# The effect of diversity on group decision-making

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01427 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01427/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DeliData: A dataset for deliberation in multi-party problem solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05271/) (2021)
- [When is a crowd wise?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.7563/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning "Partner-Aware" Collaborators in Multi-Party Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22462/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.