Uh, certainly lots of people actually know the answers of questions such as "the height of the Eiffel Tower"? It's not then surprising that the crowd accuracy i

Uh, certainly lots of people actually know the answers of questions such as "the height of the Eiffel Tower"? It's not then surprising that the crowd accuracy increases when people can talk? My impression is that the tasks where an "independent crowd" outperforms a "dependent" one is on tasks where it's highly unlikely that any one participant can know the answer for sure. (estimation number of objects, etc.) I didn't easily find any references to such papers, but this link is one confirmation http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowd-wisdom-goes-wrong http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowd-wisdom-g... (search for "Flawed thinking") EDIT: Wikipedia seems to be a decent entry point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems