Social Diversity and Exploratory Tendencies: A Moderated Mediation Approach

The present study investigated how exposure to social diversity fosters exploratory tendencies through cognitive and psychological mechanisms. We proposed that individuals exposed to greater social diversity would exhibit higher exploratory tendencies by developing greater cognitive complexity, and that this indirect pathway would be moderated by psychological richness. A sample of 289 university participants completed measures assessing social network diversity, attributional complexity, essentialism, psychological richness, self-reported openness to others, and a behavioral exploratory task. Zero-order correlations revealed that social diversity was positively associated with attributional complexity and openness to others, while essentialist beliefs were negatively related to these constructs. However, the behavioral index of exploration showed only weak alignment with social and cognitive variables. In the moderated mediation analysis, attributional complexity partially mediated the relationship between social diversity and openness to others, indicating that more socially diverse networks promote openness by fostering cognitively integrative reasoning. Psychological richness independently predicted attributional complexity but did not moderate the mediation pathway. These findings suggest that exposure to social diversity enhances openness primarily through cognitive differentiation rather than through experiential novelty or reductions in essentialist thinking. The results highlight attributional complexity as a key cognitive mechanism linking social diversity to exploratory openness.