Charlan Nemeth

Charlan Jeanne Nemeth is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Her background includes a B.A. in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in Psychology from Cornell University. Her faculty appointments include the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia and the University of British Columbia with visiting appointments in Bristol (UK), Paris (France), Trento (Italy), Mannheim (Germany) and London (UK). 

In 2004-5, she was the Leverhulme Trust Fellow at Aston Business School in Birmingham, UK and in 2005-2008 was Visiting Professor of Organizational Behaviour at London Business School. She has given keynote addresses to the Oregon Bar Assn, to the American Bar Executives and to the American Assn of State Colleges and Universities. Her work has been featured in Wired, Ode, the New Yorker and various media outlets.

Professor Nemeth has taught executive education in the areas of persuasion, team decision making, scientific creativity, corporate cultures and innovation and given invited addresses or workshops at major companies. She served as Chair of the Board of Advisors for the Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. As a visiting professor at London Business School in 2006-9, she co-led consulting field trips to South Africa for Executive MBA students.

Her most recent book on decision-making pulls together decades of research on influence processes with particular attention to raising the quality of individual and team decisions. Her research underscores how influence processes change the nature of thought and underscore two themes: the perils of consensus and the value of dissent for the quality of decision making and the creativity of solutions.