Can diversity make for better science? Although diversity has ethical and political value, arguments for its epistemic value require a bridge between normative and mechanistic considerations, demonstrating why and how diversity benefits collective intelligence. However, a major hurdle is that the benefits themselves are rather mixed: Quantitative evidence from psychology and behavioral sciences sometimes shows a positive epistemic effect of diversity, but often shows a null effect, or even a negative effect. Here we argue that to make progress with these why and how questions, we need first to rethink when one ought to expect a benefit of cognitive diversity. In doing so, we highlight that the benefits of cognitive diversity are not equally distributed about collective intelligence tasks and are best seen for complex, multistage, creative problem solving, during problem posing and hypothesis generation. Throughout, we additionally outline a series of mechanisms relating diversity and problem complexity, and show how this perspective can inform metascience questions.

多样性可以造就更好的科学吗？尽管多样性具有伦理和政治价值，但对其认知价值的论证需要在规范和机械考虑之间架起一座桥梁，展示多样性为何以及如何使集体智慧受益。然而，一个主要障碍是好处本身是相当复杂的：来自心理学和行为科学的定量证据有时显示出多样性的积极认知效应，但通常显示无效效应，甚至是负面效应。在这里，我们认为，要在这些为什么和如何问题上取得进展，我们首先需要重新考虑何时人们应该期待认知多样性的好处。在这样做的过程中，我们强调认知多样性的好处在集体智慧任务中的分布并不均匀，并且在问题提出和假设生成过程中最能体现在复杂、多阶段、创造性的问题解决中。在整个过程中，我们还概述了一系列与多样性和问题复杂性相关的机制，并展示了这种观点如何为元科学问题提供信息。