Convergent thought

Nemeth et al (1992) did a follow-up study on Nemeth's differential minority and majority influence study, in which the possible beneficial effect of convergent thought was investigated. They hypothesised that if the nature of the task can dictate the form of thought that would be optimal, there has to be situations in which convergent thought is appropriate or useful.

The task that was employed in the study is the Stroop (1935) test, in which subjects are required to tell which colour ink a word is written in, when the ink in which the word is written continually varies. For example, the word yellow might be written in blue ink, the word red in green ink, etc. They argued that if a majority focuses on the colour of the ink then the performance of subjects would improve in giving the correct answer. Further, if a majority focused on the name, performance should decrease. The focus of a minority group, in any way, was expected to influence performance to an extent that falls between these extremes.

The outcome was almost exactly as expected: the best performers were subjects exposed to a majority that focused on the colour of ink. However, an unanticipated outcome was that the effect of minority groups on performance was almost, if not quite, the same as the majority that focused on the ink. The order was (best to poorest performance): majority on ink, minority on name, minority on ink, control group, majority on name.

Thus there may well be situations in which distractions are undesirable (the example of a pilot who must concentrate is given). The research also re-emphasises Nemeth's earlier findings that exposure to dissenting views stimulates divergent thought, improving performance and the ability to make decisions.