To understand why homogeneity can degrade group performance, It might help to take it to the extreme. Suppose Bob is your best performing employee. If you were asked to do a brainstorming task for new ideas, would you prefer a team comprised of:
a) Bob and two other high-performing (but not as good as bob) employees
or
b) Three identical clones of Bob.
Team a will reliably outperform b in creative tasks, because in team B all the Bobs will be thinking along the same lines, and carry with them similar false assumptions and beliefs. Whereas in team a, you’ll get new ideas, and the Bob assumptions will be challenged.
(I should note that homogeneity does have some advantages, if you check the paper I linked, diverse groups can lead to socio-emotional or value conflict that can hurt productivity and group cohesion if not handled properly).
I could be wrong but I didn’t see political conflict mentioned specifically in that article, at least not explicitly. Not saying it can’t reasonably be inferred but given the political centrist majority within EA, I just wanted to clarify this observation as it could be misleading (?).
From what I briefly read (and gleaned from asking Ghostreader [GPT-3] in Readwise Reader), the studies found that when there is a lot of different knowledge and experience, increased task conflict (e.g. viewpoint diversity over content of a task) can override other forms of conflict, and actually lead to improved performance. More work here is needed, of course, but thanks for sharing this.
Yeah, I found the linked review quite interesting. The theory is that diversity increases different types of conflict, but that some conflict is good for performance (for the reasons I outlined), while others cause problems.
It seperates conflict into (1) task conflict, (2) socio-emotional conflict or (3) value conflict, with task conflict increasing performance and the other two decreasing it. (I summarised these as “political” initially, I’ve edited it slightly to be more precise). In other words, a diverse group will have better ideas overall, but may be dragged down in productivity by interpersonal conflict.
In a field like EA where good ideas and correctness are incredibly important, I think the best performing strategy would be to foster a diverse community, while also taking steps to reduce conflict by practicing principles of empathy, compassion, and understanding.
Agreed. I’ve also seen other studies that suggest that the rate and quality of knowledge production increases from that kind of good faith dialectical feedback. Makes a lot of sense that some forms of conflict could be quite synergistic.
I will definitely give the piece a more thorough review when I get a chance.
To understand why homogeneity can degrade group performance, It might help to take it to the extreme. Suppose Bob is your best performing employee. If you were asked to do a brainstorming task for new ideas, would you prefer a team comprised of:
a) Bob and two other high-performing (but not as good as bob) employees
or
b) Three identical clones of Bob.
Team a will reliably outperform b in creative tasks, because in team B all the Bobs will be thinking along the same lines, and carry with them similar false assumptions and beliefs. Whereas in team a, you’ll get new ideas, and the Bob assumptions will be challenged.
(I should note that homogeneity does have some advantages, if you check the paper I linked, diverse groups can lead to socio-emotional or value conflict that can hurt productivity and group cohesion if not handled properly).
I could be wrong but I didn’t see political conflict mentioned specifically in that article, at least not explicitly. Not saying it can’t reasonably be inferred but given the political centrist majority within EA, I just wanted to clarify this observation as it could be misleading (?).
From what I briefly read (and gleaned from asking Ghostreader [GPT-3] in Readwise Reader), the studies found that when there is a lot of different knowledge and experience, increased task conflict (e.g. viewpoint diversity over content of a task) can override other forms of conflict, and actually lead to improved performance. More work here is needed, of course, but thanks for sharing this.
Yeah, I found the linked review quite interesting. The theory is that diversity increases different types of conflict, but that some conflict is good for performance (for the reasons I outlined), while others cause problems.
It seperates conflict into (1) task conflict, (2) socio-emotional conflict or (3) value conflict, with task conflict increasing performance and the other two decreasing it. (I summarised these as “political” initially, I’ve edited it slightly to be more precise). In other words, a diverse group will have better ideas overall, but may be dragged down in productivity by interpersonal conflict.
In a field like EA where good ideas and correctness are incredibly important, I think the best performing strategy would be to foster a diverse community, while also taking steps to reduce conflict by practicing principles of empathy, compassion, and understanding.
Agreed. I’ve also seen other studies that suggest that the rate and quality of knowledge production increases from that kind of good faith dialectical feedback. Makes a lot of sense that some forms of conflict could be quite synergistic.
I will definitely give the piece a more thorough review when I get a chance.