Join us for our last Science Forum Lecture of the semester! Dr. Keith Hankins, assistant professor of philosophy will be giving his talk titled Modeling the Diversity Dilemma.

Abstract:  Diversity is a resource that groups can take advantage of. It can improve our ability to solve problems by facilitating specialization, broadening the solution space we can explore, and ensuring that the solutions we arrive at are more robust. But capturing these benefits can be hard because diversity often makes things like conflict and misunderstanding deeper and more pervasive. Indeed, in some cases it’s the fact that diversity makes conflict more likely that explains why it improves our decision making, so leveraging the benefits of diversity isn’t simply a matter of minimizing its costs. Better understanding the relationship between the costs and benefits of diversity is thus of crucial importance if we want to leverage its benefits. In this talk I’ll provide an overview of how abstract modeling, computational simulations, and human subject lab experiments can work together to help us better understand these dynamics.