The decency of crowds

Here's an interesting idea... With people acting individually in a group context, even better outcomes can arise from the cumulative interactions than any one person, even the best, could come up with independently. So a group can behave more helpfully than a person, in many ways.
From 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". He concludes that "There's no better case for pluralism, diversity and democracy, along with a genuinely independent press."