The Diversity Gap: When Diversity Matters for Knowledge
Open accessAbstract
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 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, multistage, 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 metascience questions.
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Cognitive diversity is essential in the search for solutions to the complex problems facing the world.
“Cognitive diversity is essential in the search for solutions to the complex problems facing the world (Sulik et al., 2021)”
From Compassionate pedagogy for neurodiversity in higher education: A conceptual analysis (2023) · cites this paper as Sulik et al., 2021
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- Authors
- Sulik, J., Bahrami, B., & Deroy, O.
- Affiliations
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
- University of London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Sulik, Justin
- Venue
- Perspectives on Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2021-10-04
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 752-767
- ISSN
- 1745-6916 (ISSN-L)
- 1745-6924
- OpenAlex
- W3161710183
- Cited by
- 80
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 10.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- Perspectives on Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- NOMIS Stiftung
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Team Dynamics and Performance
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Keywords
- cognitive diversity, collective intelligence, problem complexity, creative problem solving, hypothesis generation, problem posing, meta-research, null effect, group decision making
- MeSH terms
- Creativity, Humans, Intelligence, Problem Solving, Knowledge
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