Qualification: How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-303 · 2026-08-08

Lorenz and colleagues qualify Kaal's registered null result with an independent experiment on collective judgment. Social influence caused participants' estimates to converge and reduced group diversity. It did not significantly reduce collective error or improve accuracy. The result establishes that information exchange can change group behavior without improving the relevant accuracy measure. The correspondence is limited. Lorenz and colleagues study human factual estimation under exposure to others' answers. They do not study structured multi-model validation pools, Youden's J, or Kaal's reported confidence interval.

Affirmed commentary position. This record extends a source-bound scholarly claim but is not a verbatim paper claim.

Holds when

The response is limited to the three evidence-bound passages and the one mapped Kaal claim.
External evidence level: complete public six-page PNAS Version of Record with Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, and exact page-bound full-text evidence.
Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification.
Lorenz and colleagues study 144 human participants answering factual estimation questions. They do not study autonomous agents or validation pools.
The treatment exposes participants to aggregate or full information about others' estimates. It is not Kaal's structured deliberation protocol.
The outcome is collective estimation error and opinion diversity. It is not Youden's J or a classification discrimination measure.
The source qualifies the plausibility of a null accuracy result under social influence. It does not validate Kaal's design, execution, confidence interval, or numerical estimate.
OpenAlex multilingual searches, Semantic Scholar general search, four inherited Semantic Scholar records, and arXiv general search returned HTTP 429. Crossref, the public Version of Record, Europe PMC, PubMed, OpenAlex direct resolution, and Semantic Scholar direct resolution independently bind the retained source.

Current debate

How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:7261018-005
Wulf A. Kaal, Empirical Evaluation of the Agentic Reputation Substrate: Deliberation, the Composition of Error, and the Registered Measurement of Agency Costs in a Controlled Multi-Model Cohort (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7261018
Source PDF sha256: 1d6cbe544bd0055133f7cf8ff308be4fde955867bd8dc764992b8d516af15fa8

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: complete public six-page PNAS Version of Record with Crossref, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, PubMed, Europe PMC, and exact page-bound full-text evidence
Review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.96
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

research-methods consensus-and-security scholarly-growth-coverage scholarly-literature collective-intelligence social-influence group-accuracy

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-12:scholarly-growth-7261018-005-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: e4858c3018268832c020bc6285a881a709610081acdfc96899d057faa45f1d99
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-303.md | sha256sum