ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Building a diverse and inclusive plant science community.Journal of experimental botany · 2026Article
- The "WEIRDEST" Organizations in the World? Assessing the Lack of Sample Diversity in Organizational Research.Journal of management · 2025Review
- Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2025Review
- The Brain That Understands Diversity: A Pilot Study Focusing on the Triple Network.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Methodological concerns underlying a lack of evidence for cultural heterogeneity in the replication of psychological effects.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Network structure shapes the impact of diversity in collective learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Why cultural distance can promote - or impede - group-beneficial outcomes.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Reconstructing social networks of Late Glacial and Holocene hunter-gatherers to understand cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human societies are collective brains. People within every society have cultural brains-brains that have evolved to selectively seek out adaptive knowledge and socially transmit solutions. Innovations emerge at a population level through the transmission of serendipitous mistakes, incremental improvements and novel recombinations. The rate of innovation through these mechanisms is a function of (1) a society's size and interconnectedness (sociality), which affects the number of models available for learning; (2) fidelity of information transmission, which affects how much information is lost during social learning; and (3) cultural trait diversity, which affects the range of possible solutions available for recombination. In general, and perhaps surprisingly, all three levers can increase and harm innovation by creating challenges around coordination, conformity and communication. Here, we focus on the 'paradox of diversity'-that cultural trait diversity offers the largest potential for empowering innovation, but also poses difficult challenges at both an organizational and societal level. We introduce 'cultural evolvability' as a framework for tackling these challenges, with implications for entrepreneurship, polarization and a nuanced understanding of the effects of diversity. This framework can guide researchers and practitioners in how to reap the benefits of diversity by reducing costs. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.