Ethnic Diversity and Distributed Information in Group Decision Making: The Importance of Information Elaboration

Ethnic diversity may impede groups' use of distributed information in decision making. This is not so much because diversity interferes with groups' ability to reach agreement, but because ethnic diversity may disrupt the elaboration (exchange and integration) of distributed information. The authors find evidence for this proposition in an experiment (N = 63 groups) in which ethnically diverse groups are shown to benefit more from instructions emphasizing information integration than ethnically homogeneous groups when dealing with distributed information, whereas neither ethnic diversity nor information integration instruction affected decision making performance in groups with fully shared information. These effects were mediated by a behavioral measure of group information elaboration.