One of the tenets of Dumbagent.com is the belief in the wisdom of crowds. That is, if you ask a question to someone, such as “How many taxicabs are in Switzerland?” you will receive an answer.  And if you ask many more people, you will receive many more answers that, if then averaged out, will be very close to the truth.

Edward Vul of MIT and Harold Pasher of UCSD have now come up with another related phenomenon, published in a paper in Psychological Science. It appears that if you ask the same person the same question at different times, you will also generate a more precise answer.

Their experiment asked 428 participants what the percentage of world airports existed in the United States. Then some respondents were asked the same question again right away, while some were asked again 3 weeks later. They found that the more time elapsed between one guess and the other, the more precise the average of the two guesses was to the actual answer.

Unfortunately, neither value was as precise as asking many different people, but it can be useful nonetheless. So the next time you feel unsure about a decision, give it a rest for a while and come back to it later with a fresh mind, then see what you decide.

Original study here.