I wonder how all female groups compare to groups with just one male, and how all male groups compare to groups with just one female. It seems to me like it’s harder for any one person to dominate whenever people feel the need to signal egalitarian values like a preference for gender or racial equality. I don’t know anything about statistics yet, so maybe this is implausible, but I think part of the reason that diversity was an insignificant predictor was that poor theory of mind caused by (?) ingroup favoritism dominates the effect as diversity increases and it drowns out the effect of the need to signal egalitarian values, so I think it would be cool to see how the collective intelligence changes when you go from ‘completely’ homogenous to ‘almost’ homogenous in experimental groups composed of subjects from cultures that value egalitarianism highly. I would like to see this replicated by subjects from less egalitarian cultures as well, but that’s hard sometimes.
Here are the papers:
Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010
Engel, Woolley, Jing, Chabris, & Malone, 2014
I wonder how all female groups compare to groups with just one male, and how all male groups compare to groups with just one female. It seems to me like it’s harder for any one person to dominate whenever people feel the need to signal egalitarian values like a preference for gender or racial equality. I don’t know anything about statistics yet, so maybe this is implausible, but I think part of the reason that diversity was an insignificant predictor was that poor theory of mind caused by (?) ingroup favoritism dominates the effect as diversity increases and it drowns out the effect of the need to signal egalitarian values, so I think it would be cool to see how the collective intelligence changes when you go from ‘completely’ homogenous to ‘almost’ homogenous in experimental groups composed of subjects from cultures that value egalitarianism highly. I would like to see this replicated by subjects from less egalitarian cultures as well, but that’s hard sometimes.