The effects of dialectical inquiry, devil's advocacy, and consensus inquiry methods in a GSS environment

Abstract Much research has been done in the past few years on Group Support Systems (GSS). Laboratory versions have been created and studies have reported improved group outcomes, when compared with similar manual sessions. More recently, commercial systems have been introduced. Most of these have been created around a common approach to group work, which can be characterized as consensus. However, research in the manual group literature suggests that a consensus approach does not always produce the best outcomes. Structured conflict may provide superior performance when the issues under consideration contain multiple or unclear underlying assumptions. This paper describes a preliminary experiment to compare a consensus based approach (C) to two different conflict based approaches, devil's advocacy (DA) and dialectical inquiry (DI). The study was intended to help determine whether or not consensus based approaches are always the best choice. Results found no differences among the three inquiry methods in terms of process or outcome. Possible reasons are discussed.

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