Collective inference of the truth of propositions from crowd probability judgments

Abstract

Every day, we judge the probability of propositions. When we communicate graded confidence (e.g. "I am 90% sure"), we enable others to gauge how much weight to attach to our judgment. Ideally, people should share their judgments to reach more accurate conclusions collectively. Peer-to-peer tools for collective inference could help debunk disinformation and amplify reliable information on social networks, improving democratic discourse. However, individuals fall short of the ideal of well-calibrated probability judgments, and group dynamics can amplify errors and polarize opinions. Here, we connect insights from cognitive science, structured expert judgment, and crowdsourcing to infer the truth of propositions from human probability judgments. In an online experiment, 376 participants judged the probability of each of 1,200 general-knowledge claims for which we have ground truth (451,200 ratings). Aggregating binary judgments by majority vote already exhibits the "wisdom of the crowd"--the superior accuracy of collective inferences relative to individual inferences. However, using continuous probability ratings and accounting for individual accuracy and calibration significantly improves collective inferences. Peer judgment behavior can be modeled probabilistically, and individual parameters capturing each peer's accuracy and miscalibration can be inferred jointly with the claim probabilities. This unsupervised approach can be complemented by supervised methods relying on truth labels to learn models that achieve well-calibrated collective inference. The algorithms we introduce can empower groups of collaborators and online communities to pool their distributed intelligence and jointly judge the probability of propositions with a well-calibrated sense of uncertainty.