How Homophily Can Improve Collective Decision-Making in Diverse Teams: An Experimental Application

Theoretical works from social epistemology, organizational science, and evolutionary biology show that intermittent communication within groups can improve their decision-making: too much communication and influence between group members bears a chance of premature consensus at the expense of exploring information spaces until better solutions are found. With an agent-based model, we here show how homophily, the tendency to interact with similar group members, can represent such a form of transient communication that eventually facilitates better decision-making. Drawing on the established 'hidden profile paradigm', we then test this insight empirically by letting members of experimental discussion groups exchange arguments in favor of different decision options and measure on what options groups converge. Group members are assigned different identities; and we experimentally vary whether their interactions are homophilously structured along shared identity dimensions or follow random encounters. The study is among the first to translate collective deliberation and decision-making within the context of an agent-based model to a context where group discussions are empirically observed.