CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

5. DISSENT AS A FACILITATOR 151
interest in maintaining social order. This was operationalized by asking
the participants after the discussion to indicate how the confederate would
reason on another moral dilemma. Specifically, participants were asked
to pick from a list of 11 arguments those 4 the confederate would most
probably use to support his position. Wanting to maintain social order
characterized 3 of the 11 arguments. To the extent that the participants
were able to identify those three arguments as being the ones the confederate
would use, they were considered to understand the confederate’s
perspective. The main finding was that participants in the controversy
condition were significantly more likely to identify those three arguments
than participants in the no-controversy condition were. Subsequent studies
expanded this finding by showing that dissent particularly has these
facilitative effects on cognitive perspective taking and understanding
of the other’s position if an atmosphere of “constructive controversy” is
given—that is, open debate and constructive criticism are highly valued
(e.g., Tjosvold, 1982; Tjosvold & Deemer, 1980; Tjosvold & Field, 1985; Tjosvold,
Johnson, & Lerner, 1981). In sum, dissent—at least when the context
allows free expression of it—seems to lead to more accurate cognitive perspective
taking than consent does. In other words, dissent can help us to
understand someone else.
Second Example: Dissent and Individual Creativity
Whereas accuracy in person perception helps us to understand and get
along with others in an organization, we would not expect this variable to
be as strongly linked to performance measures as, for example, team performance
in organizations. A variable that is more closely linked to such performance
measures is creativity. We speak of creativity if people generate new,
original ideas and novel problem solutions. Does dissent affect creativity?
An intriguing study by Nemeth and Kwan (1985) shed light on this
topic. Participants were asked to judge a series of 20 slides for color and
brightness. In fact, all of these slides were blue in color. However, in the
majority condition, prior to their judgments participants were informed that
80% of previous participants had judged these slides as “green” and 20%
of participants had judged them as “blue.” In the minority condition, participants
were told that 20% of previous participants had judged these slides
as “green” and 80% of participants had judged them as “blue.” Hence, dissent
came from either a majority or a minority of previous participants. In
the control condition, no information about disagreeing judgments of previous
participants was given. In both experimental conditions, each participant
was paired with one confederate who answered first and judged the
slide to be “green” on all 20 trials. Hence, the judgment of the confederate
should have been viewed as either a minority or a majority judgment. Following
this judgment session, participants were asked for word associations
to the words blue and green.