Jack B. Soll

Jack B. Soll is a social scientist whose work with Richard Larrick helps explain why people overlook the value of collective judgment. In the book, their argument is a counterpoint to the search for a single authoritative expert: rather than trying to identify the one person most likely to be right, decision-makers can often learn more by combining the judgments of a group.

The Case Against Chasing the Expert

Soll and Larrick describe the impulse to “chase the expert” as a costly mistake. People tend to credit a crowd’s success to a few unusually smart members, even when the result is better understood as the product of aggregation. The book’s alternative is not to disregard expertise, but to ask the crowd—including its experts—and let its members’ separate judgments contribute to the answer.

The preference for one standout adviser reflects a mistaken intuition about averaging. Faced with several opinions, people commonly try to select the best one rather than combine them, as though an average necessarily dilutes useful insight. The book argues that a group can instead cancel out individual errors while retaining information distributed among its members. The crowd is often unable to recognize its own collective capacity because intelligence is imagined as residing in particular individuals.

Expertise, Confidence, and Prediction

The appeal of an expert is also strengthened by the belief that expertise will announce itself. But experts are not more confident in their abilities than ordinary people, and confidence is only weakly related to performance. Knowing a subject and knowing that one’s own judgment is reliable are different skills, so apparent certainty offers no dependable way to identify the best forecaster.

A record of past success is no guarantee of future skill. When enough people make predictions, some will acquire impressive records through chance as well as ability; a striking run does not establish that its owner will continue to outperform others. The distinction in Soll and Larrick’s argument is between seeking capable people, which may be useful, and trying to find the single smartest person, which can mislead. Combining judgments avoids making the decision depend on correctly identifying that exceptional individual.

Aggregation and Its Conditions

The broader argument specifies conditions that make collective judgment more likely to work: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation. Members need some private information or distinct interpretation; their judgments must not simply echo one another; they must be able to draw on local knowledge; and there must be a mechanism for turning separate judgments into a collective result. Averaging works not by magic but because diverse errors can cancel while information remains.

That qualification matters. If a group has no relevant information to begin with, aggregation cannot supply it. The book’s examples of a crowd estimating the responsibility for the Challenger disaster and a team estimating the location of the lost Scorpion illustrate the different pieces of the same logic: individual participants need not possess the complete answer for their combined judgments to approach it. The case for aggregation is therefore not a claim that every crowd is wise, but that a suitably structured group can hold more useful information than any one member recognizes.

The Book’s Wider Challenge

Soll and Larrick’s argument supports the book’s challenge to the assumption that a consultant, chief executive, or other singular authority will make the decisive difference. It also clarifies why a crowd’s success should not be credited automatically to a few hidden geniuses: doing so preserves the very individual-centered explanation that the examples call into question.

Their account places the choice between selecting and aggregating at the center of practical judgment. When opinions are diverse and independent, a well-designed process can make the group’s dispersed knowledge available to decision-makers; when people defer to confidence, reputation, or a supposed standout, they risk discarding that advantage. Soll’s role in the book is to sharpen this contrast and explain why the effort to find the smartest individual may be less reliable than allowing many informed judgments to work together.