Group diversity and salience: A natural experiment from a television game show

We take advantage of a naturally occurring experiment in a television game show to study the impact of group characteristics on the group's ability to select salient solutions in a matching game. The Family Feud features families seeking to earn prizes by matching the results of public opinion surveys on various subjects. Our main result is that, controlling for task difficulty, families that are more diverse, as measured by both the intra-family generational gap and the relatedness of their members, are more successful at matching wider ranges of survey responses. This highlights the importance of member diversity in expanding information and decision frames of reference within a group.