ABSTRACT
The Work in its Context The science of collective intelligence was thought to have originated as jury theory,* first explored by Marquis de Condorcet* in 1785. De Condorcet was a political scientist who explored the probability of a jury in reaching the correct verdict in his book, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. His work assumed that each juror was more likely than not to conclude the verdict correctly on his own, so that each additional juror added to the jury would subsequently improve the likelihood that the jury vote would select the correct verdict.1 Sir Francis Galton* contributed to this field in 1906 with his statistical modeling of estimates for the weight of a butchered ox at a livestock fair, the most similar example of Surowiecki’s specific argument about the “wisdom” of crowds.
