Part One: Basic Psychological Processes

Introduction

THE FIVE CHAPTERS that comprise Part 1 all focus on basic psychological processes in negotiation. Included in this section are pairs of chapters that focus on negotiator cognition and pairs of chapters that focus on emotion in negotiations. The last chapter analyzes motivation in negotiation and also highlights the role of culture in motivation. Collectively, these chapters provide insight into the basic psychological processes underlying negotiation and how they are shaped by culture.

In Chapter 1, Thompson, Neale, and Sinaceur trace the evolution of the cognitive tradition in negotiation. Using an archeological metaphor, they uncover distinct historical periods of scholarly research on different negotiation biases. The first period they identify is “cognitive biases,” which have their roots in behavioral decision theory and were a direct outgrowth of the cognitive revolution in psychology. They include, for example, negotiator framing, overconfidence, and anchoring. The next period they identify includes biases that have their roots in the perception of social situations, including the fixed pie bias, reactive devaluation, ignoring the cognitions of others, and the fundamental attribution error. This period of biases, through its ties to social psychology, ultimately made the study of cognition in negotiation more social in nature. They divide more recent periods of scholarly activity into motivational biases—biases that stem from negotiators’ goals and needs, and emotional biases—biases stemming from inaccuracy of judging and reading emotions in the self and another, faulty beliefs about the duration of emotions, and faulty beliefs about the causal impact that emotions have on behavior. These latter two eras are recent additions to the fossils that predate them and provide a much needed view of the negotiator as a “goal-directed, hotblooded, driven creature.” Thompson et al. conclude their chapter with speculations on the next era of research on negotiator cognition, arguing that research should depart from the traditional approach, wherein cognition is only studied at the individual level, and instead should adopt a situated approach to cognition—that focuses on how biases are created and sustained in particular contexts.