June 4, 2014

A new approach to diversity research




MIT professor suggests a rethinking of homogeneity as the baseline used to study diversity.

When people work in socially homogeneous groups, they overestimate their own contributions to the group’s success, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT scholar. In fact, in some cases such “self-serving bias” occurs to a degree about five times as great in homogeneous groups as in ethnically diverse groups.