Strangers Offer Excellent Advice on How to Resolve Disputes

We have already discussed how Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) can be a unique and effective way to solve many types of conflict. Most conflict in our lives result from small disagreements and miscommunications with friends, family, neighbors and business associates. If left unchecked, they have the potential to grow into the larger and more serious issues that may require professional help from a trained mediator or arbitrator.

eQuibbly offers solution alternatives for both the less serious disputes as well as the more serious issues. To resolve the former type of dispute, eQuibbly encourages you to post your dispute in public so you can ‘crowdsource’ help from strangers. Often the best advice comes from strangers – people who don’t know you and don’t really care whether you take their advice or not. This is true for a number of reasons.

Strangers are not personally invested in your dispute. Although soliciting opinions from friends and family members can certainly be valuable, it is much more likely,  consciously or not, that they will be influenced by factors other than the merits of the argument. People who are intimately familiar with the conflict or the disputing parties are likely to have pre-existing biases or shared personal relationships which will no doubt influence their suggestions and opinions.

When offering advice, rather than being biased by irrelevant factors such as how what they say might affect their relationship with one of the parties, strangers will draw on their own experiences with similar situations. This can be helpful since it provides an opportunity to learn from someone else’s mistakes and successes.

The disputing parties also will be more likely to heed strangers’ advice since those strangers have nothing to gain and nothing to lose – they have no dog in the fight. Often people in the midst of a disagreement will lose sight of the facts and the merits and become mired in a battle of wits and egos. It’s no longer whether one side is right or wrong – it’s whether one side can out-smart the other or whether they can be more persuasive. No matter what the ultimate cause of a conflict, at some point it can become difficult to admit defeat or agree to a compromise without a crushing blow to the ego. If a dispute reaches this stage, it is a lot easier taking the same advice from a stranger than your adversary.

Posting a public non-binding dispute on eQuibbly is an efficient and effective way to solicit advice from strangers and arrive at a mutually satisfactory resolution to your dispute, or at least one that is fair.

INTERNET USERS TRUST RECOMMENDATIONS FROM PEOPLE THEY KNOW ABOVE ALL ELSE

According to Nielsen’s 2011 Global Trust in Advertising Survey of over 28,000 Internet consumers from 56 countries, 92% of Internet consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer opinions posted online (90% and 68% respectively in North America).

Randall Beard, global head, Advertiser Solutions for the Nielsen Company said, “Although television advertising will remain a primary way marketers connect with audiences due to its unmatched reach compared to other media, consumers around the world continue to see recommendations from friends and online consumer opinions as by far the most credible.”

If people trust people they know over all else to recommend certain brands for products and services, why not trust them to help resolve their disputes? If people trust “consumer opinions posted online” by people they don’t know to such a high degree, why wouldn’t they trust them to suggest ways they could resolve their arguments?

Percent of Internet Users Having Some 
Degree of Trust in the Following Forms
of Advertising in 2011

Crowdsourcing Online Dispute Resolution – The New ADR

A relatively new type of litigation alternative called Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution (CODR) has the potential to offer an even faster and cheaper means of resolving disputes than traditional Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR –  which includes mediation and arbitration).

In June of 2006, Jeff Howe first coined the term “crowdsourcing”, when referring to tasks that were being performed by ‘crowd outsourcing’ that previously would have been outsourced to other companies. In essence, harnessing the power of group intelligence.

Crowdsourcing isn’t just a fad. Many large corporations have jumped into crowdsourcing head-first. Some of the best examples have been through social media channels where big brands like Domino’s Pizza, Coca Cola, Heineken and Sam Adams have crowdsourced a new pizza, song, bottle design and beer. GE has conducted multiple million dollar open innovation projects. Amazon built one of the largest crowdsourcing platforms called Mechanical Turk. General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and PepsiCo continue to execute crowdsourcing projects – not just one-off publicity stunts.

Crowdsourcing is still in the early adoption phase with smaller businesses and individuals. A very small percentage of people are familiar with everything crowdsourcing can do. Threadless.com is just one example: it selects the t-shirts it sells by having users provide designs and vote on the ones they like, which are then printed and available for purchase. These examples use a form of CODR called “crowdvoting”.

Crowdvoting takes advantage of what is known as the “wisdom of the crowd” which is based on the idea that under the right circumstances a group of people is often more intelligent than an individual. This idea of collective intelligence proves particularly effective on the web because people with very diverse backgrounds can contribute. There is a body of literature asserting that a diverse untrained crowd can outperform experts under certain conditions (Page 2007; Surowiecki 2004)

Financial journalist and staff writer of “The Financial Page” for the “New Yorker”, James Surowiecki explains how large groups of people are often smarter than an elite few in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds“. He says that four elements are required to form a wise crowd:

1. Diversity of opinion – Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
2. Independence – People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.
3. Decentralization – People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
4. Aggregation – Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

Based on Surowiecki’s book, Prof. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen – Professor of information systems at the Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oul in Finland – captures the wisdom of crowds approach with the following eight conjectures:

1. It is possible to describe how people in a group think as a whole.
2. In some cases, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.
3. The three conditions for a group to be intelligent are diversity, independence, and decentralization.
4. The best decisions are a product of disagreement and contest.
5. Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.
6. Information aggregation functionality is needed.
7. The right information needs to be delivered to the right people in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way.
8. There is no need to chase the expert.

CODR may be the beginning of a new era in affordable and effective dispute resolution. It could be an era in which dispute are solved by the collective intelligence of your ‘community’, whatever that community may be. Whether you are involved in a family or neighborhood dispute or a potential lawsuit involving many thousands of dollars, these processes should be considered. They are often more affordable and effective methods of dispute resolution and can result in a fair, just, reasonable solution for both you and the other party.

(Contributions to this post were made by Danel Dimov – PhD Student at Leiden University)

Other Resources of Note:

1. Crowdsourcing: How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. Jeff Howe. Random House, 2008.
2. http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/08/31/the-top-five-crowdsourcing-mega-trends/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#.22Wisdom_of_the_crowd.22