Adversarial collaboration

History

One of the earliest modern examples of adversarial collaboration was a 1988 collaboration between Erez and Latham with Edwin Locke working as a neutral third party. This collaboration came about as the result of a disagreement from the field of Goal-Setting research between Erez and Latham on an aspect of goal-setting research around the effect of participation on goal commitment and performance. Latham and Erez designed four experiments which explained the differences between their individual findings, but did not coin the term adversarial collaboration. Independently, to Erez, Locke and Latham whose work he was unaware of, Daniel Kahneman developed a similar protocol for adversarial collaboration around ten years later and may have been the first to use the term adversarial collaboration. More recently, Clark and Tetlock have proposed adversarial collaboration as a vehicle for improving how science can self-correct through exploring rival hypotheses which will ultimately expose false claims. Their work has led to the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences creating the Adversarial Collaboration Project which seeks to encourage the use of adversarial collaboration as a research approach to address a variety of research questions.