The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

[3] Surowiecki breaks down the advantages he sees in disorganized decisions into three main types, which he classifies as Not all crowds (groups) are wise.

At the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference Surowiecki presented a session entitled Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?

[6] The question for all of us is, how can you have interaction without information cascades, without losing the independence that's such a key factor in group intelligence?He recommends: Tim O'Reilly[7] and others also discuss the success of Google, wikis, blogging, and Web 2.0 in the context of the wisdom of crowds.

Will Hutton has argued that Surowiecki's analysis applies to value judgments as well as factual issues, with crowd decisions that "emerge of our own aggregated free will [being] astonishingly... decent".

"[8] Applications of the wisdom-of-crowds effect exist in three general categories: Prediction markets, Delphi methods, and extensions of the traditional opinion poll.

[citation needed] A number of Web-based quasi-prediction marketplace companies have sprung up to offer predictions primarily on sporting events and stock markets but also on other topics.

As published by Rosenberg (2015), such real-time control systems enable groups of human participants to behave as a unified collective intelligence.

[10] When logged into the UNU platform, for example, groups of distributed users can collectively answer questions, generate ideas, and make predictions as a singular emergent entity.

Illusionist Derren Brown claimed to use the 'Wisdom of Crowds' concept to explain how he correctly predicted the UK National Lottery results in September 2009.

However, other commentators have suggested that, given the entertainment nature of the show, Brown's misapplication of the theory may have been a deliberate smokescreen to conceal his true method.

[16][17] This was also shown in the television series East of Eden where a social network of roughly 10,000 individuals came up with ideas to stop missiles in a very short span of time.

Iain Couzin, a professor in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Albert Kao, his student, in a 2014 article, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, argue that "the conventional view of the wisdom of crowds may not be informative in complex and realistic environments, and that being in small groups can maximize decision accuracy across many contexts."