Exploration-exploitation tradeoff and opinion diversity in real-world groups

社区在探索问题的新解决方案和利用现有解决方案之间摇摆，这取决于手头的任务。因此，关于可能的解决方案的意见的多样性随着时间的推移而起伏不定。这些意见多样性的变化如何影响群体绩效是一个悬而未决的问题，现有的研究发现，这既有积极的影响，也有消极的影响。这个项目将调查这些不一致的发现是否可以通过多样性与任务复杂性和群体威胁的相互作用来解释。当群体面临复杂的任务时，对于可能的解决方案，较高的多样性意见可以适应，而较低的多样性可以帮助集体解决简单的任务。此外，观点更一致、因此协调得更好的群体在群体间冲突中往往具有优势。因此，当群体威胁导致意见多样性降低时，它可能会对复杂任务的绩效产生负面影响，但对简单任务的影响是中性的，甚至是积极的。此外，可以期待群体根据任务的复杂性和经历的威胁使用策略来自适应地操纵他们的多样性水平。因此，该项目还将调查这些战略的适应价值，包括维持治安、排斥和诋毁外部群体。总体而言，了解促进或抑制意见多样性的因素在当今对国家安全问题非常重要。目前的通信技术为与许多不同的人互动提供了前所未有的机会，但它们似乎也促进了具有相似观点的相对孤立的人社区的形成。要维持和促进健康的民主对话，就必须更好地从理论和经验上了解影响现实世界社区意见多样性的因素，并使多样性对找到良好的社会解决办法的价值有所缓和。为了促进这一领域的进一步研究，该项目还将为认知和社会科学、计算语言学和网络科学的交叉学科的学生提供独特的培训机会，并包括两个跨学科工作组，讨论在理解现代社会多样性方面的理论和方法进步的有希望的方向。为了研究任务复杂性和群体威胁如何影响意见多样性和由此产生的群体绩效，并调查现实世界社区用来管理这些因素的多样性的机制，该项目将首先整合几个以前互不相关的文献，这些文献涉及探索-开发权衡、威胁下的群体行为和决策、社会学习、利他惩罚、排斥和刻板印象。由此产生的假设将使用三种不同的方法进行验证：计算建模、小组实验和对涉及数千用户的在线新闻网站上长时间讨论的计算语言学分析。这将允许健壮性检查和减少只依赖一种方法的风险。这些理论和方法的发展将促进对现代人类社会的进一步科学研究。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Communities oscillate between exploring new solutions to problems and exploiting existing ones, depending on the task at hand. As a consequence, the diversity of opinions about possible solutions waxes and wanes over time. How these changes in diversity of opinion affect group performance is an open question, with extant studies finding both positive and negative effects. This project will investigate whether these inconsistent findings can be explained by how diversity interacts with task complexity and group threat. Higher diversity of opinions about possible solutions can be adaptive when groups face complex tasks, while lower diversity can help in collective solving of simple tasks. In addition, groups that have more homogeneous views, and are therefore better coordinated, often have an advantage in intergroup conflict. As a consequence, when group threat leads to decreased diversity of opinions, it might have negative effects on performance in complex tasks, but neutral or even positive effects for simple tasks. Furthermore, groups can be expected to use strategies to adaptively manipulate their level of diversity according to task complexity and experienced threat. This project will therefore also investigate the adaptive value of such strategies, including policing, ostracism, and denigrating outgroups. Overall, understanding factors that promote or suppress the diversity of opinions is immensely important today for national security issues. Current communication technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for interactions with many different people, and yet they also seem to facilitate formation of relatively isolated communities of people with similar opinions. Better theoretical and empirical understanding of factors that influence the diversity of opinions in real-world communities, and that moderate the value of diversity for finding good societal solutions, is necessary for maintaining and promoting a healthy democratic dialogue. To promote further research in this area, the project will also provide unique training opportunities for students at the intersection of cognitive and social sciences, computational linguistics, and network science, and include two interdisciplinary working groups discussing promising directions for theoretical and methodological progress in understanding diversity in modern societies.To study how task complexity and group threat influence opinion diversity and the resulting group performance, and to investigate mechanisms that real-world communities use to manage their diversity in response to these factors, the project will first integrate several previously disconnected literatures on exploration-exploitation trade-offs, group behavior and decision making under threat, social learning, altruistic punishment, ostracism, and stereotyping. The resulting hypotheses will be tested using three different methodologies: computational modeling, group experiments, and computational linguistics analyses of discussions on online news sites involving thousands of users over prolonged time periods. This will allow for robustness checks and mitigation of risks of relying on only one method. These theoretical and methodological developments will foster further scientific research of modern human sociality.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.