UC Irvine

How do social identities and social injustice impact knowledge production in a group? Does diversity improve group learning? In what ways? How do we promote such diversity? These are the kinds of questions I tackle in my dissertation, which is situated at the intersection of social epistemology, network modeling, and the philosophy of race and gender.

A theme running through my findings is that having a diversity of approaches within a group can facilitate the production of better knowledge. I propose three novel mechanisms that lead to epistemically-beneficial diversity and use agent-based models to investigate their often surprising downstream consequences. I show that (1) marginalized social groups sometimes develop better beliefs because their testimony is devalued by dominant groups; (2) industrial scientists can gain epistemic benefits by failing to share their research; and (3) a group can ultimately learn better when its members explore many, possibly sub-optimal, solutions to a problem instead of always choosing the best available solution.