The Diversity Gap: when diversity matters for knowledge

Abstract

Can diversity make for better science? Although diversity has ethical and political value, arguments for its epistemic value require a bridge between normative and mechanistic considerations, demonstrating why and how diversity benefits collective intelligence. However, a major hurdle is that the benefits themselves are rather mixed: quantitative evidence from psychology and behavioral sciences sometimes shows a positive epistemic effect of diversity, but often shows a null effect, or even a negative effect. Here we argue that, in order to make progress with these why and how questions, we need first to rethink when one ought to expect a benefit of cognitive diversity. In doing so, we highlight that the benefits of cognitive diversity are not equally distributed about collective intelligence tasks, and are best seen for complex, multi-stage, creative problem solving, during problem posing and hypothesis generation. Throughout, we additionally outline a series of mechanisms relating diversity and problem complexity, and show how this perspective can inform meta-science questions.

The social route to abstraction: interaction and diversity enhance performance and transfer in a rule-based categorization task

“…That is, group-members that share and discuss different perspectives and strategies during interaction would perform better than groups with more similar contributions (Bang & Frith, 2017;R. Fusaroli & Tylén, 2016;Olsen & Tylén, Accepted;Sulik, Bahrami, & Deroy, 2021). Some existing studies manipulate diversity directly, for instance with respect to groups' bio-demographic composition (gender, age, race, or personality) or informational factors (experience, value perception, strategies, etc., Fjaellingsdal, Vesper, Fusaroli, & Tylén, 2021;Van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007).…”