I'd place the devil's advocate into the superset of "idea generation" or "brainstorming" in general. It's only diabolical in that the idea has properties that m

I'd place the devil's advocate into the superset of "idea generation" or "brainstorming" in general. It's only diabolical in that the idea has properties that make the modal person tend to resist and deny it. But really, it's just one possibility of many. The fact itself that it's unpopular doesn't make it more or less likely. The clever thing about brainstorming is that by thinking of a new possibility, you almost always lower the probability of the "obvious" path. This is true even if the new possibility is very unlikely. In other words, brainstorming tends to increase overall uncertainty and protects you from overconfidence.