Devil's advocate

The Latin term devil's advocate to German devil's advocate, a person is referred to in the field of rhetoric, which represents their arguments the position of the other side, without her to belong to himself. The term colloquially referred to the church lawyer whose job it is to challenge the documentary evidence gathered and arguments for the Causes of Saints in a canonization process and contribute their own arguments against the canonization.

• 4.1 to devil's advocate
• 4.2 to Devil's Advocacy Technique

Usage

The rhetorical devices can be used to sharpen the arguments of their own position with regard to possible counter-arguments ( the devil's advocate ). When debating taking the position of devil's advocate can also serve the targeted provocation.

In the field of education, this method is applied to give the learners practice is to represent an opinion. This teaching method has, especially in the social science field advantage.

For learners of occupations in which it is particularly important to the validity of arguments and evidence ( law, natural sciences, mathematics ), the development of an "inner " devil's advocate to protect against loss of objectivity by errors such as overconfidence, blindness, etc. is an indispensable part of the training.

Devil's Advocacy Technique

Devil's advocacy is based on the principle of the devil's advocate. It describes a technique used in the industrial and organizational psychology, which is used in order to counteract biased information seeking in the context of judgment and decision-making processes in groups. In the devil's advocacy technique, one randomly selected member of the group assumes the role of devil's advocate (English devil 's advocate ), whose task it is to criticize proposals of the group. When all have agreed on a solution that represents the devil 's advocate counter-arguments to this solution and tries to identify corresponding weaknesses. The group must then respond to the criticism and consider whether the arguments that have been spawned by the devil 's advocate, may be invalidated. After this test, the initially proposed solution is either selected or rejected.

Flow / procedure

Target

The devil's advocacy technique is a form of artificial disagreement (English contrived dissent ); they do serves to counteract the bias in information search in group decision-making processes ( cf. groupthink (Section devil's advocate ) ). The technique is especially used in homogeneous groups, since the search for counterarguments is encouraged.