Facebook’s Never-Ending Movie Quiz: Your mom was wrong, follow the crowd.
by Marion JensenIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
We’ve all heard the line: If all of your friends were to jump off a cliff, would you do it too?
Well, there is a good chance all of your friends are not jumping off a cliff. Because they know better. In fact, if you have a large enough crowd, there is a good chance whatever they think is right. Sort of.
I’ve been playing around on Facebook. There are all sorts of interesting things going on there, but I wanted to write about something called the Never-Ending Movie Quiz. The basic premise is that you answer a whole bunch of questions and the more you answer right, the higher you are ranked.
The interesting part is that after you answer the question, you are shown the correct answer. You are also shown, as a percentage, how other people are voting. I’ve answered 201 questions (it was over Thanksgiving and a bit slow). For all 201 question, the crowd has never been wrong. In other words, the majority of users have always picked the right answer, usually by 70 or 80 percent. So while I’m not perfect, all of you are. At least when taken all together.
This obviously doesn’t work all the time (you can point to many a political election and make a case that the crowd is often wrong). But when there is a reasonably well known fact, or even a less-than-reasonably well known fact, there is an excellent chance that if you poll enough people, whatever the crowd says is right.
It would be interesting to run this same experiment but with more challenging questions. Does this hold true for difficult questions? Little known trivia? Maybe only 1 in a hundred know pi to 20 decimal points, but if you polled 50,000 people, you’d be able to discern pi, because 500 people would all be picking the same numbers.
So, next time somebody asks you if you would follow your friends off the cliff, you can reply, “Yes. Yes I would. Because there must be something really interesting there at the bottom.”
1 Comment 
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April 15th, 2008 at 12:49 am
That movie quiz is addicting.
One of the questions was answered correctly by only 41% of the participants. All the rest were at least 70%