CSH Talk by Mirta Galesic: “The complexity of diversity”

Diversity of opinions is known to improve group performance on complex tasks. One way to achieve group diversity is by bringing together people with different personal characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, and age. In this talk I will describe several additional ways to increase group diversity by drawing on research in social complexity. In this view, group performance emerges from a complex system of individual cognitions, social networks in which they are embedded, and properties of tasks that groups need to solve. I will present studies on how individual strategies and network structures interact to produce different levels of diversity, and how this affects group performance on different tasks. I will further show how aggregating diverse, localized knowledge can be used to predict elections and similar social phenomena. Finally, I will show how perceived intergroup threat changes the level of diversity in groups discussing political issues. I will end by discussing when is diversity more or less beneficial for group performance and why.

Bio

Mirta Galesic is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. Her projects focus on developing empirically grounded computational models of social judgments, social learning, collective problem solving, and opinion dynamics. She is also interested in how people understand and cope with uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions.