Effects of devil's advocacy and dialectical inquiry on decision making: A meta-analysis

Abstract

For the past two decades, researchers have been investigating the effects of two techniques for promoting and managing cognitive conflict on decision making; devil's advocacy (DA) and dialectical inquiry (DI). Reviewers of previous experiments have reached different conclusions about whether the DA and DI are superior to a simpler expert (E)-based approach involving no conflict and whether the DI is superior to the DA in improving decision making. In this paper, meta-analysis has been applied to the results of all previous experiments on the effects of the DA and DI on decision making. The results suggest that the DA is more effective than the E approach in general. However, the superiority of the DI to the E was not demonstrated in experiments using relatively ill-structured tasks. Neither the DA nor the DI was shown to be a more effective method of introducing conflict into decision making. The meta-analysis provides directions for future research which are offered in the Conclusions.