Boosting medical diagnostics by pooling independent judgments

Significance Collective intelligence is considered to be one of the most promising approaches to improve decision making. However, up to now, little is known about the conditions underlying the emergence of collective intelligence in real-world contexts. Focusing on two key areas of medical diagnostics (breast and skin cancer detection), we here show that similarity in doctors’ accuracy is a key factor underlying the emergence of collective intelligence in these contexts. This result paves the way for innovative and more effective approaches to decision making in medical diagnostics and beyond, and to the scientific analyses of those approaches. Collective intelligence refers to the ability of groups to outperform individual decision makers when solving complex cognitive problems. Despite its potential to revolutionize decision making in a wide range of domains, including medical, economic, and political decision making, at present, little is known about the conditions underlying collective intelligence in real-world contexts. We here focus on two key areas of medical diagnostics, breast and skin cancer detection. Using a simulation study that draws on large real-world datasets, involving more than 140 doctors making more than 20,000 diagnoses, we investigate when combining the independent judgments of multiple doctors outperforms the best doctor in a group. We find that similarity in diagnostic accuracy is a key condition for collective intelligence: Aggregating the independent judgments of doctors outperforms the best doctor in a group whenever the diagnostic accuracy of doctors is relatively similar, but not when doctors’ diagnostic accuracy differs too much. This intriguingly simple result is highly robust and holds across different group sizes, performance levels of the best doctor, and collective intelligence rules. The enabling role of similarity, in turn, is explained by its systematic effects on the number of correct and incorrect decisions of the best doctor that are overruled by the collective. By identifying a key factor underlying collective intelligence in two important real-world contexts, our findings pave the way for innovative and more effective approaches to complex real-world decision making, and to the scientific analyses of those approaches.