wiki-ingest: Multi-Agent System Reliability

wiki/concepts/Bandwagon-Effect.md

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+# Bandwagon Effect
+
+## Definition
+A psychological phenomenon where people adopt beliefs or actions because they see others doing the same, regardless of the underlying evidence. In multi-agent systems, it causes agents to converge on popular answers rather than independently reasoning to correct conclusions.
+
+## Risk in Multi-Agent Consensus
+- Agents may be influenced by implicit ordering or presentation of options
+- If one answer appears first or is more salient, later agents may favor it
+- The effect can override actual reasoning
+- Correlated responses reduce the benefit of voting
+
+## Prevention
+- Ensure agents are truly independent (no feedback loops)
+- Present information in randomized order where applicable
+- Use diverse models with different training to reduce shared biases
+- Treat the consensus as a blind experiment — agents don't know they're voting
+
+## Key Principle
+- Diversity in human systems helps solve novel problems
+- The same applies to LLM ensembles
+- Different models, different fine-tuning, different prompts
+- Maximize variance in responses for maximum cancellation of noise
+
+## Related Concepts
+- [[Groupthink]]
+- [[Multi-Agent Consensus]]
+- [[Sycophancy]]