Word: experimentals
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In this process, the University has become both a more national and a more international institution. The Harvard of the 1950s was still largely male, white, with an undergraduate student body dominated by alumni sons—many from private schools and from the East. Many of them were, of...
Does serendipity really matter? Consider a clue, coming from a small experiment in democracy, conducted by several colleagues and me in Colorado a few years back. About 60 American citizens were brought together and assembled into 10 groups, each consisting of five or six people. Members of each group were...
As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of predominantly liberal or conservative members—with the liberal groups coming from Boulder, and the conservative groups from Colorado Springs. (Crucially, the groups were not mixed together.) It is widely known that Boulder tends to be liberal and that Colorado...
The experiment had an independent effect: it made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous, thus squelching diversity. Before members started to talk, many groups displayed a fair bit of internal disagreement. Even in their anonymous statements, group members showed far more consensus after discussion than before. It...
This is an experiment, of course, but it tells us a lot about the power of niches and self-sorting. Countless students (and others) are exercising their freedom of choice, with the aid of new technologies, to replicate the Colorado experiment. On the Internet and on campus, they sort themselves...