Dissent, Effects on Group Decisions

The Benefits of Dissent for Group Decision Making

Most people do not like dissent because dissent implies conflict, and conflict is undesirable. The expression of dissent lowers group members' satisfaction with the process and the outcome of group decision making. Generally speaking, people value consensus and harmony in a group.

However, the absence of dissent can have disastrous consequences. The American psychologist Irving L. Janis analyzed famous decision fiascoes in U. S. foreign policy (such as the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba) using historical documents, biographies, and other archival data, and demonstrated that the groups that had made these disastrous decisions suffered from extreme consensus seeking and a lack of conflicting opinions in the group, leading to closed-mindedness, a severe underestimation of risks, and a faulty decision-making process. Janis contrasted these fiascoes with two successful decisions (e.g., the reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis) and showed how in these cases procedures aimed at establishing robust debates in the group helped achieve a sound decision.

Interpretations of historical data, however, are likely to be biased by the hypotheses the researcher has in mind. Therefore, the question is what controlled experiments and field studies tell us about effects of dissent on group decision quality. Interestingly, this literature also indicates that dissent can be beneficial for group judgment and decision quality. Specifically, greater variety in individual judgments and decision preferences prior to group discussion is associated with better final group judgments and group decisions. This is particularly true for situations where the superiority of certain alternatives cannot be detected on the basis of the group members' individual prediscussion information but requires the exchange and integration of members' unique information during group discussion (so-called hidden profiles). In such situations, dissent fosters the detection of superior solutions that have not been in the focus of the group members' attention before; these findings are supplemented by field studies showing that dissent is associated with higher innovativeness in teams.

Productive Dissent: How Does it Work?

The positive influence of dissent on group decision quality relies on two different effects. The first one is the proponent effect. It means that the more variety in prediscussion preferences is given, the more likely it is that the group will—by chance—contain members that already prefer the best or a nearby optimal solution prior to discussion, and the influence exerted by these members will benefit group decision quality. The second effect is the pure dissent effect. It means that even if all group members prefer suboptimal alternatives at the beginning, their disagreement makes it more likely that they will find the optimal solution in the group. Thus, a diversity of wrong opinions can sometimes generate the right idea.

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