The benefits of diversity are particularly evident in tasks that involve combining information, such as finding a single correct answer to a question. To show how this works, Page takes us back to the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Imagine, he writes, that a contestant has been stumped by a question about the Monkees, the pop group invented for TV who became so popular they sold more records in 1967 than the Beatles and Elvis combined. The question: Which person from the following list was not a member of the Monkees?
(a) Peter Tork
(b) Davy Jones
(c) Roger Noll
(d) Michael Nesmith
Let’s say the studio audience this afternoon has a hundred people in it, Page proposes, and seven of them are former Monkees fans who know that Roger Noll was not a member of the group (he’s actually an economist at Stanford). When asked to vote, these people choose (c). Another ten people recognize two of the names on the list as belonging to the Monkees, leaving Noll and one other name to choose from. Assuming they choose randomly between the two, that means (c) is likely to get another five votes from this group. Of the remaining audience members, fifteen recognize only one of the names, which means another five votes for (c), using the same logic. The final sixty-eight people have no clue, splitting their votes evenly among the four choices, which means another seventeen votes for (c). Add them up and you get thirty-four votes for Roger Noll. If the other names get about twenty-two votes each, as statistical laws suggest, then Noll wins—even though 93 percent of the audience is basically guessing. If the contestant follows the audience’s advice, he climbs another rung on the ladder to the show’s million-dollar prize.
The principle at work in this example, as Page explains, was described in the fourth century B.C. by Aristotle, who noted that a group of people can often find the answer to a puzzle if each member knows at least part of the solution. “For each individual among the many has a share of excellence and practical wisdom, and when they meet together, just as they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses, so too with regard to their character and thought,” Aristotle writes in Politics. The effect might seem magical, Page notes, but “there is no mystery here. Mistakes cancel one another out, and correct answers, like cream, rise to the surface.”
This does not mean, he cautions, that diversity is a magic wand you can wave at any problem and make it go away. It’s important to consider what kind of task you’re facing. “If a loved one requires open-heart surgery, we do not want a collection of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers carving open the chest cavity. We’d much prefer a trained heart surgeon, and for good reason,” Page writes. Nor would we expect a committee of people who deeply hate each other to come up with productive solutions. There are limits to the magic of the math.
You have to use common sense when weighing the impact of diversity. For simple tasks, it’s not really necessary (you don’t need a group to add two and two). For truly difficult tasks, the group must be reasonably smart (no one expects monkeys banging on typewriters to come up with the collected works of Shakespeare). The group also must be diverse (otherwise you have nothing more to work with than the smartest expert does). And the group must be large enough and selected from a deep enough pool of individuals (to ensure that the group possesses a wide-ranging mix of skills). Satisfy all four of these criteria, Page says, and you’re good to go.
Surowiecki would emphasize one point in particular: If you want a group to make good decisions, you must ensure that its members don’t interact too much. Otherwise they could influence one another in counterproductive ways through imitation or intimidation—especially intimidation. “In any organization, like a team or company, people tend to pay very close attention to bosses or those with higher status,” Surowiecki says. “That can be very damaging, from my perspective, because one of the great things about the wisdom of crowds, or whatever you want to call it, is that it recognizes that people may have useful things to contribute who aren’t necessarily at the top. They may not be the ones everyone automatically looks to. And that goes by the wayside when people imitate those at the top too closely.”
Diversity. Independence. Combinations of perspectives. These principles should sound familiar. They’re versions of the lessons we learned from the honeybees: Seek a diversity of knowledge. Encourage a friendly competition of ideas. Use an effective mechanism to narrow your choices. What was smart for the honeybees is smart for groups of people, too.
It’s not so easy, after all, to make decisions as efficiently as honeybees do. With millions of years of evolution behind them, they’ve fashioned an elegant system that fits their needs and abilities perfectly. If we could do as well—if we could harness our diversity to overcome our bad habits—then perhaps people wouldn’t say that we’re still thinking with caveman brains.
Caveman Brains
Imagine this scenario: Intelligence agencies have turned up evidence of a plot by at least three individuals to carry out a terrorist attack in Boston. Exactly what kind of attack is not known, but it might be related to a religious conference being held in the city. Possible targets include the Episcopal Church of St. Paul, Harvard’s Center for World Religion, One Financial Plaza, and the Federal Reserve Bank. Security cameras at each building have captured blurry images of ten different individuals acting suspiciously during the past week, though none have been positively identified as terrorists. Intercepted e-mail between suspects appears to include simple code words, such as “crabs” for explosives and “bug dust” for diversions. Time’s running out to crack the plot.
This was the fictional situation presented to fifty-one teams of college students during a CIA-funded experiment at Harvard not long ago. Each four-person team was simulating a counterterrorism task force. Their assignment: sort through the evidence to identify the terrorists, figure out what they were planning to do, and determine which building was their target. They were given an hour to complete the task.
The experiment was organized by Richard Hackman and Anita Woolley, a pair of social psychologists, with collaborators Margaret Giabosi and Stephen Kosslyn. A few weeks earlier, they’d given the students a battery of tests to find out who was good at remembering code words (verbal working memory) and who was good at identifying faces from a large set of photos (face-recognition ability), skills that tap separate functions of the brain. They used the results of these tests to assign students to teams, arranging it so that some teams had two experts (students who scored unusually high on either verbal or visual skills) and two generalists (students who scored average on both skills), and some teams had all generalists. This was important, because they wanted to find out if a team’s cognitive diversity really affected its performance as strongly as did its level of skills.
The researchers had another goal. They wanted to see if a group’s performance might be improved if its members took time to explicitly sort out who was good at what, put each person to work on an appropriate task—such as decoding e-mails or studying images—and then talked about the information they turned up. Would it enable them, in other words, to exploit not only their diversity of knowledge but also their diversity of abilities? To find out, they told all of the teams how each member had scored on the skills tests, but they coached only half of the teams on how to make task assignments. They left the other half on their own.
The researchers had hired a mystery writer to dream up the terrorist scenario. The solution was that a fictional anti-Semitic group was planning to spray a deadly virus in the vault at the Federal Reserve Bank where Israel stores its gold, thereby making it unavailable for months and supposedly bankrupting that nation. “We made it a little bit ridiculous because we didn’t want to scare anybody,” Woolley says.
Who did the best job at solving the puzzle? Not surprisingly, the most successful teams—the ones that correctly identified the target, terrorists, and plot