when does diversity trump ability (and vice versa) in group decision making a simulation study什么时候多样性胜过能力(反之亦然)团体决策模拟研究.pdfVIP

When Does Diversity Trump Ability (and Vice Versa) in Group Decision Making? A Simulation Study 1 2 3 Shenghua Luan *, Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos , Torsten Reimer 1 Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, Berlin, Germany, 2 Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany, 3 Department of Communication, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America Abstract It is often unclear which factor plays a more critical role in determining a group’s performance: the diversity among members of the group or their individual abilities. In this study, we addressed this ‘‘diversity vs. ability’’ issue in a decision- making task. We conducted three simulation studies in which we manipulated agents’ individual ability (or accuracy, in the context of our investigation) and group diversity by varying (1) the heuristics agents used to search task-relevant information (i.e., cues); (2) the size of their groups; (3) how much they had learned about a good cue search order; and (4) the magnitude of errors in the information they searched. In each study, we found that a manipulation reducing agents’ individual accuracy simultaneously increased their group’s diversity, leading to a conflict between the two. These conflicts enabled us to identify certain conditions under which diversity trumps individual accuracy, and vice versa. Specifically, we found that individual accuracy is more important in task environments in which cues differ greatly in the quality of their information, and diversity matters more when such differences are relatively small. Changing the size of a group and the amount of