The effect of diversity on group decision-making
Georgi Karadzhov Andreas Vlachos Tom Stafford
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 anonymised repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/
r/cogsci24-FD6D