Conventional wisdom and decades of empirical research in American behavioral sciences have tended to portray negotiations as game like, 1-shot interactions, best practiced by rational, unemotional actors. New research challenges this notion by suggesting that subjective value (i.e., social, perceptual, and emotional outcomes of a negotiation) may matter more than economic outcomes (such as the dollar value of the deal) in terms of predicting results of repeated negotiations over time. The recently developed Subjective Value Inventory (SVI) enables researchers to measure social psychological outcomes of negotiations (such as trust, satisfaction, or self efficacy) with a similar level of precision by which economic outcomes have been studied for decades.
Using the SVI, this program of research investigates when and how subjective value resulting from early negotiations might feed back, positively or negatively, into later negotiations. Methods represent a combination of controlled laboratory experiments and field studies of real-world negotiations involving diverse samples of participants and actual (as opposed to hypothetical) long-term consequences. This research has implications for negotiation theory as well as the development of practical strategies to help negotiators improve their social psychological outcomes.
