# NEMETH / SCHULZ-HARDT CANON -- Authenticity + Contradiction Routing

**Scope:** The empirical literature that grounds (a) the authenticity constraint on adversarial reasoning and (b) the rule that contradictions fan into sub-inquiries rather than collapse into votes. This reference explains *why* the anti-ritualization posture and the no-confidence-field rule are structural, not stylistic.

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## The authenticity finding

Nemeth, Connell, Rogers & Brown (2001, *JASP*) compared authentic minority dissent vs role-played devil's advocacy in group decisions. Authentic dissent produced divergent thinking and better decisions. Role-played dissent, once recognized as procedural, got discounted.

Schulz-Hardt, Jochims & Frey (2002, *OBHDP*) replicated: authentic dissent outperforms contrived devil's advocacy particularly when the group has committed publicly to a prior finding -- the exact condition RAM operates under when the confirmatory pass has already produced results.

CSET (2024) extends the argument to AI red-teaming: adversarial output that *looks* procedural is *treated* as procedural and loses its epistemic value. A skill that ritualizes disconfirmation is worse than one that skipped disconfirmation, because it launders the absence of challenge.

**Implication:** authenticity is not stylistic. It is the empirical condition under which the adversarial pass retains any value. Ritualized output actively degrades the run.

## The contradiction-routing finding

Schwenk (1990, *OBHDP*) meta-analyzed devil's-advocacy and dialectical-inquiry interventions. Dialectical inquiry -- where contradiction opens a new inquiry rather than adjudicates between priors -- outperformed straight devil's advocacy. The mechanism: adversarial output is valuable when it surfaces assumptions that drive the next round of investigation. It is less valuable when compressed into a tiebreaker.

Maxwell (2013) gives the methodological frame: negative cases expand explanation. A negative case compressed into a score *removes* the expansion and replaces it with an adjudication that adds no new information.

Strauss & Corbin treat deviant cases the same way in grounded theory: they drive theoretical refinement, not verdict.

**Implication for this skill:** every contradiction surfaced by an inversion query is a sub-inquiry prompt, not a vote. This is why the Contradiction Routing Schema has no `confidence` field. Adding one would reintroduce the Schwenk failure mode under a new name -- the absence of the field is a *structural* defense against vote-collapse.

## What the canon forbids

- Inversion queries produced by predicate negation, synonym swap, or template instantiation.
- Contradiction records that carry a confidence score, confidence delta, tiebreaker weight, or procedural vote.
- Reports framed as "the adversarial pass agreed / disagreed with the confirmatory pass."
- Compression of contradictions into a single "adversarial-pass disposition" label before they reach the Surprise Register.

## What the canon enables

- Surprise Register entries that read as new questions, not as answers.
- Sub-inquiry expansion that the Warrant Governor can act on.
- Authentic inversion reasoning whose per-query rationale a reader can verify.
- An adversarial pass whose epistemic value is preserved because it did not collapse into adjudication.
