Abstraction promotes win-win agreements in negotiations

Sebastian’s note #2: High-level construal induced by a series of five prompts led to a higher percentage of multi-issue offers and, ultimately, higher joint gain in a negotiation task

The ministers of foreign affairs of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, France, China, the European Union and Iran negotiating in Lausanne for a Comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme (30 March 2015).

Study: Henderson, M.D. and Trope, Y., 2009. The effects of abstraction on integrative agreements: When seeing the forest helps avoid getting tangled in the trees. Social cognition, 27(3), pp.402–417.

Related research

Negotiation research

• Much of the research is concerned with behaviors that promote win-win agreements (high joint gain).
• Pruitt (1981): Negotiatiors who deal with one issue at a time miss out on opportunities to maximize the pie. They behave as if each was the most important issue.
  In contrast, negotiators who deal with multiple issues through packaged trade-offs are more open to conceding on less important issues in exchange for concessions on their most important issues (log-rolling).
• Kelley (1966): Individuals entering a negotiation for the first time overwhelmingly prefer to consider issues one at a time.

Low-level and high-level construal

• People can construe things on a high or a low level.
• Low-level construal (LLC) consists of a larger number of context-dependent, readily observable features of objects and events.
• High-level construal (HLC) goes beyond incidental features and involves a more comprehensive integration of information based on a smaller number of primary, defining features.

Level of construal in negotiatons

• Henderson & Trope hypothesize that experimentally manipulated construal level will influence the process and outcome of a negotiation.
• Parties with an HLC, they predict, will consider the issues in a more global manner and, thus, make more offers that encompass multiple issues at once.
• Furthermore, HLC parties are hypothesized to be more concerned with their primary issues.

Experimental procedure

Participants

• 80 participants: students enrolled in psychology courses
• 40 pairs of negotiators (“dyads”): 23 female-female, 4 male-male, 13 female-male
• Two conditions: 20 dyads in the LLC condition, 20 in the HLC condition (and no dyads with mixed level of construal manipulations)

Incentives

• Participation incentive: $10 or partial fulfillment of course requirements
• Performance incentive: tickets for a $100 cash prize lottery
• Participants were told that the better they performed during the negotiation task, the more lottery tickets they would receive.
• They were also told that a failure to reach an agreement during the negotiation would mean they would receive no tickets.
• This set up what is referred to as mixed motive: participants were incentivized to create value with their partner while claiming their share.

Manipulation

• Before participants negotiated in pairs, their construal was manipulated.
• Participants in the LLC condition were asked to think concretely about the negotiation. Participants in the HLC condition were asked to think abstractly about the negotiation.
• After participants were presented with the negotiation issues, they were , respectively, asked: “What is a more [concrete/abstract] way to think about the issues that need to be negotiated?”
• After providing an initial answer, they were prompted to provide a [more concrete/more abstract] answer. This procedure was repeated five times.
• For example, in the LLC condition, one participant initially used the words “rating of hotel”, and then, when prompted to be more concrete, wrote “number of stars of hotel. In the HLC condition, another participants initially wrote “arguments between coworkers”, and then “conversions about work”.

Negotiation task

• Modified version of a task by Thompson & DeHarpport (1998)
• Participants assumed the role of two interns who are interested in attending a business conference because they were told it would would “look good” on their resume and and don’t want to travel alone.
• There are four issues that two parties need to agree on to make the trip happen: mode of travel, length of stay, type of conference, type of hotel.
• For each issue, there are five options. For example, parties can agree to stay in the hotel for 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 days.
• The two parties are assigned different points for each option.
• The key point is that the task had logrolling potential: High joint outcomes could be achieved if parties exchanged concessions on their respective low- and high-priority issues.
• In particular, one issue that had the highest potential potential for party A had the lowest potential payoff for party B. And for another issue, the situation was reversed.
• The negotiation was conducted via instant messenging.

Measures

• Number of points earned (0 if no agreement was reached).
• Number of single-issue offers (e.g., “I want to fly”) vs. number of multi-issue offers (e.g., “How about 5 days but only if we go to the workers united affiliation”).
• Index of multi-issue offers: # of multi-issue offers / total # of offers
• Self-reported degree of concession behavior
• Self-reported levels of potential confounds: motivation and cognitive effort

Results

Outcome of negotiations

• 13 out of 40 dyads failed to reach an agreement: 6 in the HLC condition, 7 in the LLC.
• Dyads in the HLC earned more points: on average, 345 vs 311.

Negotiation process

• Overeall, participants made more single-issue offers than multi-issue offers.
• On average, dyads in the HLC made a greater propotion of multi-issue offers (40% vs 24%) and a greater number of multi-issue offers (2.5 vs. 1.4). They also reported fewer concessions on high-priority issues.
• Groups did not differ w.r.t. self-reported levels motivation or cognitive effort.

Mediation

• The index of multi-issue offers mediated the effects of abstraction on the outcome of negotiations.
• In other words, analysis indicates that participants induced to have a high-level of construal achieved better joint outcomes by making more multi-issue offers.
• Presumably, a multi-issue format seemd more attractive to them, because they already adoped a mroe global approach toward negotiation.

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