Abstract
We carry out most of our epistemic projects as groups. Networks of individuals work together to identify questions, accumulate evidence, and settle on answers that lie beyond the ken of individual knowers. This is particularly important for controversial issues. And when it comes to ideologically contested issues, groups that are ideologically diverse in their membership are epistemically superior to groups that are ideologically homogenous. That’s because ideologically diverse groups are better at (a) identifying a representative sample of important questions, (b) developing a wider range of potential answers, and (c) evaluating the evidence for and against each option. Awareness of this point produces a competence defeater for the relevant outputs of ideologically homogenous groups: they don’t deserve the high level of trust we often grant them. That, among other things, goes a long way towards justifying the public’s decreased trust in institutions like social networks, journalism, and universities.
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Notes
“Ceteris paribus” is meant to flag a generalization and side-step content-specific counterexamples. For example, perhaps individuals are better than groups at figuring out whether I’m hungry right now. I’ll do a better job determining the truth of that proposition than any group you could assemble. But that’s not a very interesting sort of objection. The question is whether, in general, you would be better off relying on a group rather than an individual to answer a question before you knew the content of that question. I argue in what follows that the answer is clearly to prefer the group.
I’m assuming here that the group investigation is decentralized. If group investigation is rigidly controlled by a central authority figure, the group won’t ask as wide a range of questions as it otherwise would. In that case, it would be acting more like a single agent than a group. For this reason, decentralization is an important epistemic feature of groups but not one related to ideological diversity.
Interestingly, some groups are epistemically better than others because they communicate their evidence appropriately. This is an important but not obvious feature of group investigation. Consider again the anecdote from the fair. If each contestant knew the guess of the previous contestant, there would have been an obvious anchor bias. The group performed well because each member of the group was ignorant of the guesses of other members. This basic tendency has been dubbed the Zollman Effect, and it shows how scientists can improve a body of beliefs by limiting their communications with one another at the early stages of investigation (O’Connor and Weatherall 2019). Sharing results too early can discourage other scientists from taking up a problem (because they think it’s already solved) or bias those in the midst of their own research. This isn’t a point about how groups are epistemically better than individuals but still an important point about what makes a group epistemically effective.
For a scholarly account of an echo chamber, see Nguyen 2018: “An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been excluded and discredited.”.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that ideological homogeneity is relativized to specific questions. A group of voters could be homogenous with regard to, say, tax policy and not to, say, affirmative action.
In fact, investment clubs with a good mix of men and women also outperform investment clubs with members of only one sex (Harrington 2010). This fits well with the overall thesis of this piece that diversity improves the epistemic power of groups.
I note as an aside that in some cases, it may still be rational for members of a group to stick to their controversial views even after they find out that the group suffers particular epistemic problems (for a defense of this, see Lougheed 2021). But whether it’s rational to do that from an individual’s perspective and whether the group retains its epistemic advantages are two different questions.
There are so many ways of doing this, so many caveats, and so many pitfalls, that the discussion of how best to improve the ideological diversity of a group is left for another project.
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Acknowledgements
An early version of this paper was presented at the Bled Philosophical Conference in Bled, Slovenia, in June of 2023. The author is grateful for the helpful feedback provided by colleagues at that conference
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McBrayer, J.P. The Epistemic Benefits of Ideological Diversity. Acta Anal (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00582-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-023-00582-z