Humans bring diverse beliefs, perspectives and strategies to problem solving. This cognitive diversity means that groups of people can often outperform individual experts (the “wisdom of crowds”, or “collective intelligence”). For this to work in real-world contexts, people must integrate volatile and varied pieces of social information into their own representations of the problem. In complex, unfamiliar cases, where expertise is hard to assess, where no clear majority opinion exists, or where other established heuristics for weighting information are unavailable, the human response to diversity frequently diverges from normative frameworks. We are studying how cognitive diversity in collective solving problem plays out in complex, real-world problems.