Exploiting the Wisdom of Others to Make Better Decisions: Suspending Judgment Reduces Egocentrism and Increases Accuracy

Although decision makers often consult other people’s opinions to improve their decisions, they fail to do so optimally. One main obstacle to incorporating others’ opinions efficiently is one’s own opinion. We theorize that decision makers could improve their performance by suspending their own judgment. In three studies, participants used others’ opinions to estimate uncertain quantities (the caloric value of foods). In the full‐view condition, participants could form independent estimates prior to receiving others’ opinions, whereas participants in the blindfold condition could not form prior opinions. We obtained an intriguing blindfold effect. In all studies, the blindfolded participants provided more accurate estimates than did the full‐view participants. Several policy‐capturing measures indicated that the advantage of the blindfolded participants was due to their unbiased weighting of others’ opinions. The full‐view participants, in contrast, adhered to their prior opinion and thus failed to exploit the information contained in others’ opinions. Moreover, in all three studies, the blindfolded participants were not cognizant of their advantage and expressed less confidence in their estimates than did the full‐view participants. The results are discussed in relation to theories of opinion revision and group decision making. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. It is a common practice to solicit other people’s opinions prior to making a decision. A student seeks other students’ ratings of an elective course, and a manager considers several judgmental forecasts of foreign exchange rates before embarking on a new venture. Such settings involve the decision maker in the task of combining other people’s opinions, mostly to improve one’s final decision (Gino, Shang, & Croson, 2009; Harvey & Fischer, 1997; Yaniv, Choshen‐Hillel, & Milyavsky, 2011). In some settings, decision makers form their own preliminary views prior to soliciting others’ opinions; thus, their task, upon receiving the advice, is to revise their opinions. In other settings, decision makers approach the tasktabula rasa ,t hat is, with hardly any prior knowledge that would enable them to form clear opinions; here, their task is merely to combine others’ advice. For example, a student (or a manager) seeking others’ opinions might or might not have the information to form a confident, independent preliminary forecast. How might the presence or the absence of prior opinions affect decision makers’ ability to use advice profitably? Do prior opinions aid one’s performance (e.g. by adding information) or hamper it? How might suspending judgment affect accuracy? We suggest that judges engage different modes of processing when integrating others’ opinions, depending on whether or not they hold a prior opinion of their own. These modes, which could be traced using process measures, determine the judges’ success in judgmental estimation tasks. Specifically, we suggest that judges who do not hold personal opinions form an aggregate opinion by attending to all opinions and assessing an intuitive measure of the central tendency in the set (Budescu, Rantilla, Yu, & Karelitz, 2003;