Schulz-Hardt, S., Brodbeck, F. C., Mojzisch, A., Kerschreiter, R., & Frey, D. (2006). Group decision making in hidden profile situations: Dissent as a facilitator for decision quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6), 1080–1093. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.91.6.1080.
Not read: no lawful copy was reached on 2026-10-23 (see the status note). What follows is the abstract’s.
Key takeaways
From the abstract only (PubMed 17144766).
- Design. “135 three-person groups worked on a personnel selection case with 4 alternatives”, with information distributed as a hidden profile: the correct option “could be detected only by pooling and integrating the members’ unique information”.
- Dissent helps, even wrong dissent. “Whereas groups with homogeneous suboptimal prediscussion preferences (no dissent) hardly ever solved the hidden profile, solution rates were significantly higher in groups with prediscussion dissent, even if none of these individual prediscussion preferences were correct.”
- A correct proponent helps more; the amount of dissent does not. “The magnitude of dissent (i.e., minority dissent or full diversity of individual preferences) did not affect decision quality.”
- Mechanism. The effect “was mediated primarily by greater discussion intensity and to some extent also by less discussion bias in dissent groups.”
The abstract gives no solution rates, and does not say how prediscussion preferences were composed into groups or whether members announced them.
Why this is here
The owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request”, cited it as an external result for QUESTION-089 (when does a process that destabilizes a whole’s prevailing pattern improve the organization) and for the proposed study CASE-108, whose measures include the suppression of honest dissenting minorities. It bears on CLAIM-281. It is a laboratory result about human groups on one task type; how far it carries to the record’s processes is the record’s question, not the paper’s.
It is to be read with Mojzisch and Schulz-Hardt (2010), LIT-1403, which by its abstract finds that knowing others’ preferences at the start impairs the same kind of decision. The two are not in conflict as stated: this one varies whether members actually disagree; that one varies whether they are told what the others prefer.
The hidden-profile meta-analysis (Lu, Yuan & McLeod 2012, Personality and Social Psychology Review, doi:10.1177/1088868311417243) is not held in the record.