Why we pretend all opinions are equal

[supergee]

Evidence that we are herd animals

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[johnpalmer]

I'm not sure if I'm disturbed by the science or the journalism (which means I'm disappointed by the journalism, regardless).

A key here is that, although they are establishing that one person is better than the other, they're doing it in a test in which uncertainty is an obvious intended consequence of the task. That PersonA guesses correctly even, say, 75% of the time doesn't tell us *which* 75% of the time s/he's guessing correctly. It also doesn't show that there's a reward for agreeing "correctly" so there's no incentive to care about being right.

I suppose we could say that this means we're predisposed to let people have an opinion during a bull session, but unless there was some reason that the teams were eager to be correct, this doesn't tell us anything past that.