Two Types of Disagreement in Group Discussions of Japanese Undergraduates

In this study we investigated the nature of disagreement, which is a necessary component of a good discussion. We obtained 27 group discussion scenes by Japanese undergraduates that were evaluated by two ways: impression rating and ranking. As a result of factor analysis for the impression rating data, five factors were extracted: activeness, multidirection and unification of discussion, relationships of participants, development and sophistication of discussion, and sincerity of the participants, and each factor scores of each scene was simultaneously calculated. Each scene’s rank score was also calculated by relative comparisons. A significant positive correlation was found between the mean factor and the rank scores except for Factor 3 (relationships of participants). To consider the reason for the difference relating to Factor 3’s score, we scrutinized the discussion process of four scenes of the different patterns of the factor and rank scores. From the analysis of conversations, we suggested that this difference reflected ways of disagreement. By introducing a probative discourse tags for discussion (pDTD), we reasoned that the frequency of disagreement made Factor 3’s score negative and the absence of the second part of adjacency pairs made the rank score worse. The explicit speech and actions of blame such as emotional and aggressive expression, and neglect of treatment for the minor opinion made also the discussion unfair, but we think that these behaviors might erupt from the ground made by the accumulated implicit behaviors such as the absence of the second part. We finally concluded that the criticism type of disagreement increased the rank scores, and its censure type produced lower results, and the proper ways of disagreement in group discussions were discussed.