Cues to gender and racial identity reduce creativity in diverse social networks

Abstract

The characteristics of social partners have long been hypothesized as influential in guiding group interactions. Understanding how demographic cues impact networks of creative collaborators is critical for elevating creative performances therein. We conducted a randomized experiment to investigate how the knowledge of peers’ gender and racial identities distorts people’s connection patterns and the resulting creative outcomes in a dynamic social network. Consistent with prior work, we found that creative inspiration links are primarily formed with top idea-generators. However, when gender and racial identities are known, not only is there (1) an increase of $$82.03\%$$ 82.03 % in the odds of same-gender connections to persist (but not for same-race connections), but (2) the semantic similarity of idea-sets stimulated by these connections also increase significantly compared to demography-agnostic networks, negatively impacting the outcomes of divergent creativity. We found that ideas tend to be significantly more homogeneous within demographic groups than between, taking away diversity-bonuses from similarity-based links and partly explaining the results. These insights can inform intelligent interventions to enhance network-wide creative performances.

Don't follow the leader: Independent thinkers create scientific innovation

“…Redundancy: Finally, in a related context, in the field of creative ideation, it has been reported that inspirees stimulated by highly creative alters, tend to generate more creative ideas [47][48][49]. However, as a group, the inspirees ideas was found to be similar to each other leading to redundancy in generated ideas over time at the group level.…”

Novel idea generation in social networks is optimized by exposure to a “Goldilocks” level of idea-variability

“…Unfortunately, despite its ubiquity, the temporal self-organization characteristic of social networks has received rather little research attention when it comes to novel idea-generation performances of humans. Recent explorations suggest two opposing factors that influence idea generation performances in this setting ( 10 , 11 ). On the one hand, people selectively seek inspiration from (or "follow", as referred to henceforth) the high-performing peers in their networks.…”

“…To address these, we use a recently developed experimental approach that facilitates conducting randomized controlled experiments in the temporal social network setting ( 10 , 11 ). The experiment design builds on ego-centric networks, which specifically map the social inspiration ties from the perspective of a single person (an “ego”) to their peers (“alters”).…”

“…To enable a randomized controlled setup, independent samples of egos are taken for each study "condition," but the set of alters (and their respective ideas) is held constant across all study conditions. Then, modifying only one modality of social signal/cue of the alters across study conditions enables us to test that modality’s influence on the network connection choices and associated idea generation performances of the egos in the respective conditions ( 11 ).…”