Twelve studies will test the capacity of various interventions to help parties involved in ongoing conflicts find "common ground" and reach mutually beneficial agreements. Some of these interventions are suggested by the theoretical perspective that the investigators have developed through research on various cognitive and motivation barriers to successful negotiation. Others are suggested by the investigators' real-world experiences in intergroup conflict resolution in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. These studies will focus not only on the participants' success in reaching agreements, but also on the cognitive, motivational, and interpersonal processes that often pose barriers to success in real-world negotiations. One such barrier is the "dissonance" that antagonists can feel about abandoning a struggle for which they have made past sacrifices without achieving their objectives. Another barrier is "reactive devaluation"-a phenomenon first studied by the present investigators, whereby the act of putting a given concession or compromise proposal on the table decreases its attractiveness and perceived significance in the eyes of the party to whom it has been offered.
Conflict resolution has long been a central problem in social psychology, but most experimental work on this topic has involved highly artificial conflicts and negotiation tasks. In contrast, the proposed studies feature a range of negotiation tasks and measures specifically developed and pre-tested by the investigators, in which the participants' roles and motives reflect genuine, strongly felt interests, social-political opinions, and personal identities. For example, one task will require Palestinians and Israelis to try to reach agreement about specific issues or proposals that would benefit both sides, regardless of what specific future political settlement might be reached by their respective governments. Closer to home, students who disagree about they way resources should be allocated to male and female athletic programs will attempt to reach agreement about the best way to distribute extra funds and/or bear the burden of cutbacks. Thus, for these studies to bear fruit, the intervention techniques they employ will have to "matter" even when motivated negotiators deal with issues they care about deeply.
Three types of interventions will be tested. The first type is designed to "defuse" the mechanisms postulated to underlie reactive devaluation-in particular, the tendency for the recipient of a proposal to make negative inferences about the content of the proposal and the reasons why it was offered. The second type will use various techniques (some operating consciously and some non-consciously) to promote positive expectations about negotiation outcomes and/or the trustworthiness of the other side. The third type explores the value of various techniques for providing negotiation participants with research-based "insight" about reactive devaluation and the processes underlying it-in the expectation that such knowledge will make those participants less susceptible to those processes. Many of these interventions have already been tested in pilot studies in the investigators' laboratories. The main goal of the proposed research is to show that they can make a difference in the context of heartfelt, real-world disagreements. In so doing, the investigators also hope to show the more general value of applying research in social psychology and judgment and decision-making to illuminate shortcomings and biases in the way people respond to new information, to prospective risks and opportunities, and to the challenges of life in conflictual social settings.
