torically specific: it is more crucial in an environment characterized
by uncertainty, where conflict avoidance, along with eschewing com-
ments that might offend specific constituencies (defined in sexual,
gender, racial, ethnic, religious, class, or national terms), may be the
safest strategy. A more aggressive masculine style may have been
more acceptable a generation ago, when higher education was more
homogeneous or “clubby” than it is now.^13
Preparedness, expertise, succinctness, intellectual depth and multi-
disciplinary breadth, respectfulness, and sensitivity to others: these
traits and skills all go into the equation that defines a good panelist
and establishes an individual’s credibility. The ideal personality for a
panelist is captured by a sociologist as he reviews the traits he feels
made his panel’s chair superlative: “[He has] a very good sense of
[the field], [is] smooth, agreeable, charming, and very much blessed
with a sense of reality, up on the literature, very well informed...he
listened, [was] brisk, efficient, everything a chairman could be.” Yet
this description is very much at odds with that presented in most of
the literature on peer review. Most studies emphasize exclusively
cognitive factors and the exercise of power and downplay the role of
emotion and interpersonal signaling (about one’s morality, for in-
stance).^14 The misalignment between the traits and behaviors that
panelists single out and those that researchers have focused on hints
at the importance of considering evaluation as an emotional process,
as opposed to the more typical approach of focusing on cognition
and final outcomes. These traits also suggest that the credibility of
panelists seems to inhere both in their person and in their disciplines
and institutions.
The Central Rules of Deliberation
Panel deliberations follow principles analogous to those that some
theorists prescribe for deliberative democracy.^15 The standard of rec-
116 / Pragmatic Fairness