ABSTRACT
In their examination of perspectives on “group argument,” Meyers and Seibold address the question of whether or not communication makes a difference in the decisional outcomes groups achieve. In so doing, they enter the voluminous body of scholarship spawned by Stoner’s (1961) discovery that groups do not necessarily exercise the sort of conservative influence on members commonly attributed to them. The fact that group decisions in Stoner’s pioneering study were different from, and frequently more risky than, those one would expect on the basis of prediscussion individual choices led almost immediately to a number of competing explanations for this initially puzzling occurrence. Of those, one of the longest surviving and most influential accounts has been the so-called persuasive arguments theory (Vinokur & Bumstein, 1974). The particular perspective offered by persuasive arguments theory (PAT) is a major object of Meyers and Seibold’s attention.
