Restored: Diversity, in mind and form, restores the path to evolutionary success...
Infinite Diversity, in Infinite Combinations - IDIC. It is a guiding principle of Mr. Spock’s people, the Vulcans, on the television show Star Trek - the center of their value system. It celebrates differences-in-kind and beyond, and is part of their historical path to universal peace.
“Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations represents a Vulcan belief that beauty, growth, progress, all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes,” Gene Roddenberry (the show’s creator) once explained. “The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities. The circle and triangle combine to produce the gemstone in the center as the union of words and music creates song, or the union of marriage creates children.”19
And it can honestly be said that Roddenberry’s attitude toward diversity was present from the start, evident in his eventual casting of the show, with its multinational crew. It’s a statement that is apparent to any viewer in their first few moments of watching any episode, a statement that persisted through all of Star Trek’s on-screen incarnations.
But it’s about more than variety in skin color and culture: diversity lurks deep beneath our surface – and is perhaps more survival-critical than any other aspect of humanism.
Ancient Human Diversity
But diversity is more than a key to future harmony and growth. Diversity was, ironically, the key to human survival, when we were genetically at our most Homogenous.
Confined in our earlier millennia to Central Africa, we had not yet developed the broad range of skin tones we now enjoy; our culture in particular was decidedly monotone, as we had not yet developed writing, art, or even language.
Yet we had already begun experiencing the most important diversity of all: differences in thought.
By this, we aren’t thinking of differences in philosophies or doctrines or ideologies like those that surround us today – those things didn’t yet exist. We’re talking about literal differences in thought – the actual variations that existed (and still exist!) in human brains, diversity in proportional quantities of brain tissue in different brain regions – diversity that resulted (and still does today) in some variation in how each of us processes the world.
We’ve looked at those brain variations themselves, and how different combinations of brain components resulted in different cognitive contributions to tribal survival. And we’ve considered how destructive it is when that cognitive diversity is dampened when humans cluster together in cults of like-mindedness. Now let’s look at the evidence.
Diversity Makes Us Smarter
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people.”
~Steve Jobs
Scientific American gathered together summaries of a number of studies demonstrating the advantages of diversity in the workplace,20 concluding that being around people who think differently increases our creativity and diligence.
Cristian Deszö of the University of Maryland and David Ross of Columbia University, for instance, noted the impact of gender diversity in business. Reviewing the size and gender make-up of the top equity firms from 1992-2006, they found that, on average, firms with women in top management positions demonstrated greater financial performance than those without. Orlando Richard of the University of Texas found in a 2003 study that the same holds true for racial diversity in upper management.
A 2006 study at the University of Illinois teamed subjects to solve a murder mystery exercise, varying the racial make-up of the three-person teams. Teams with a non-white member significantly out-performed all-white teams.
Another University of Illinois study in 2013 tasked subjects to identify as either Democrat or Republican, then read a murder mystery and decide who they thought committed the crime. They were then tasked to write an essay making their case, for presentation to another test subject in hopes of convincing them. Half of the subjects were told they would be making the case to a member of their own political party; half were told they’d be trying to convince a member of the other party. Subjects of both parties prepared less well and wrote a less persuasive essay when they believed they were going to be talking to a member of their own party. “Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that Homogeneity simply does not,” the study concluded.
And in 2014, Richard Freeman and Wei Huang of Harvard University examined ethnicity among the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers, noting that those written by ethnically diverse research teams received more citations than those written by teams of people with common ethnicity.
Finally there’s a 2006 study by Samuel Sommers of Tufts University, where real judges, jury administrators and jurors participated in a mock jury experiment to determine the effects of racial diversity in jury decision-making. Sommers arranged the jurors into all-white groups and four-white, two-black groups. The diverse juries made fewer errors in recall of important information and discussed the role of race in the case more openly. Sommers concluded that in the presence of diversity, white jurors “were more diligent and open-minded,” according to Scientific American.
Cognitive diversity and performance
But gender, race, and political orientation, though qualifying as diversity, do not necessarily imply cognitive diversity. In an article in the Harvard Business Review,21 Alison Reynolds and David Lewis took up the problem, using Peter Robertson’s AEM Cube tool22 to assess a person’s knowledge processing and perspective in new situations.
Six teams were created, variable in their degree of AEM Cube ratings, and were then given a group task to complete. The teams with greater diversity in knowledge processing and perspective completed the exercise more quickly; the greater the level of diversity, the higher the team’s score.
Reynolds and Lewis further noted that cognitive diversity is a more reliable performance enhancer than gender and racial diversity, comparing the AEM Cube study to other performance studies:
“Someone being from a different culture or a different generation gives no clue as to how that person might process information, engage with, or respond to change,” they wrote. “We cannot easily detect cognitive diversity from the outside. It cannot be predicted or easily orchestrated. The very fact that it is an internal difference requires us to work hard to surface it and harness the benefits.”
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