The need for ignorance

A recent study shows that some percentage of uninformed (ignorant) individuals promote democratic consensus in animal groups. This is a very interesting finding as the same appears to be true in complex human societies as well. Through theory and experiments, the article demonstrates that the presence of uninformed individuals inhibit the process of domination by a strongly opinionated minority. If the strongly opinionated minority is pushing toward an optimal outcome for the system, ignorant participants will slow them down.

These findings have a variety of societal and policy implications. At the limit, in a system with fully informed individuals, strongly opinionated minority is more able to push the outcomes in their desired direction better. On the other side, a system with complete ignorance will assure democratized outcomes, regardless of the optimality of such outcomes. Most systems, fall in between and it is unclear what may be the best level of ignorance that should be maintained to push the system to the best outcome.

A proxy for informed systems may be large and complex companies, where an opinionated minority drives the agenda. An example of uninformed systems may be large democracies that generally assure democratic outcomes. Since neither democratic outcomes nor agendas driven by the opinionated minority can be shown to be optimal, it is difficult to determine the best level of ignorance. However, it is likely that both a complete ignorance or a lack of it, result in inefficient outcomes.

1. Uninformed Individuals Promote Democratic Consensus in Animal Groups

Science 16 December 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6062 pp. 1578-1580 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210280

Iain D. Couzin 1,*, Christos C. Ioannou 1,†, Güven Demirel 2, Thilo Gross 2,‡, Colin J. Torney 1, Andrew Hartnett 1, Larissa Conradt 3,§, Simon A. Levin 1,
Naomi E. Leonard 4