Does Gender Diversity Promote Nonconformity?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Amini, Makan; Ekstrom, Mathias; Ellingsen, Tore; Johannesson, Magnus; Stromsten, Fredrik
• 署名单位: Stanford University; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN); Stockholm School of Economics
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2382
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 1085-1096
• 关键词: CONFORMITY; Gender differences; group composition; skill

摘要

Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a newexperimental procedure to measure such conformity in a judgment task, we compare the degree of conformity in groups with varying gender composition. Overall, our experiments offer little evidence that gender composition affects expression of minority views. A robust finding is that a subject's lack of ability predicts both a true propensity to accept others' judgment (informational social influence) and a propensity to agree despite private doubt (normative social influence). Thus, as an antidote to conformity in our experiments, high individual ability seems more effective than group diversity.