CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

5. DISSENT AS A FACILITATOR 157
individual preferences or building groups with a minority or majority faction.
After their discussion, participants had the opportunity to acquire
additional information about the topic. Members of former dissent groups
requested more additional pieces of information than members of former
consent groups did. Similar effects became evident in a study by Levine
and Russo (1995). In the studies by Tjosvold and his colleagues, reported
in the previous section, people who were confronted with someone who
disagreed with them were more interested to get further information
about the other person’s thoughts than people who where confronted
with agreement (Tjosvold & Johnson, 1978). This higher receptivity to and
interest in additional information can explain why people understand the
perspective of dissenters better than the perspective of those with whom
they agree.
On the level of the group, the equivalent to intensified information
processing is intensified discussion. Groups with dissent among their
members conduct more intensive discussions than groups without
dissent. More specifically, groups with prediscussion dissent among
their members (e.g., where members enter the discussion with different
opinions or choice preferences) discuss a decision problem longer
(Brodbeck et al., 2002), exchange more information (Parks & Nelson,
1999), repeat exchanged information more often (Schulz-Hardt et al.,
2006), and generate more arguments about a decision problem (Smith,
Tindale, & Dugoni, 1996) than groups without prediscussion dissent.
Although this mechanism might not be very surprising, since dissent
requires more intensive discussion to come to a consensual solution
than consent does, it has important consequences: As Schulz-Hardt et
al. (2006) showed, intensified discussion is the primary reason dissent
groups are more likely than consent groups to talk about and subsequently
choose superior solutions that no group member has preferred
before. Thus, better performance in dissent groups can be simply due
to the fact that discussion in these groups is much more intensive than
discussion in consent groups.
Exposure to Minority Versus Majority Dissent: Effects on Individuals
As already outlined in the first section, different subtypes of dissent
seem to be differently facilitative of creativity and performance. The
research program by Nemeth and her colleagues provided convincing
evidence that exposure to minority dissent is more likely to enhance individual
creativity and performance than exposure to majority dissent is. To
understand why this is the case, we have to look at the different psychological
processes resulting from minority versus majority dissent.
In her theory of minority influence, Nemeth (1986) predicted that bothminority
and majority dissent induce cognitive activity, but that these activities
differ in direction. Specifically, majority dissent is proposed to induce