Does Gender Diversity Promote Nonconformity?
通过新实验测量判断任务中的从众行为，发现性别组成对少数观点表达影响甚微，而个人能力比群体多样性更能有效对抗从众。
Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental 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. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2382 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.