Beyond Information Exchange: Racial Diversity and Group Decision-Making

Sam Sommers, Professor of Social Psychology, Tufts University

Wednesday, October 18th, at 11am

Tillet Hall Room 116

The traditional explanation for the influence of a group’s racial composition on its decision-making focuses on information exchange: demographic diversity within a group is expected to lead to a broader range of experiences, perspectives, and idiosyncratic knowledge. The present work explores additional processes through which racial diversity is influential. In a series of studies using college as well as community samples, the decision-making of racially diverse and homogeneous groups was compared, as were the cognitive tendencies and race-related concerns of the individual members of these groups. Results indicated that the effects of diversity were not limited to processes of information exchange and were not wholly attributable to the performance of non-White individuals. Even before beginning a group discussion, for example, mere membership in a diverse group significantly influenced Whites’ private judgments and led them to process information more systematically. Follow-up studies examine the psychological mechanisms underlying these effects, as well as boundary conditions for them.