Specialties: Social Psychology with an emphasis on the quality of group decision making in small groups e.g. teams or juries, the workplace or board of directors. The emphasis has been on consensus and dissent and the role of properly harnessed conflict of opinion.
I joined the Psychology Department at UCB in 1977 as a full professor with tenure and retired 2015. During my academic career, I had numerous short- and long-term visiting professorships at Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the Univ of Mannheim, the Univ of Bristol, Aston School of Business Birmingham and London Business School I co-led the Executive MBA program for London Business School to Cape Town, South Africa for 3 years. I’ve also enjoyed a year as a fellow at Battelle Seattle Research Center on Psychology and Law and as Leverhulme Fellow at Aston Business School. At Berkeley, I served on numerous university committees e.g. the Committee on Prizes, the Provost’s Affirmative action council, and Committee on Committees.
While having over 120 academic publications, I wrote a trade book on my decades long research. It is entitled “In defense of troublemakers: the power of dissent in life and business”, published 2018 by Basic Books and translated into Chinese simple (Citic Publishing) and complex (Commonwealth Publishing), Korean, (Chungrim Publishing) and Slovenian. It received stellar reviews including a full column on the Opinion Page of the Wall Street Journal and named one of “10 new business books to read” and one of “20 new idea books to kick off 2018.”
My research interests have been on the quality of decision making in groups with an emphasis on consensus vs dissent. While initially the focus was on persuasion, i.e. how those in the majority or the minority prevail, our studies unfolded a far greater impact, that is, the change in the way we think about an issue, the quality of that thought and the quality of the decision making that results from exposure to majority vs minority opinion.
By means of numerous studies over 4 decades, we demonstrated the power of a majority view to narrow the range of information sought, the alternatives considered, the attention to the pros and cons of a position and often results in poor (but consensual) decision making. By contrast, dissent (even when wrong) stimulates a search for information on multiple sides of an issue, a consideration of the pluses and minuses of a position, more alternatives considered and, in general, improves the creativity and quality of solutions.
My research and 2018 book were covered in notable outlets e.g. the WSJ and the New Yorker, garnered widespread positive reviews and I was invited to give featured addresses, including the Organization of Cable Company CEOs, Sequoia Capital, and Goldentree Asset Management, as well as numerous podcasts including Second City, KERA (PBS Dallas), Econ Talk and specialty podcasts e.g. Boards of Directors, Talking to Teens
(https://www.econtalk.org/charlan-nemeth-on-in-defense-of-troublemakers/).
