Unifying Conflicting Perspectives in Group Activities: Roles of Minority Individuals

For drawing higher-level perspectives in group activities, resolving conflicts among group members is crucial. We investigated group activities with four members wherein one member had a different perspective from the other three. Four members engaged in a rule discovery task in which they were required to unify conflicts for the solution. Through two experiments, we investigated two hypotheses: 1) Innovative high-level perspectives are more likely to emerge from a minority individual than from the majority of group members, 2) Group members on the majority side might tend to have more egocentric perspectives than an individual on the minority side. Both hypotheses were supported.