Bringing the Wisdom of the Crowd to an Individual by Having the Individual Assume Different Roles
Jaime Teevan and Lisa Yu. 2017. Bringing the Wisdom of the Crowd to an Individual by Having the Individual Assume Different Roles. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 131-135. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3059454.3059467
Summary :
In this paper, the author considered the question that for people who prefer to work alone, they may suffer from fixation and have the difficulty thinking out of their mind. Due to a few reasons, like the cost of money, effort to explain, private information, and personal feeling, many people choose to work individually on their own. However, this situation may cause the problem that fixating on the knowledge, mind, and skills they have without the wisdom of the crowd. To address this question, the author came up the idea that we could help an individual think like a crowd by the method of approaching the same problem multiple times as if they were a different person with a different mindset each time. To prove this idea, the author designed an interesting experiment. The author divided the participants into two parts. One is the multiple-roles condition, and the other is non-roles conditions. All of the participants were asked to think out three useful ideas that could be a good solution for the given problem in a limited time. While in the multiple-roles conditions, participants were also asked to assume themselves as several different roles to answer the same questions. After the experiment, participants need to answer several questions about difficulty and creativity. According to the result of the experiment, the author found that compared with two different conditions, asking people to assume different roles encouraged creative thinking. And in the non-role condition, people suffer a gradually increasing difficulty of coming up a new idea, while in the multiple-roles condition it stays the same. And most people prefer their most recent idea.
Reflection:
This is an interesting paper that used role assuming experiment to figure out whether asking yourself the same question while pretending you are different people could actually bringing the wisdom of solving this question.
I think the result that a single person addresses creative problems by assuming the role of various crowed-generated experts is really interesting. Jumping out of the box is really important especially for someone who likes doing work individually.
However, I don’t think that answer the question about how creative is this idea by themselves is a good method. This question should be answered by other people, other participants, or some experts. To be honest, the conclusion that people have a trend that like their recent idea more is not so solidity. There are still many participants like their first idea. I think the reason to cause this situation is that person like their first idea because it is just the first one. And people may refine their previous idea to come out the third idea, so they thought the last idea could be more perfect.
The cost of time using to come up with a new idea could also be an important parameter, instead of self-rating difficulty level.
Questions:
Is it good to assign specific roles to let people think in these situations? Why not let participants assume their own roles?
What kind of other questions can be asked to figure out whether this method really help?
Like which idea do you think can solve this problem best?
Why not recruit some experts or other people to rate whether these ideas are creativity? Or pick their favorite idea?