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The psychology of negotiation: Principles and basic processes.
Abstract
This chapter is about negotiation and has three goals. First, we review recent developments in the social psychological study of negotiation. Second, we develop a set of basic principles that covers current insights into the negotiation process and captures cognitive, motivational, and affective influences on the quality of agreements people reach. Third, we develop the idea that to make strategic decisions, individuals in negotiation need to make sense of their situation and their counterpart. That is, to understand negotiation we need to understand how people search and process information and use the emerging insights to make strategic decisions that, ultimately, affect their own as well as their counterpart's outcomes. We begin this chapter with a brief discussion of the structure of negotiation and argue that individuals in negotiation face fuzzy situations that are full of uncertainties and ambiguities and require sense making on the part of the negotiators. We then discuss the strategies and interaction patterns that characterize negotiation and develop principles about strategic repertoires negotiators have, and about action-reaction patterns across different phases of negotiation. In the third section we discuss the negotiator as motivated information processor, concentrating on the (often detrimental) impact of cognitive heuristics, naive realism, and ego defensiveness. In this section we also discuss work showing that the influence of these information-processing barriers may be countered by the epistemic motivation to process information systematically and deliberately. In the fourth section we view the negotiator as social animal, and focus on impression management motives, and the wealth of research on proself versus prosocial motivation, questioning the rather popular assumption that individuals in conflict and negotiation are self-interested and ignorant of their counterpart's needs and desires. In the fifth section we consider the emotional negotiator and discuss the intra- and interpersonal functions of affect and emotion in negotiation. In each of these five sections we identify one or more basic principles of negotiation. To examine the generality of these basic principles and processes, we review in the sixth section recent research on cross-cultural differences in negotiation. We conclude with a summary and integration of the 10 principles identified in this review and provide some general direction for future inquiry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Contrary to what negotiation theory would predict, the UK adopted a harder stance than the EU, despite being the weakest party in the negotiations (Martill and Staiger 2021;Jones 2019;Schimmelfennig 2018). This article attempts to explain this paradox, by using a two-level game framework (Putnam 1988) combined with insights from the literature on the social psychology of negotiations (Rubin and Brown 1975;Pruitt 1981; Thompson and Hastie 1990;De Dreu et al. 2007). It argues that the UK's behaviour was indeed harder than the EU's on the domestic level of the negotiations, but, on the international level, the EU's behaviour was harder than the UK's. ...
... Putnam's framework needs to be combined with insights from the social pscyhology of negotiations (Rubin and Brown 1975;Pruitt 1981;Thompson and Hastie 1990;De Dreu et al. 2007). 2 This approach makes it possible to focus on the behavioural implications of the two-level model, as opposed to its strategic implications, and specifically to explain how the two-level game results in the UK talking hard (domestic game) but negotiating softly (international game), while the opposite occurs with the EU. ...
The negotiation of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement (2017–2020) puzzled scholars by appearing to show a weaker party (the United Kingdom) adopting a harder negotiation strategy than the stronger party (the European Union). This article attempts to explain this paradox, by combining a two-level game framework with a negotiation psychology lens. It finds that the United Kingdom’s (UK) behaviour was indeed harder than the European Union’s (EU) on the domestic level of the game, but, on the international level, the EU’s behaviour was harder than the UK’s. The article further explores the behavioural and psychological incentives behind the UK’s hard behaviour, differentiating between negotiators at the political level and at the administrative level. The analysis shows that, while some aspects of the UK’s hard stance were rational within the context of a two-level game, others were harmful and due to cognitive limitations.
... According to Fisher, Ury & Patton (1991), negotiation is a two-party transaction whereby both parties intend to resolve a conflict, they state that negotiation is the most effective device thus far invented for achieving common interests while compromising on conflicting interests. De Dreu, Beersma, Steinel & Van Kleef (2007) explain that when a high-quality agreement is created which meet the needs of the parties involved in the negotiation, it will create order and stability, foster social harmony, increase the feeling of self-efficacy, reduce the probability of future conflict and stimulate economic prosperity. They conclude that when individuals create a poor agreement or fail to agree, they leave dissatisfied, create frustration and annoyance, and face continued conflict and disharmony. ...
This paper examines issues of workplace harmonious employment relations to establish the role workplace negotiations from the point of view of bargaining in the workplace play in employment relations. Philosophical and historical approaches were adopted for this study. The paper established that workplace negotiations had been and will continue to be an integral part of work relations and an important tool that will enhance the peaceful relationship among the different actors in employment relations and also a tool for better organisation productivity. It is the pivot on which harmonious employment relations stand and the strategy for sustaining harmonious industrial relations through union-management relations for improved socioeconomic and political development. It concludes that actors in industrial relations should work towards harmonious employment relations using the available negotiation mechanisms at all times to reduce strikes and enhance conducive work relations in the organisation and better employee and organisation performance.
... Negotiators are typically in an interdependent relationship (Walton & McKersie, 1965) and motivated by both cooperative and competitive incentives (e.g., Kelley et al., 2003): cooperation helps them reach an agreement with the other party and avoid a negotiation impasse (Schweinsberg et al., 2022) which can be costly for both parties. At the same time, negotiators compete to maximize their individual interests (De Dreu et al., 2007). Mixed-motive negotiations therefore involve both a high degree of interpersonal conflict between parties and also a high degree of intrapersonal conflict between a negotiator's incentives to cooperate and to compete (Kelley et al., 1970). ...
Conflict management scholars study mixed-motive negotiation situations with cooperative and competitive incentives predominantly through multi-issue negotiation tasks in experimental studies. Intriguingly, experimenters currently lack an objective, generalizable, and continuous measure that precisely quantifies the incentives underlying these negotiation tasks. We present the conflict strength coefficient, which enables scholars to systematically quantify the incentive structures in these multi-issue negotiation tasks. By making the incentive structures accessible and numerically comparable, the conflict strength coefficient provides new insights into the central element of the experimental study of negotiation and conflict management, unmasks differences across existing tasks, facilitates research transparency, knowledge sharing, and open science practices. We demonstrate the coefficient’s benefits by providing a hands-on example from past research, by reviewing and quantitatively assessing the current literature, and by mapping conflict strength coefficients for the negotiation and conflict management research landscape and its subareas. Our analysis suggests that the conflict strength coefficient can enrich the understanding of cooperative and competitive incentives in the established tasks and directly guide and support an individual scholar’s process of knowledge creation. The conflict strength coefficient provides a methodological contribution to the experimental study of conflict management and negotiation with immediate benefits for the production of scientific knowledge, the experimental study of real-world phenomena, and theory development.
... Agents with a myopic mindset are assumed to primarily process the information on the differences between themselves and others (intergroup bias [34,35,42,95]), react with egoistic and self-serving behaviors (egoistic motivation [31,108,109]), and focus on immediate short-term outcomes while neglecting future consequences (temporal discounting; (e.g., [37][38][39]). A myopic mindset in negotiations on common resource dilemmas is, thus, predicted to have a strong impact on agents' behaviors and strategies. ...
Current sustainability challenges often reflect common resource dilemmas where peoples’ short-term self-interests are at odds with collective interests in the present and future. In this article, we highlight the key role of joint decision-making processes in negotiations to facilitate the management of common resource dilemmas and to promote the transition toward sustainability. By reflecting on psychological drivers and barriers, we argue that the limited availability, the restricted accessibility, and the dynamic alterability of resources in negotiations on common resource dilemmas may cause a myopic mindset that fosters value claiming strategies and, ultimately, results in distributive-consumptive negotiation outcomes. To promote value creation in negotiations on common resource dilemmas, we argue that agents must perform a mindset shift with an inclusive social identity on a superordinate group level, an embracive prosocial motivation for other parties’ interests at and beyond the table, and a forward-looking cognitive orientation towards long-term consequences of their joint decisions. By shifting their mindset from a myopic towards a holistic cognitive orientation, agents may explore negotiation strategies to create value through increasing the availability, improving the accessibility, and using the alterability of resources. Applying these value creation strategies may help achieve integrative-transformative negotiation outcomes and promote sustainable agreements aimed at intersectional, interlocal, and intergenerational justice. We conclude by discussing additional psychological factors that play a pivotal role in negotiations on common resource dilemmas as well as further developments for future research.
... Also, it is common that parties are groups rather than individuals. As a result, participants will experience mixed interests both between their in-group and with their out-group (De Dreu et al., 2007). Additionally, in inter-group negotiations, competitiveness and partial impasses appear more often compared to inter-individual negotiations, negatively affecting the negotiation outcome (Loschelder and Trötschel, 2010). ...
Human creativity opens new ways for the fulfillment of needs. It becomes increasingly difficult to predict which resources will be hunted and which will become unattractive. Even so, the conquest of new lands remains a dominant hallmark of all societies, regardless of technological advancements or human rights recognition. Access to and use of natural resources often cause conflicts, especially due to competing interests. In this context, the design of coping strategies is a difficult task. The present study aims to advance the understanding of how the outcome of large land negotiations at the global level is influenced by country characteristics. Consequently, the paper explores the relationship between the number and size of land transactions (between 2000 and 2018) at a global level and the social-economic and environmental features of 84 countries. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed to understand the patterns of variation within the data describing country features. PCA resulted in four principal components used to define four types of countries: “Development”, “Size”, “Water resources”, and “Agriculture”. Results evidenced that the indicators for the “Development” country-type negatively predicted the number and size of failed deals and that the indicators for the “Size” country-type significantly influenced every contract type. Overall, this contribution reveals the cases in which the social-economic and environmental profile of the country can predict the type of contracts related to land grabbing and also their size and number. From a practical perspective, the results can serve as a knowledge framework that enhances negotiators’ power in future land bargaining.
Negotiations that involve contributions or distributions of shared resources are ubiquitous. However, the empirical literature has predominantly focused on how parties negotiate the exchange of exclusive resources in transaction negotiations (e.g., buyer-seller negotiations) and ignored shared-resource negotiations. We develop a novel negotiation task to investigate how parties resolve conflicts over the contribution versus distribution of resources via negotiations. We propose that when parties negotiate the allocations of shared resources, their exclusive ownership becomes the dominant reference point in the negotiation which induces reference-dependent frames throughout the negotiation process. Whereas negotiating contributions should induce give frames that highlight losses, negotiating distributions should induce take frames that highlight gains. These different allocation frames should, therefore, distinctly affect parties’ tradeoff aversion (i.e., willingness to trade off exclusive resources against shared resources), their allocation behaviors, and the quality of the final negotiation agreements. We further predict that these effects of give and take frames should be reversed when negotiating burdens. Across two preliminary and one preregistered, incentivized, and interactive negotiation experiments, we show that parties reach less integrative agreements when they have to contribute their own benefits to the shared ownership (i.e., inducing a give frame that highlights losses) than when they have to distribute benefits into their exclusive ownership (i.e., inducing a take frame that highlights gains). For negotiating the allocations of burdens, this finding reversed and parties reached less integrative agreements when they had to distribute burdens to the exclusive ownership (i.e., inducing a take frame that highlights losses) than when they had to contribute own burdens to shared ownership (i.e., inducing a give frame that highlights gains). Our findings suggest that parties’ aversion against tradeoffs prevents negotiators from reaching integrative agreements. The present studies are among the first to systematically elucidate negotiation processes over the contribution versus distribution of shared resources and point towards future research pathways to overcome reference-dependent biases.
When should negotiators care relatively more about their relationships with their counterparts than about the deal terms? We introduce a new dimension to characterize negotiation contexts to answer this question: the Economic Relevance of Relational Outcomes (ERRO). ERRO reflects the extent to which the total economic value of a negotiation hinges on the strength of a negotiator’s post-negotiation relationship with their counterpart. For example, in hiring a tutor, a student may derive economic value from both the wage and the quality of the tutor’s post-agreement service; if the student’s post-negotiation relationship with the tutor influences the quality of the service, this negotiation context is high ERRO. Importantly, although ERRO is an objective feature of the negotiation context for each negotiator, individuals may perceive their negotiation context to have higher or lower ERRO than it actually does. Across four experiments (N = 1601), we identify ERRO as a fundamental dimension of negotiation contexts. We find that in high ERRO contexts (e.g., many services, such as hiring a tutor) compared to low ERRO contexts (e.g., buying a couch), individuals negotiate more collaboratively, are more likely to privilege relational concerns over favorable deal terms, or may even forgo negotiating altogether. Compared to negotiators who build poor relationships, negotiators who build positive relationships with their counterparts attain better economic outcomes in high ERRO contexts because their counterparts invest greater effort following the negotiation. By introducing ERRO, our work underscores the importance of post-negotiation behavior and identifies when, how, and why relational outcomes influence economic outcomes.
Many social exchanges produce benefits that would not exist otherwise, but anticipating conflicts about how to distribute these benefits can derail exchange and destroy the gains. Coordination norms can solve this problem by providing a shared understanding of how to distribute benefits, but such norms can also perpetuate group-level inequality. To examine how inequitable norms evolve culturally and whether they generalize from one setting to another, we conducted an incentivized lab-in-the-field experiment among kindergarten (5–6) and second-grade (8–9) children living in Switzerland (4′228 decisions collected from 326 children). In Part 1, we created two arbitrarily marked groups, triangles and circles. We randomly and repeatedly formed pairs with one triangle and one circle, and players in a pair played a simple bargaining game in which failure to agree destroyed the gains from social exchange. At the beginning of Part 1 we suggested a specific way to play the game. In symmetric treatments, this suggestion did not imply inequality between the groups, while in asymmetric treatments it did. Part 2 of the experiment addressed the generalization of norms. Retaining their group affiliations from Part 1, each child had to distribute resources between an in-group member and an out-group member. Children of both age groups in symmetric treatments used our suggestions about how to play the game to coordinate in Part 1. In asymmetric treatments, children followed our suggestions less consistently, which reduced coordination but moderated inequality. In Part 2, older children did not generalize privilege from Part 1. Rather, they compensated the underprivileged. Younger children neither generalized privilege nor compensated the underprivileged.
Multilateral negotiation is a difficult task for the amicable settlement because of its structural complexity. Therefore, the strategy of problem solving which is commonly used in bilateral negotiation is not readily applicable. This study tries to find an integrative strategy in multilateral negotiations that brings all win-win benefts rather than competition or coaltion for some. To improve the efficiency of multilateral negotiation, the effects of Goal Setting and Feedback were tested. With the 3 studies it was found that amicalbe netotiation is really difficult if the interest structure is incompatible, higher Goal Setting bring rather negative negotiation results, and feedbacks, which lead to the flexible search to the alternative options, are very helpful for good results. We discussed the theoretical extension and the practical implications of these studies.
Soziale Konflikte bezeichnen das Erleben einer Unvereinbarkeit der Überzeugungen oder Interessen mindestens zweier Parteien und sämtliche Aktivitäten der Parteien, die sich aus der erlebten Unvereinbarkeit ergeben. Deskriptive Ansätze der Konfliktforschung versuchen, die Erscheinungsformen sozialer Konflikte systematisierend zu beschreiben. So kann beispielsweise mit Blick auf das Konfliktthema zwischen Aufgaben- und Beziehungskonflikten unterschieden werden. Erklärende Ansätze beschreiben den Zusammenhang zwischen Entstehungs- und Verlaufsbedingungen, Konfliktverhalten und Auswirkungen desselben. So postuliert das Dual-Concern-Modell, dass das Verhalten im Kontext sozialer Konflikte durch zwei Motive bestimmt werde: Selbstbehauptungsmotiv sowie Unterstützungs- oder Kooperationsmotiv. Präskriptive Ansätze formulieren Handlungsempfehlungen zur Konfliktvermeidung und -beilegung. Auf dieser präskriptiven Ebene lassen sich z. B. integrative und distributive Verhandlungstechniken erörtern.
Reactions to persistent annoyance were studied with a new laboratory method. A standard escalation sequence was found, which involved the following order of tactics: requests for termination of the annoyance, impatient demands, complaints, angry statements, threats, harassment, and abuse. The further along a tactic was in this sequence, the fewer the people who used it. This pattern of results provided a good fit to a cascading Guttman scale, suggesting the existence of a standard "try-try-again" escalation script. Problem solving and appeals to a third party were intermediate in the escalation sequence but did not appear to be part of the standard script. Groups used more escalated tactics than individuals, apparently because of their greater activity level. Women used more escalated tactics than men, at least in part because of greater anger at being treated unfairly. Men were the targets of more escalated tactics than women.