CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

168 SCHULZ-HARDT, MOJZISCH, AND VOGELGESANG
ions. The most popular of these techniques are “devil’s advocacy” and “dialectical
inquiry.” Devil’s advocacy means that a single group member or a
subgroup is assigned the role of the devil’s advocate, which has the task of
criticizing as substantially as possible a proposal made by the group. Dialectical
inquiry differs from devil’s advocacy in that, after a proposal has
been made, the opposite faction in the group not only criticizes this proposal
but also comes up with a complete counterproposal, and a dialectical
debate between the two factions emerges about both proposals.
Dialectical decision techniques have been shown to enhance the accuracy
of individual judgments as well as the quality of group decisions,
particularly in strategic decision making (e.g., Schweiger, Sandberg, &
Ragan, 1986; Schweiger, Sandberg, & Rechner, 1989; Schwenk, 1982; for
a meta-analysis, see Schwenk, 1990). Thus, it seems possible to capture
at least some of the beneficial effects of authentic dissent by mimicking
dissent through dialectical techniques. This raises the question of how
the beneficial effects of contrived dissent (dialectical techniques) compare
with those of authentic dissent reported in the previous sections.
Unfortunately, only very few studies so far have directly compared the
effects of authentic dissent and dialectical techniques. Nemeth, Brown,
and Rogers (2001) confronted their participants with a dissenting opinion
that presumably came either from an authentic minority or from a
devil’s advocate; in a control condition no dissent occurred. Of these two
forms of dissent, only authentic dissent significantly increased the number
of issue relevant thoughts generated by the participants. Similarly, in
a study by Nemeth, Connell, et al. (2001), quantity and quality of solutions
were affected only by authentic dissent, not by a devil’s advocate, and
these effects were independent of whether the devil’s advocate was said to
truly believe in the position advocated or whether the other group members
expected this person to argue against her true conviction. Nemeth,
Brown, and Rogers (2001) came up with an even more striking result:
Whereas authentic dissent increased divergent thinking (thoughts in support
of vs. opposed to one’s own judgment were balanced) compared with
the control condition, contrived dissent increased cognitive convergence
(dominance of thoughts in favor of one’s own judgment).
One of our own studies also revealed a superiority of authentic dissent
over contrived dissent, but with slightly more favorable results for the latter.
Schulz-Hardt et al. (2002) used the group information search paradigm
previously described: In three-person groups, managers discussed an
investment decision case. Half of the groups had homogeneous prediscussion
preferences (authentic consent), whereas the other half consisted of a
majority and a minority faction (authentic dissent). In each condition, half
of the groups used the devil’s advocacy procedure (with the role of the
devil’s advocate being randomly assigned), whereas the other half received
no such instructions. The main dependent variable was the confirmation
bias in the group information search. Whereas groups lacking both types
of dissent selectively searched for information in favor of the alternative