This award allows the investigator to pursue her research spanning the areas of interpersonal conflict, decision making, groups and social memory. She combines central ideas from cognitive psychology and social cognition into the study of interpersonal conflict to create a new perspective in conflict research. In her work, Dr. Thompson addresses why negotiators often enter disputes assuming: (1) the payoffs to different parties are zero-sum, and (2) that the other party's interests are incompatible with their own. Wrongly assuming that the sum of all the gains plus all the losses is zero, negotiators can end up with sub-optimal outcomes. This award will support Dr.Thompson in carrying out laboratory studies on negotiation behavior, and community-based research to establish the external validity of laboratory research findings and to explore methods for producing more effective conflict resolution in real social groups. Dr. Thompson's work has been and will continue to be very effective in developing theory and insights for the pervasive and important problem of improving interpersonal conflict resolution.
