Aversion to Disagreement: Psychological Barriers to Harnessing Cognitive Diversity

Abstract: Both the business world and academic research argue that cognitive diversity yields higher-quality information for better decisions. However, it also brings interpersonal differences that often create relational barriers preventing groups from reaping its benefits. The current research proposes a novel barrier of cognitive diversity beyond these relational barriers. Drawing from the wisdom of crowds, we reveal a fundamental tension between the greater comfort of seeing agreement stemming from the use of a redundant information source and the objective benefit of combining discrepant judgments from the use of unique information sources. Under various experimental contexts, we show that one is more confident in advice (and advisors) who are in high agreement because they use a redundant and less useful information source; one is less confident in advice (and advisors) in high disagreement because they use unique and more informative information sources. This confidence gap influences actions with tangible monetary consequence.

Keywords: cognitive diversity, advice taking, decision making