Do Competing Alternatives Reduce Illusory Consensus in OSS Communities?

This project asks whether requiring competing alternative proposals reduces illusory consensus, where a group believes it has agreed while members privately disagree, in open-source software communities. Drawing on dual-process theory and a modified framework from Healey et al. (2015), it hypothesizes that multiple alternatives align voting with discussion valence, while alternatives introduced late increase illusory consensus. Two studies are planned: an online experiment with an Implicit Association Test to validate voting as a proxy for reflexive cognition, and an observational study of GitHub governance discussions in the Python and Rust projects.