As the world braces itself for a pandemic-induced surge in automation and a consequent (accelerated) shift in the nature of jobs, it is essential now more than ever to understand how people's creative performances are impacted by their interactions with peers in a social network. However, when it comes to creative ideation, it is unclear how the demographic cues of one's peers can influence the network dynamics and the associated performance outcomes of people. In this paper, we ask: (1) Given the task of creative idea generation, how do social network connectivities adapt to people's demographic cues? (2) How are creative outcomes influenced by such demography-informed network dynamics? We find that link formations in creativity-centric networks are primarily guided by the creative performances of one's peers. However, in the presence of demographic information, the odds of same-gender links to persist increase by 82.03%, after controlling for merit-based link persistence. In essence, homophily-guided link persistence takes place when demographic cues are available. We further find that the semantic similarities between socially stimulated idea-sets increase significantly in the presence of demographic cues (P<1e-4), which is counter-productive for the purposes of divergent creativity. This result can partly be explained by the observation that people's ideas tend to be more homogeneous within demographic groups than between demographic groups (P<1e-7). Therefore, choosing to maintain connections based on demographic similarity can negatively impact one's creative inspiration sources by taking away potential diversity bonuses. Our results can inform intelligent intervention possibilities towards maximizing a social system's creative outcomes.

中文翻译：

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人口统计线索的可用性会对动态社交网络中的创造力产生负面影响

随着世界为大流行引起的自动化激增以及随之而来的工作性质的（加速）转变做好准备，现在比以往任何时候都更重要的是了解人们的创造性表现如何受到他们在社交网络中与同龄人的互动的影响. 然而，当谈到创意构思时，尚不清楚同龄人的人口统计线索如何影响网络动态和人们的相关绩效结果。在本文中，我们问：（1）给定创意产生的任务，社交网络连接如何适应人们的人口统计线索？(2) 这种基于人口统计的网络动态如何影响创造性成果？我们发现以创造力为中心的网络中的链接形成主要受同龄人的创造性表现指导。然而，在存在人口统计信息的情况下，在控制了基于绩效的链接持久性后，同性链接持续存在的几率增加了 82.03%。本质上，当人口统计线索可用时，同质性引导的链接持久性就会发生。我们进一步发现，在人口统计线索（P<1e-4）的存在下，社会刺激的想法集之间的语义相似性显着增加，这对于发散创造力的目的是适得其反的。这一结果可以部分解释为观察到人们的想法在人口群体内比人口群体之间更趋同（P<1e-7）。因此，选择基于人口统计相似性来维持联系可能会通过剥夺潜在的多样性奖励来对一个人的创作灵感来源产生负面影响。