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

Raiyan Abdul Baten,Ehsan Hoque,Gourab Ghoshal,Richard N Aslin

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-89498-5

Raiyan Abdul Baten, Ehsan Hoque + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89498-5

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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% 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.

Highlights

To selectively form links with people from different demographic identities, so as to cash in on the diversity bonuses to generate novel ideas
Using a custom social-media-like web-interface for the interactions, we are able to unambiguously track creative stimulation of ideas in a dynamic social network, while the challenges of ensuring an unconfounded exposure to demographic cues are overcome with the use of avatars
Any difference in the connectivity dynamics and network-level creative outcomes between the two conditions can be attributed to the availability of demographic cues

Summary

Experimental setup

Participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk took part in 5 rounds of text-based creative tasks, where they generated alternative use ideas for a given common object (e.g., a brick) in each round. The egos were randomly placed into either of two conditions: (1) Control ( N = 90 , demographic cues not shown) and (2) Treatment ( N = 90 , demographic cues shown). The egos were shown the ideas of the 2 alters they were following. In the treatment condition, the egos were shown the demographic information (gender and race) of their followee alters using avatars. The egos were shown the ideas of all 6 alters, which they rated on novelty They were allowed to optionally follow/unfollow alters to have an updated list of 2 followee alters each. The only difference between the two conditions was that the treatment egos had access to the gender and race cues of the alters. Any difference in the connectivity dynamics and network-level creative outcomes between the two conditions can be attributed to the availability of demographic cues

Results

Discussion

Methods