An information cascade

I think it's fascinating that a group of intelligent, experienced people could publicly announce the "Ivory-bill rediscovery" given such flimsy evidence. I think it's likely that definitive proof will never come, and this high-profile case seems a likely candidate to be written up as a groupthink "case study" in future textbooks.

This 28-minute podcast by James Surowiecki doesn't mention the Ivory-bill, but I think it sheds some light on the psychology of the team.

To me, it seems very likely that team members were highly influenced by an "information cascade" as discussed in these two podcast excerpts:

Podcast excerpt 1
Podcast excerpt 2

Specifically, once the team became convinced an Ivory-bill was present, low-quality glimpses were considered "robust sightings" of the Ivory-bill; each of those sightings then further pounded in the idea that "there's an Ivory-bill here".

Even among strong "believers", I doubt that any single piece of evidence (sightings, video, audio recordings, bark peeling etc) was convincing on a stand-alone basis. However, as part of a swelling "information cascade", the weak individual pieces became convincing.

I've previously written about groupthink here.