cussion, and then was convinced that perhaps it was not my fail-
ure to understand something, but rather that the project wasn’t
completely thought through.Conversely, this same historian explains that other panelists turned
to him for his historical expertise:
I knew that my colleagues would occasionally look to me to ex-
plain the situation [of the proposal] within the discipline—is this
where the work is going, is this a valuable set of sources, what is
this proposal missing, all sorts of things. So I tended to really fo-
cus a good deal on those, simply because I accepted it as my re-
sponsibility to be able to answer questions that others might have.Undoubtedly, the multidisciplinary character of the panels I
studied reinforces the interdependence of panelists when it comes
to obtaining the knowledge needed to assess proposals. But across
all types of panels, the evaluators also depend on one another for
subtle nonverbal signals concerning the value of proposals (eye roll-
ing, shoulder shrugging, nodding, smiling admiringly, and so on)—
signals that help them “satisfice” or make the best choices possible
given the limitations of their own knowledge and their current
context.^37
As suggested in Chapter 1, face-to-face conversations are seen as
leading to better decisions. John Dewey, for one, believed that debat-
ing is important for the emergence of shared standards about fair-
ness and for developing trust.^38 Accordingly, deliberating forces pan-
elists to articulate their argument in the context of a dialogue—a
process that may produce more transparent, less controllable deci-
sions, and decisions that take into consideration contextual infor-
mation. As a technology for decision making, deliberation helps
neutralize conflicts and encourages interdisciplinary conversations,
50 / How Panels Work