Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: In Defense of Troublemakers
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1941?
WEBSITE: http://charlannemeth.com/
CITY: Berkeley
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1941.
EDUCATION:Washington University, St. Louis, B.A.; Cornell University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Chicago, IL, assistant professor, 1968-73; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, associate professor, 1973-75; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, associate professor of psychology, 1975-77; University of California, Berkeley, professor, 1977—; Aston Business School, Birmingham, England, Leverhulme Trust Fellow, 2004-05; London Business School, England, visiting professor, 2005-09. Has served as a visiting professor at other colleges abroad. Former chair of board of advisors for University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to academic journals and to publications, including the New Yorker, Wired, Fast Company, and Ode.
SIDELIGHTS
Charlan Nemeth is a writer and educator. She has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. Prior to joining that school, Nemeth taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, and the University of British Columbia. She has served as a visiting professor at educational institutions, including London Business School. Nemeth has written articles that have appeared in academic journals and in publications, including the New Yorker, Wired, Fast Company, and Ode.
In 2018 Nemeth released In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. It was published in the U.K. under the title No! The Power of Disagreement in a World That Wants to Get Along. The book finds Nemeth arguing that expressing differing viewpoints benefits an organization and a society. She provides examples of the positive impact of dissent, including an analysis of the classic film, Twelve Angry Men, in which the character played by Henry Fonda goes against the opinions of the other jurors who are serving with him. Other examples in the book are drawn from Catholicism and the Supreme Court.
In an interview with Jay Robb, contributor to the Hamilton Spectator website, Nemeth explained: “Dissent, while often annoying, is precisely the challenge that we need to reassess our own views and make better choices. It helps us consider alternatives and generate creative solutions. Dissent is a liberator. Genuine dissent and debate not only make us think, but make us think well. We become free to know what we know.” Nemeth told Ephrat Livni, writer on the Quartz Media website: “We actually do others a favor because our dissent—provided it is authentic—stimulates them to think more broadly and deeply. Our groups make better decisions. We ourselves gain clarity.” Nemeth continued: “We have to stop being polite if it means being dishonest about what we believe.”
Claire Nana, reviewer on the Psych Central website, commented: “Nemeth makes a very compelling case that dissent is a necessary ingredient to our creativity, the accuracy of our decisions, and the quality of our thoughts.” Nana concluded: “In Defense of Troublemakers doesn’t only lay out the science behind divergent thinking, it is a powerful treatise on why we need dissenting opinions to solve problems from the most complex real world kind to those that they we may not even realize are interfering with our thinking and decisions.” A Kirkus Reviews critic suggested that the book offered “good ammunition for contrarians and [was] well grounded in scholarly research.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business.
ONLINE
Charlan Nemeth website, http://charlannemeth.com/ (July 10, 2018).
Hamilton Spectator Online (Ontario, Canada), https://www.thespec.com/ (April 27, 2018), Jay Robb, author interview.
Psych Central, https://psychcentral.com/ (June 24, 2018), Claire Nana, review of In Defense of Troublemakers.
Quartz Media, https://qz.com/ (May 6, 2018), Ephrat Livni, author interview.
Second City Works, https://www.secondcitywords.com/ (April 27, 2018), author interview.
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Psychology website, https://psychology.berkeley.edu/ (July 10, 2018), author faculty profile.
Charlan Jeanne Nemeth is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Her background includes a B.A. in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Psychology from Cornell University. Her faculty appointments include the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia and the University of British Columbia with visiting appointments in Bristol (UK), Paris (France), Trento (Italy), Mannheim (Germany) and London (UK). In 2004-5, she was the Leverhulme Trust Fellow at Aston Business School in Birmingham, UK and in 2005-2008 was Visiting Professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School. She has given keynote addresses to the Oregon Bar Assn, to the American Bar Executives and to the American Assn of State Colleges and Universities. Her work has been featured in Wired, Ode, the New Yorker and various media outlets.
Professor Nemeth has taught executive education in the areas of persuasion, team decision making, scientific creativity, corporate cultures and innovation and given invited addresses or workshops at major companies. She served as Chair of the Board of Advisors for the Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
As a visiting professor at London Business School in 2006-9, she co-led consulting field trips to South Africa for Executive MBA students.
Her most recent book on decision-making pulls together decades of research on influence processes with particular attention to raising the quality of individual and team decisions. Her research underscores how influence processes change the nature of thought and underscore two themes: the perils of consensus and the value of dissent for the quality of decision making and the creativity of solutions.
Professor Nemeth teaches both undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of persuasion, group processes, creativity and organizational behaviour. Previously taught classes include:
Social Psychology
Group Processes
The Art of Persuasion
The Psychology of Creativity
Law and Psychology
Attitudes and Attitude Change
Innovation in the Workplace
Applied Social Psychology.
Core Course in Organizational Behaviour
Leading Teams in Organizations
Experience
1977 – present
Professor of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley, California
2005 – 2009
Visiting Professor
London Business School, London UK
1975 – 1977
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
1973 – 1975
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
1968 – 1973
Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Professor Nemeth has over 100 publications in peer reviewed journals and books. Her work, primarily on influence and group decision making processes, has been translated in various languages and broadly applied to both business and to the law. Her most recent work has been on the topic of creativity and innovation and has included interviews with Nobel laureates in the sciences as well as entrepreneurs and CEOs of innovative companies. A complete list of her work and publications can be found in the curriculum vitae. Additional publications can be found and downloaded in the section on Consulting Services.
Areas of Research Interest
Social Psychology and Organizational Behaviour.
Research specialties are influence, creativity and small group decision making with a particular emphasis on the value of properly managed dissent for stimulating thought and creativity. Her work has been broadly applied, most notably in jury decision-making and the managing of innovation in organizational settings.
Additional related topics of her research include corporate cultures, profiting from diversity and dissent, the psychology of creative scientists and techniques, including brainstorming, for improving the quality of decision making and creativity.
Description
For most of Professor Nemeth’s professional career, she has studied small group decision making with an emphasis on the ways in which such decisions can be made “better”, more correct and more creative. Her emphasis has been on influence processes in general and the value of dissent, in particular, as she provides repeated evidence that dissent, even when it is wrong, stimulates divergent thinking, a consideration of more alternatives, and ultimately serves the detection of truths and the finding of creative solutions (“Minority Influence Theory”).
This research, while both experimental and naturalistic, concentrates on basic cognitive and influence processes. However, it has been broadly applied to law and to business. The work relevant to law is primarily on jury decision making and the reader is referred to “Jury Trials: Psychology and the Law” published in the Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (ed L. Berkowitz), 1981, 14 ,pp 309-367., as well as to a comparative analysis of France vs the United States. Professor Nemeth has also consulted extensively on jury trials and she was the first woman and the first social scientist to give an invited address to the Oregon Bar Association.
The research pertinent to business has focused not only on the quality of decision making and “teams” but also on corporate cultures that foster innovation. The Reader is referred to “Managing Innovation: When Less is More” published in the California Management Review (Fall 1997).
Professor Nemeth has given invited addresses on teams, decision making, persuasion, corporate cultures and innovation to the Business Schools or Schools of Management at Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, MIT, Yale and at Aston Business School and London Business School in the United Kingdom as well as the School of Management in St. Petersburg, Russia, and UC Berkeley. In 2004-2005, she was named a Leverhulme Fellow, one of the most prestigious awards in social science in the United Kingdom, one which required addresses to Business Schools and local communities. She served 6 years as the Chair of the Board of Advisors to the Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization at the Haas school of Business at UC Berkeley.
As part of her research interests in creativity and innovation, Professor Nemeth spent 3 years interviewing Nobel laureates in Chemistry and Physics for 10-12 hours each and is currently preparing a book on that project. Other research interests include diversity of team members, techniques for raising the level of creativity (e.g. brainstorming, devil’s advocate), power (its uses and abuses) and persuasive tactics as well as cross cultural differences in creativity and influence processes. Her work on brainstorming was featured in an article in the New Yorker in 2012.
Professor Nemeth led the international assignment for Executive MBA students from London Business School to South Africa for 3 years and has consulted for a number of companies on the broad issue of communication and culture. Those companies include: Ernst & Young, Metropolitan Insurance, Home Choice, Telkom SA, Allee Bleue Winery, Lesedi Nuclear Services, Woolworths, Waterford Winery, Vergelagen Winery and Cape Grace Hotel. Professor Nemeth’s specialty is the effectiveness of communication modes, both formal and informal, leading teams for innovation and the role of “voice” in corporate cultures of innovation.
Professor Nemeth has given invited addresses on teams, decision making, persuasion, corporate cultures and innovation to the Business Schools or Schools of Management at Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, MIT, Yale, UC Berkeley and at Aston Business School and London Business School as well as the School of Management in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2004-2005, she was named a Leverhulme Fellow, one of the most prestigious awards in social science in the United Kingdom. She served 6 years as the Chair of the Board of Advisors to the Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization at the Haas school of Business at UC Berkeley.
Professor Nemeth’s forthcoming book “In defense of troublemakers: the power of dissent in life and business” summarizes her approach after decades of research on persuasion and influence, especially about the ways in which consensus and dissent stimulate different kinds of thinking about an issue. The resulting message regarding the value of dissent is applied to business, law and everyday life, including major historical and current examples in the news
Charlan Nemeth is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in San Francisco.
Charlan Jeanne Nemeth is a professor in the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2005-2009 she was Visiting Professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School. Professor Nemeth's work has been featured in Wired, the New Yorker, Fast Company and various other media outlets. She advises numerous important institutions on effective decision-making.
Professor of the Graduate School
Email Address:
charlan@berkeley.edu
Education:
Ph.D., Cornell University
Research Area:
Social-Personality
Secondary Research Area:
Cognition
Website:
charlannemeth.com
Curriculum Vitae:
CV-Sept2017.pdf
Research Interests:
Social: influence processes; social interaction; dissent and cognition; decision making and creativity in small groups and organizations: psychology of entrepreneurs and creative scientists
CV: https://psychology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/cv/CV-Sept2017.pdf
April 27, 2018
Second City Works “Getting to Yes, And” – Rule of Three
Charlan Nemeth is a professor at UC Berkeley whose new book “In Defense of Troublemakers” is an evidence-based look into how important dissent and dissenters are – whether we like it or not.
You posit in your book that dissent is good even if it’s wrong. How so?
“The whole point of the book is really not one of argument for argument’s sake or even dissent for dissent’s sake. It really has to do with when you have a differing opinion from the majority or from the consensus. Most people are afraid and they don’t speak up. Companies have that problem all the time. And the research really shows us that that even if it’s wrong, the fact that the majority or the consensus is challenged actually stimulates thinking that by and large improves decision making in creative problem solving. It basically just gets you to think in broader, more divergent ways. It’s a benefit regardless of whether or not they hold the truth or not.
Likewise, you talk about how prone we are to be in error by subscribing to the majority opinion.
“People will agree with an erroneous majority judgment even when it’s on physical facts. Early studies by Solomon Asch on a simple length of lines. Namely, if you’re making the judgements alone, you make no mistakes. These aren’t kind of ambiguous or tough problems. I mean, it’s just flat in front of your face. But what you find is that if you put as few as three people, all of whom agree on something that’s wrong, over 35 percent of the individuals will follow that judgment. They start to see a reality in a way that they would not, if they were making the judgment alone. And these are not judgments or things where there’s ambiguity and there’s five different ways of looking at it. This is a flat out ight physical judgment in front of you. So blue becomes green and what comes to mind is this notion of what’s fake and what’s true.”
And how can we protect ourselves from this particular bias?
“I think that that listening as if you’re wrong is an extremely important mindset.”
QUOTED: "Dissent, while often annoying, is precisely the challenge that we need to reassess our own views and make better choices. It helps us consider alternatives and generate creative solutions. Dissent is a liberator. Genuine dissent and debate not only make us think, but make us think well. We become free to know what we know."
Dissent can be annoying, but it’s the cure for groupthink
Jay Robb reviews 'In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business'
OPINION Apr 27, 2018 Jay RobbSpecial to The Hamilton Spectator
Dissent
In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business By Charlan Nemeth Basic Books $35.50
In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business
By Charlan Nemeth
Basic Books, $35.50
Come up with a great idea at work and you're showered with awards and accolades.
But what do you get for killing a dumb idea that's a fan favourite with colleagues or a pet project of the boss?
Don't count on winning employee-of-the-month honours. You'll likely lose friends, make some enemies and get branded a malcontent. You'll be reminded why it's important to go along to get along, and may even be told to make amends for hurt feelings and bruised egos.
Also expect fewer invitations to join project teams, committees and task forces which counts as a big plus.
Or maybe none of that will happen because you work for a leader who values troublemakers like you and applauds your courage, conviction and candour. You may be a pain, but you're the preventive cure for groupthink.
Groupthink is how otherwise smart people make stupid decisions. These teams have bought into the illusion of their invulnerability and unanimity. They practise self-censorship, discuss only the information they have in common and put the screws to dissenters.
Teams that are suffering from groupthink are often in error but never in doubt, says Charlan Nemeth, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of "In Defense of Troublemakers."
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"The pressure to reach consensus and especially the suppression of dissent are precisely the ways to get convergent thinking — a narrowing of the range of information and options by viewing the issue from a single perspective instead of exploring multiple perspectives," says Nemeth.
Dissent is the cure for groupthink.
"Dissent, while often annoying, is precisely the challenge that we need to reassess our own views and make better choices. It helps us consider alternatives and generate creative solutions. Dissent is a liberator. Genuine dissent and debate not only make us think, but make us think well. We become free to know what we know."
Don't confuse troublemakers with devil's advocates. Troublemakers believe what they're saying and their conviction has the power to privately change hearts and minds.
Devil's advocates are playing a part free of authentic dissent. This can fool teams into believing they've had vigorous debate. And rather than provoking a team to make a smarter decision, research shows devil's advocates can actually reinforce initial thinking and polarize the group's position.
"For too many years, I have watched the pumped-up moral superiority by people who believe that they have considered all sides of an issue — and have no patience for any challenge to the position they have decided," says Nemeth.
It's up to leaders to defend troublemakers and actively solicit a diversity of perspectives. Hiring people who will look at issues from different points of view is key.
"Diversity might provide a range of views, but to have value, those views need to be expressed — perhaps even welcomed in a debate between views. For this to happen, however, there must be a leader who actually welcomes differences in viewpoint."
Going against majority opinion and saying aloud what others may be thinking can be career-limiting in organizations that value cohesion and harmony above all else. Yet troublemakers play an essential role in breaking the power of consensus and stimulating independent thinking.
"Confronted by dissent, we are less likely to rush to judgment, whether as individuals or in groups," says Nemeth.
"We are more likely to consider the pros and the cons of a position. Dissent, by and large, helps us make better decisions and come up with more creative solutions. Dissent makes us more open to learning, to growing and to changing."
@jayrobb is a troublemaker who serves as director of communications for Mohawk College, lives in Hamilton and has reviewed business books for The Hamilton Spectator since 1999.
QUOTED: "We actually do others a favor because our dissent—provided it is authentic—stimulates them to think more broadly and deeply. Our groups make better decisions. We ourselves gain clarity."
"We have to stop being polite if it means being dishonest about what we believe."
Ephrat Livni
May 6, 2018
It’s sweet to be agreeable—but what a vibrant, healthy society really needs is principled troublemakers.
Those who dare to say “no” when it appears that everyone else is in agreement are rare and brave—and they make the world a better place, according to University of California, Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth. Her new book, In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business, shows how everyone benefits when someone presents a thoughtful contrarian view.
Nemeth’s research in social psychology and cognition has shown that disagreement improves group thinking. “It’s a benefit regardless of whether or not [dissenters] hold the truth,” she argues. “Most people are afraid and they don’t speak up. Companies have that problem all the time. And the research really shows us that that even if it’s wrong, the fact that the majority or the consensus is challenged actually stimulates thinking.”
The professor has spent decades studying disagreement, looking at the behavior of juries, companies, airplane crews, and groups in general. Her work shows that a challenge to the general consensus generates necessary consideration and debate. This, in turn, improves decision-making, leads to more creative solutions, and even saves lives, for example in a criminal case where a defendant’s life or liberty may be at stake.
The American justice system relies on this kind of contrariness.If 11 jury members agree that the defendant is guilty, based on the evidence presented, and one jury member keeps holding out, the rest of the group is bound to get impatient and complain. Still, because they must reach a unanimous verdict, the group will have to reconsider the evidence and argue until all are convinced of a conclusion, based on facts. That’s a jury’s job, and doing it properly can mean the difference between incarceration and freedom, even life and death, for an innocent person.
Though it’s not easy being the disagreeable person in a group, standing up for your truth ensures that actual or self-appointed leaders and conscious or unwitting bullies don’t do damage to a process, project, person, or institution.
Dissenters seem like a pain. But principled troublemakers who challenge prevailing groupthink create more space for all. Nemeth told Quartz in an email, “We actually do others a favor because our dissent—provided it is authentic—stimulates them to think more broadly and deeply. Our groups make better decisions. We ourselves gain clarity.”
As for politesse, the professor is merciless, putting meaningful discourse above mere manners. She doesn’t think it’s better when everyone just agrees for the sake of general good feels. “We have to stop being polite if it means being dishonest about what we believe,” Nemeth says.
Nemeth offers these rhetorical questions, “ruminations” for your consideration. “Do we really want to spend our lives worrying about not offending, walking on pins and needles lest someone be upset with us?” she asks. “Have we lost our ability to know what we know and to engage in honest discourse?”
Hopefully, your answer is “no.” But please do feel free to disagree.
QUOTED: "good ammunition for contrarians and well grounded in scholarly research."
Nemeth, Charlan: IN DEFENSE OF TROUBLEMAKERS
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Nemeth, Charlan IN DEFENSE OF TROUBLEMAKERS Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-0-465-09629-9
Just say no: an examination of how the naysayers in the audience can help individuals and organizations make better decisions.
In our lives and work, most of us go along to get along, admonished by adages about rocking the boat and getting hammered down if imitating a nail. But, urges psychologist Nemeth (Psychology/Univ. of California), that's not the best approach. "We benefit," she writes, "when there are dissenting views that are authentically held and that are expressed over time." One of her cases in point is the movie Twelve Angry Men, with Henry Fonda as a juror who refuses to give in to the will of the majority to convict. The movie is used in the psychology classroom as a prime example of how a person with conviction can sway doubters, and it "demonstrates the art of influence, which includes timing, an observation of subtle cues from others, and knowing when to talk and when to listen." Another case in point is the example of the devil's advocate, appointed in the Catholic hierarchy to say, "yeah, but" when a person is considered for sainthood. By implication, every organization might do well to shake off the cobwebs and have someone throw up doubt whenever a major decision is being discussed. Even the Supreme Court values dissent, writes Nemeth, since it "has been found to increase what is called the integrative complexity of the Court's decisions"--i.e., dissent forces an examination of all sides of an issue and the trade-offs involved in making one choice over another. Unanimity, in that view, is bad. Not much of the book centers on the workaday business world, where being a reliable spoilsport can get a person not valued but removed. However, with the necessary adjustments, it's easy to see that this largely academic argument could be made accessible for laypersons.
Good ammunition for contrarians and well grounded in scholarly research.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nemeth, Charlan: IN DEFENSE OF TROUBLEMAKERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461372/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b480dfc9. Accessed 8 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461372
QUOTED: "Nemeth makes a very compelling case that dissent is a necessary ingredient to our creativity, the accuracy of our decisions, and the quality of our thoughts."
"In Defense of Troublemakers doesn’t only lay out the science behind divergent thinking, it is a powerful treatise on why we need dissenting opinions to solve problems from the most complex real world kind to those that they we may not even realize are interfering with our thinking and decisions."
Book author: Charlan Nemeth
Reviewed by: Claire Nana
~ 3 min read
We defend our dissertations. We defend our arguments in a courtroom. And we defend our beliefs – unless they challenge the status quo. More often than not, we trade conviction for agreement, and the result, while it may avoid confrontation, doesn’t avoid consequences. Moreover, it doesn’t improve the collective decisions we make.
In her new book, In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business, social psychologist Charlan Nemeth makes a very compelling case that dissent is a necessary ingredient to our creativity, the accuracy of our decisions, and the quality of our thoughts.
“A consensus position can sway our judgments even when it is in error, and even when the facts are in front of our face,” write Nemeth.
Nemeth cites the example of United Airlines Flight 173 where, after hearing a loud thump when trying to lower the landing gear, the crew became so focused on solving the problem of the landing gear that while delaying their scheduled landing, they ran out of fuel.
“When everyone is focused on one thing, they all lose sight of relevant information and options,” writes Nemeth.
We also give more attention to information that confirms our own beliefs, while often discounting information that discredits them. Moreover, we often don’t even consider alternative explanations, perspectives, or ways of interpreting situations.
“Consensus narrows, while dissent opens the mind,” writes Nemeth.
People often follow the majority simply because it is the majority, without considering its value.
“The power and pull of the majority is all around, even if we don’t notice it, and even if we are unaware of its potential influence over us,” writes Nemeth.
We follow the majority, Nemeth tells us, for two main reasons: the assumption that truth lies in the numbers, and the desire to belong.
Nemeth cites the work of Robert Cialdini, who placed signs in Arizona’s Petrified Wood Forest National park that were either descriptive, indicating that many past visitors had removed petrified wood from the park changing its natural state, or prescriptive, asking people not to remove the wood:
“Over the five weeks of the study, the petrified wood placed close to signs with the descriptive message was five times more likely to be stolen than wood placed close to a sign with the prescriptive message.”
Relying on consensus is a fundamental problem of the majority, and one that doesn’t offer room for independent, expansive thinking.
One way to break the pattern of groupthink, Nemeth contends, is through anonymity. The result is that we must commit to what we believe before we know the opinions of others.
“Think of a group vote in which the first three people vote the same way. This almost ensures that other hands will go up in agreement. Suppose, however, that each person writes down his vote before seeing or hearing how others are voting. In that case, each member of the group will be less likely to follow the majority. When we have already committed to what we believe, we at least have to confront why we are changing our minds if we are inclined to do so. We have to stop and pause,” writes Nemeth.
Similarly, people are much more likely to listen to dissenters if asked privately. One important factor, however, is that dissenters must be consistent.
“The research suggests that consistency is more effective than compromise in changing minds,” writes Nemeth.
The influence of dissenters is also not fully recognized. In jury deliberations a dissenter who fails to compromise can prevent an agreement, and can change attitudes.
“We may persuade even if there is no public acknowledgement of it,” writes Nemeth.
Beyond persuasive ability, however, dissent improves the quality of our thinking and our decisions.
“In the presence of dissent, we don’t narrow our search to any one position, whether our own, or that of the dissenter. Instead, we expand and widen our search,” writes Nemeth.
The divergent thinking that emerges from dissent forms the basis of creativity, creative solutions and greater flexibility of thought.
“This appears to be another benefit of dissent: it enables us not only to see different paths but to shift from one path to another as needed,” writes Nemeth.
Challenging the desire to be favorably viewed or give priority to the beliefs already held by the group, dissent helps correct for what Nemeth says is a highly replicable phenomenon: that discussion among like-minded people leads to more extreme views.
Dissent doesn’t only balance otherwise radical beliefs, it improves the quality of belief itself. When a dissenter speaks up he empowers those around him to also challenge their thinking and beliefs, unlock the stronghold of the majority, and think with a mind that is open, and willing to explore opposing – and perhaps more accurate – views.
In Defense of Troublemakers doesn’t only lay out the science behind divergent thinking, it is a powerful treatise on why we need dissenting opinions to solve problems from the most complex real world kind to those that they we may not even realize are interfering with our thinking and decisions.
In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business
Charlan Nemeth
Basic Books
March 2018
Hardcover, 214 Pages