The Costs and Benefits of Negotiated Agreements in Social Conflicts

Psychological research on negotiation is shaped by the fundamental belief that social interaction between negotiators is unconditionally beneficial to negotiation outcomes. Over a series of four experiments, we provide the first empirical test of this belief. Drawing on an experimental paradigm established in group performance research, we compare interactive negotiations with non-interactive, nominal negotiation methods, allowing us to identify process gains or losses in different negotiation settings. Our first three experiments show considerable benefits of social interaction in both distributive (Experiments 1 and 2) and integrative (Experiment 3) negotiations, independent of motivational and coordinative challenges. However, our fourth experiment demonstrates that process gains in negotiations are not unconditional. After adding explicit transaction costs to a distributive price negotation, interactive negotiators could no longer surpass their nominal counterparts in terms of negotiation outcomes. On the contrary, by embedding the negotiation in a series of different tasks, we were able to show that longer negotiation durations for interactive negotiators led to a significantly worse overall task performance compared to nominal negotiators