Charlan Nemeth

Who they are

Nemeth is a professor of psychology at Berkeley. The vault records her research programme as being on dissent, minority influence and group decision making, and records her central finding in popular form: that debate and criticism produce more ideas, and better ones, than instructions to withhold judgment.

Her work reaches this library by an indirect route. Cal Newport's Deep Work takes its brainstorming and serendipity material from a 2012 New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer, and the research described there is largely hers. She is not named in the book. The vault created its note on her to give downstream arguments a better source to point to than the journalist, with the rule that any argument built on that material should cite Nemeth and not the article.

She enters the groupthink literature at a specific point. Irving Janis's account of groupthink describes a group that suppresses dissent in favour of agreement, which makes the effect of dissent on decision quality the natural thing to test. Colin Fisher cites her in The Collective Edge, at page 141, on dissent and creativity, in the chapter that sets out structural remedies for conformity pressure.

A piece in the Behavioral Scientist attributes to her the claim that knowing the majority position on the first ballot lets an observer predict the final verdict in juries almost 90 per cent of the time, and describes her 2018 book, In Defense of Troublemakers. Those statements come from a secondary presentation, and this page records them as hers without having checked the underlying studies.

Key papers

• Nemeth, C., Brown, K., & Rogers, J. (2001). Devil's advocate versus authentic dissent: stimulating quantity and quality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(6), 707-720. doi:10.1002/ejsp.58.
• Nemeth, C. (2018). In Defense of Troublemakers. The 2018 date and title are taken from a secondary page, and the book has not been read for this page.

The 2001 paper was read through its abstract on the Crossref record, and not in full.

Key ideas

Dissent improves thinking. The core proposition of her programme, as the vault records it, is that exposure to a dissenting view improves how a group thinks even when the dissenter turns out to be wrong, because it breaks the group out of a single line of attack. A group told to debate and criticise produces more ideas, and better ones, than a group told to hold back judgment.

Devil's advocate against authentic dissent. The 2001 study tests a familiar repair for hasty agreement. An earlier study had suggested that devil's advocates tend to reinforce the group's initial viewpoint instead of prompting divergent thinking. The new experiment varied whether the advocate's true position was known or unknown and whether it was consistent with the assigned position, and measured the quantity and the quality of the solutions produced. The authentic minority outperformed all three devil's advocate conditions, and the authors read the result as showing that role-playing has difficulty reproducing genuine dissent.

Why it matters for groupthink. If sincere dissent does something that assigned dissent does not, then guarding against groupthink cannot be a matter of appointing a critic. The article this page serves argues that the better-supported remedies are structural: outside perspectives, newcomers, protected dissent and the aggregation of independent judgements. Fisher makes the same case, doubting devil's advocacy on the ground that it is still advocacy.

Where to be careful. The finding is comparative and experimental, and a single study. It shows that sincere dissent did better than assigned dissent in the conditions tested. It does not show that conflict is always beneficial, and Fisher himself concedes elsewhere in his book that task conflict frequently spills into relationship conflict.

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