The Art and Science of Negotiation
My goal is to learn everything there is to know about negotiation. Partly because I need to freshen up my lecture material, and partly because it just seems like a good idea. I'll be keeping you updated with blog posts and my latest videos.
One thing that becomes obvious very quickly--and this is sort of a truism of all social science--is that some very few findings are replicated, i.e. tested a second time. Of course by design every paper tackles a very unique question and set of hypotheses, or it wouldn't get published. Oddly enough, people don't publish rigorous testing, only new and exciting things. And especially surprising things--which are even more likely to actually just be wrong.
Sometimes basic fundamentals get repeated,as they become the subject of further tests. For example, we know through a range of studies that the first offer in a negotiation anchors the final agreement. But if you want to know how the various factors that moderate the anchoring effect, or the best way to block it--you are looking at single-study conclusions.
Another thing that becomes obvious very quickly is that a lot of the evidence on negotiation is not explicitly on “negotiation.” To understand negotiation, we can draw on the vast quantity of evidence about broader communication psychology.
For example, a fundamental component of negotiation is the sheer conversational dynamics. If we want to know how behavioral similarities across the table shape a negotiation (e.g. two people displaying similar speech or body language) we can draw on the basic research that examines how similarities emerge in conversation and how they shape the dynamics.
Of course, this body of work suffers similar epistemological limitations as negotiation research.
Lucky for me, I am not restricted to evidence-based practice. Although I am a research professor, I was a practitioner first. Long before I ever set foot in the University of Pennsylvania or knew what a p-value was, I was a mediator out in the world helping people resolve conflict and training other mediators. I will always try to be clear what the evidence says and what is my best guess, but my deep professional background gives me a body of “best practice” even if it’s not “evidence based.”
Ultimately, most of what I will discuss is evidence-inspired educated guess. As I mentioned, most social scientific research is so heavily limited that the exceptions and caveats will comprise a vast swath of real-life experience. What I can do is share with you the evidence as best as I understand it, contextualize it within my own experience, and let you incorporate it into your practice.
My particular interest is group decision-making where people don't perfectly agree. Also known as group decision-making. Also known as multi-lateral negotiation.
This topic is one of the least studied areas of negotiation, despite being one of the most important. Nearly every published experiment on negotiation involves just 2 people ("dyads"), occasionally 3 people, rarely more. I know just one experimental study comparing dyads and groups. And on the basic question of "do groups impasse more," the result is: not statistically significant.
But even with unclear experimental evidence, we can derive some concepts very confidently just by thinking about them. Consider the norm of reciprocity, the idea that we should give back when someone gives to us. Reciprocity heavily shapes information sharing, a major factor in negotiation--I tell you something, you tell me something. But in groups, B can reciprocate to A while C sits and does nothing. I read this idea in a theory paper, and we don't need evidence to know its true.
And so it is that we can learn from research, even when the "scientific" evidence is not entirely clear. That is what this blog and video series contains--the best I can figure from what's out there. As I read through academic articles, trying to learn everything there is to know about negotiation, I'll share my findings with you, and make them as useful as I can.