Exploration-exploitation tradeoff and opinion diversity in real-world groups

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM

Investigators

Abstract

Communities oscillate between exploring new solutions to problems and exploiting existing ones, depending on the task at hand. As a consequence, the diversity of opinions about possible solutions waxes and wanes over time. How these changes in diversity of opinion affect group performance is an open question, with extant studies finding both positive and negative effects. This project will investigate whether these inconsistent findings can be explained by how diversity interacts with task complexity and group threat. Higher diversity of opinions about possible solutions can be adaptive when groups face complex tasks, while lower diversity can help in collective solving of simple tasks. In addition, groups that have more homogeneous views, and are therefore better coordinated, often have an advantage in intergroup conflict. As a consequence, when group threat leads to decreased diversity of opinions, it might have negative effects on performance in complex tasks, but neutral or even positive effects for simple tasks. Furthermore, groups can be expected to use strategies to adaptively manipulate their level of diversity according to task complexity and experienced threat. This project will therefore also investigate the adaptive value of such strategies, including policing, ostracism, and denigrating outgroups. Overall, understanding factors that promote or suppress the diversity of opinions is immensely important today for national security issues. Current communication technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for interactions with many different people, and yet they also seem to facilitate formation of relatively isolated communities of people with similar opinions. Better theoretical and empirical understanding of factors that influence the diversity of opinions in real-world communities, and that moderate the value of diversity for finding good societal solutions, is necessary for maintaining and promoting a healthy democratic dialogue. To promote further research in this area, the project will also provide unique training opportunities for students at the intersection of cognitive and social sciences, computational linguistics, and network science, and include two interdisciplinary working groups discussing promising directions for theoretical and methodological progress in understanding diversity in modern societies. To study how task complexity and group threat influence opinion diversity and the resulting group performance, and to investigate mechanisms that real-world communities use to manage their diversity in response to these factors, the project will first integrate several previously disconnected literatures on exploration-exploitation trade-offs, group behavior and decision making under threat, social learning, altruistic punishment, ostracism, and stereotyping. The resulting hypotheses will be tested using three different methodologies: computational modeling, group experiments, and computational linguistics analyses of discussions on online news sites involving thousands of users over prolonged time periods. This will allow for robustness checks and mitigation of risks of relying on only one method. These theoretical and methodological developments will foster further scientific research of modern human sociality. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.