CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

5. DISSENT AS A FACILITATOR 153
session either two (minority condition) or four of the six participants
(majority condition) were confederates who said the standard figure was
embedded both in the easy comparison figure and in one other figure.
Again, depending on the experimental condition, this answer was either
correct or incorrect. Consistent with the results previously described,
participants exposed to minority dissent were more likely to find novel
correct solutions than participants exposed to majority dissent or participants
in the control condition. Thus, minority dissent enhanced not only
creativity but also performance (more correct solutions compared with
the other conditions). Importantly, this finding held true regardless of
whether the minority was correct or incorrect.
Third Example: Dissent and Group Decision Quality
So far, the reported facilitative effects of dissent were located at the individual
level: Individuals became more accurate in understanding other
persons’ positions after having been exposed to dissent, and individuals
showed higher creativity and better performance after having been confronted
with dissenting minority opinions. Since dissent characterizes a
relation between two or more persons—does dissent also have beneficial
effects on creativity and performance if the persons with different opinions
have to perform together as a group?
A direct test of this hypothesis was recently conducted by Schulz-
Hardt, Brodbeck, Mojzisch, Kerschreiter, and Frey (2006). In this study,
Schulz-Hardt et al. used a hidden profile task to investigate whether
dissent in group members’ prediscussion preferences has a beneficial
effect on group decision quality. So-called “hidden profiles” are dual-
or multiple-alternative group decision tasks in which the information
about the decision alternatives is distributed among the group members
such that no member can detect the best alternative on the basis of his or
her individual information set. To understand this type of task better, it
is necessary to distinguish between shared and unshared information
(Stasser & Titus, 1985). Whereas shared information is known to all group
members prior to discussion, unshared information is held by only one
group member. In a hidden profile, shared and unshared information
have different decisional implications (i.e., favor different alternatives),
and the alternative implied by the unshared information is the correct
one. Hidden profiles are particularly important in group decision making
because, faced with a hidden profile, groups can uncover a superior
decision alternative that none of their members supported individually.
Hence, hidden profiles represent a class of situations that can result in
innovative and superior decisions by groups. Unfortunately, groups predominantly
fail to solve hidden profiles (for overviews, see Brodbeck,
Kerschreiter, Mojzisch, & Schulz-Hardt, 2007; Mojzisch & Schulz-Hardt,
2006; Stasser & Birchmeier, 2003).