. 63, No. 5
- Evaluating the wisdom of scholar crowds from the perspective of knowledge diffusion
  16 September 2024 | Scientometrics, Vol. 129, No. 9
- Citizen science resource mobilization: Social identities and textual narcissism
  Telematics and Informatics, Vol. 92
- Promoting Erroneous Divergent Opinions Increases the Wisdom of Crowds
  12 June 2024 | Psychological Science, Vol. 35, No. 8
- Community notes increase trust in fact-checking on social media
  31 May 2024 | PNAS Nexus, Vol. 3, No. 7
- Efficiency of Community-Based Content Moderation Mechanisms: A Discussion Focused on Birdwatch
  23 March 2024 | Group Decision and Negotiation, Vol. 33, No. 3
- Strategic low-carbon technology supervision in the closed-loop supply chain: An evolutionary game approach
  Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 450
- Group efficiency and individual fairness tradeoff in making wise decisions
  Omega, Vol. 124
- A multi-stage multi-criterion group decision-making method for emergency management based on alternative chain and trust radius of experts
  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Vol. 101
- Social Influence in Signed Networks
  IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, Vol. 11, No. 1
- Time Series Analysis of Sentiment Polarity Trends: A Case Study
  8 September 2024
- Realtime user ratings as a strategy for combatting misinformation: an experimental study
  28 January 2023 | Scientific Reports, Vol. 13, No. 1
- How does patriotism and institutional support affect the social entrepreneurial orientation (SEO) in the presence of social valuation and experiential learning for social ventures
  9 November 2022 | Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, Vol. 17, No. 6
- Board political ideological diversity and information exposure as antecedents to value creation and value appropriation
  14 June 2023 | Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 40, No. 6
- Multi-stage multi-criteria group decision making method based on hierarchical criteria interaction and trust rejection threshold under uncertain preference information
  Information Sciences, Vol. 647
- Diffusion of Community Fact-Checked Misinformation on Twitter
  4 October 2023 | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 7, No. CSCW2
- A hypernetwork-based urn model for explaining collective dynamics
  19 September 2023 | PLOS ONE, Vol. 18, No. 9
- SUCCEED: Sharing Upcycling Cases with Context and Evaluation for Efficient Software Development
  21 September 2023 | Information, Vol. 14, No. 9
- Evaluating Ventures Fast and Slow: Sensemaking, Intuition, and Deliberation in Entrepreneurial Resource Provision Decisions
  13 May 2022 | Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Vol. 47, No. 4
- Group Structure and Information Distribution on the Emergence of Collective Intelligence
  Ming Tang,
  Huchang Liao
  10 January 2023 | Decision Analysis, Vol. 20, No. 2
- Learning in Networks: An Experiment on Large Networks with Real-World Features
  Syngjoo Choi,
  Sanjeev Goyal,
  Frederic Moisan,
  Yu Yang Tony To
  9 February 2023 | Management Science, Vol. 69, No. 5
- Believability and Harmfulness Shape the Virality of Misleading Social Media Posts
  30 April 2023
- Can individual subjective confidence in training questions predict group performance in test questions?
  7 March 2023 | PLOS ONE, Vol. 18, No. 3
- Conformity effect on the evolution of cooperation in signed networks
  13 February 2023 | Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Vol. 33, No. 2
- Methodological Individualism and Formal Models
  29 December 2023
- Aggregating or Interacting?: The Role of Individual Overconfidence
  1 January 2023 | SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 96
- Foretelling what makes people pay: Predicting the results of field experiments on TV fee enforcement
  Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Vol. 100
- Collective decision-making under changing social environments among agents adapted to sparse connectivity
  13 December 2022 | Collective Intelligence, Vol. 1, No. 2
- Predictive models for human–AI nexus in group decision making
  17 May 2022 | Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1514, No. 1
- Collective wisdom in polarized groups
  13 September 2022 | Collective Intelligence, Vol. 1, No. 1
- Green Logistics Partner Selection Based on Pythagorean Hesitant Fuzzy Set and Multiobjective Optimization
  Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Vol. 2022
- Delegation Mechanism-Based Large-Scale Group Decision Making With Heterogeneous Experts and Overlapping Communities
  IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, Vol. 52, No. 6
- Ideological homophily in board composition and interlock networks: Do liberal directors inhibit viewpoint diversity?
  19 October 2021 | Corporate Governance: An International Review, Vol. 30, No. 3
- Optimizing voting order on sequential juries: a median voter theorem and beyond
  19 October 2021 | Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 58, No. 3
- Underestimating randomness: Outcome bias in betting exchange markets
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 12
- Interacting Cascades: An Experiment on Inter-Group Information Spillovers
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 78

Volume 67, Issue 7

July 2021

Pages 3985-4642, iii-iv

Article Information

Supplemental Material

Metrics

Information

Received:August 21, 2018
Accepted:May 06, 2020
Published Online:October 08, 2020

Cite as

Vincenz Frey, Arnout van de Rijt (2020) Social Influence Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Sequential Decision Making. Management Science 67(7):4273-4286.

https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3713

Keywords

PDF download

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Social Influence Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Sequential Decision Making

Supplemental Material

Volume 67, Issue 7

Article Information

Supplemental Material

Metrics

Information

Cite as

Keywords

Sign Up for INFORMS Publications Updates and News