The effect of diversity on group decision-making

TL;DR

This study investigates how cognitive diversity influences small-group deliberation on the Wason Card Selection Task using the DeliData corpus of 500 online dialogues. It analyzes three diversity manifestations—group size as a proxy, diversity of initial ideas, and diversity of discussed solutions—along with conversational probing as a potential facilitator. Results consistently show that higher diversity is associated with greater performance gains, with diversity of initial ideas and diversity of discussed solutions being particularly predictive; probing for reasoning markedly enhances discussion diversity. The work demonstrates that online, low-commitment group discussions can reduce individual biases and that multi-level analysis of dialogue provides actionable insights for designing deliberative processes and interventions in real-world decision-making contexts.

Abstract

We explore different aspects of cognitive diversity and its effect on the success of group deliberation. To evaluate this, we use 500 dialogues from small, online groups discussing the Wason Card Selection task - the DeliData corpus. Leveraging the corpus, we perform quantitative analysis evaluating three different measures of cognitive diversity. First, we analyse the effect of group size as a proxy measure for diversity. Second, we evaluate the effect of the size of the initial idea pool. Finally, we look into the content of the discussion by analysing discussed solutions, discussion patterns, and how conversational probing can improve those characteristics. Despite the reputation of groups for compounding bias, we show that small groups can, through dialogue, overcome intuitive biases and improve individual decision-making. Across a large sample and different operationalisations, we consistently find that greater cognitive diversity is associated with more successful group deliberation. Code and data used for the analysis are available in the repository: https://github.com/gkaradzhov/cognitive-diversity-groups-cogsci24.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Average performance gain against group size
• Figure 2: Comparison between conversational statistics of two-party dialogues (dyads) and group dialogues (groups)
• Figure 3: Performance gain of groups with high (purple) and low (pink) diversity of initial submissions. Groups are also split by whether any initial submissions contained a correct answer (right two) or did not contain any correct answers (left two).