Social influence makes outlier opinions in online reviews offer more helpful information.

Identifying helpful information from large-scale online reviews has become a core issue in studies on harnessing wisdom-of-crowds. We investigated whether online reviews expressing dissenting opinions (i.e., outlier reviews) can provide helpful information. Using statistical and simulation methods with a large-scale dataset, we found that, compared with other online reviews, outlier reviews were deemed more helpful because they provided more sufficient, neutral, and concise information. To interpret these results, we considered that in collective behaviours, a prevalent social psychological process-conformity (i.e., changing one's behaviour in response to pressure from others)-pressured reviewers expressing dissenting opinions. This motivated them to provide more convincing evidence (i.e., sufficient, neutral, and concise information). This study offers a simple yet effective approach for eliciting helpful information from many online reviews and deepens the understanding of the mechanism underlying collective online behaviour. Specifically, conformity was considered to cause biases in the collective behaviour of humans; however, this study revealed that conformity can elicit valuable outcomes in collective behaviour.

On an effective and efficient method for exploiting the wisdom of the inner crowd.

Researchers have shown that even an individual can produce the wisdom of the crowds, called "the wisdom of the inner crowd." However, the previous methods leave room for improvements in terms of efficacy and response time. This paper proposes a more efficient method, which required a short time, based on findings from cognitive and social psychology. The procedure is to ask participants to give two answers to the same question: first, their own estimate and, second, their estimate of public opinion. Experiments using this method showed that the averages of the two estimates were more accurate than the participants' first estimates. That is, the wisdom of the inner crowd elicited. In addition, we found that the method could be superior to other methods in terms of efficacy and convenience. Moreover, we identified the conditions where our method worked better. We further clarify the availability and limitations of using the wisdom of the inner crowd. Overall, this paper proposes an effective and short-time method for harvesting the wisdom of the inner crowd.

A simple cognitive method to improve the prediction of matters of taste by exploiting the within-person wisdom-of-crowd effect.

In our daily lives, we must often predict the level of others' satisfaction with something they have not experienced thus far. How can such a prediction be accurate? Existing studies indicate that, by referring to the extent to which people themselves have enjoyed something, they are able to predict others' future satisfaction, to some extent. In this study, we propose a method that can further improve such predictions. This method is expected to allow individuals to exploit the 'wisdom of the crowd' within a person, in terms of taste. Specifically, for a single target, participants in our study group produced two opinions from different perspectives: the degree to which they preferred something, and they estimated 'public opinion'. Utilising two behavioural studies and computer simulations, we confirmed the effectiveness of our method; specifically, blending the two opinions could enhance an individual's prediction ability. Subsequently, we mathematically analysed how effective our method is and identified several factors that influenced its efficiency. Our findings offer several contributions to 'wisdom-of-crowd' research.

More knowledge causes a focused attention deployment pattern leading to lower creative performances.

Previous studies demonstrate that people with less professional knowledge can achieve higher performance than those with more professional knowledge in creative activities. However, the factors related to this phenomenon remain unclear. Based on previous discussions in cognitive science, we hypothesised that people with different amounts of professional knowledge have varying attention deployment patterns, leading to different creative performances. To examine our hypothesis, we analysed two datasets collected from a web-based survey and a popular online shopping website, Amazon.com (United States). We found that during information processing, people with less professional knowledge tended to give their divided attention, which positively affected creative performances. Contrarily, people with more professional knowledge tended to give their concentrated attention, which had a negative effect. Our results shed light on the relation between the amount of professional knowledge and attention deployment patterns, thereby enabling a deeper understanding of the factors underlying the different creative performances of people with varying amounts of professional knowledge.

Cooperation patterns of members in networks during co-creation.

Cooperation (i.e., co-creation) has become the principal way of carrying out creative activities in modern society. In co-creation, different participants can play two completely different roles based on two different behaviours: some participants are the originators who generate initial contents, while others are the revisors who provide revisions or coordination. In this study, we investigated different participants' roles (i.e., the originator vs. the revisor) in co-creation and how these roles affected the final cooperation-group outcome. By using cooperation networks to represent cooperative relationships among participants, we found that peripheral members (i.e., those in the periphery of the cooperation networks) and core members (i.e., those in the centre of the cooperation networks) played the roles of originators and revisors, respectively, mainly affecting the quantity versus the quality of their creative outcomes. These results were robust across the three different datasets and the three different indicators defining core and peripheral members. Previous studies have considered cooperation behaviours to be homogeneous, ignoring that different participants may play different roles in co-creation. This study discusses patterns of cooperation among participants based on a model in which different roles in co-creation are considered. Thus, this research advances the understanding of how co-creation occurs in networks.

Typicality or Fluency?

The modern Japanese writing system comprises different scripts, such as Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. These scripts differ greatly in both typicality and frequency of usage. In two experimental studies using names of cities or prefectures in Japan as target stimuli, we examined two hypotheses, the typicality hypothesis and fluency hypothesis, in order to assess effects of Japanese script on psychological processes. It was found that Kanji names induced typical thinking in a participant's description of a location, whereas Katakana names induced rather nontypical thinking. In contrast, we found that script differences did not affect distance estimations. We discuss these effects of Japanese script on psychological processes in terms of the typicality hypothesis (differences in typical usage habits between Kanji and Katakana that affect psychological processes).