ABSTRACT
T raditional economic theories, as well as conventional wisdom, suggest that negotiations should be rational transactions guided by the principle of utility maximization (Raiffa, 1982). That is, the economic perspective assumes that negotiators have stable, well-defined preferences, and that they attempt to fulfill these preferences during the course of their negotiations by striving to maximize their gains and minimise their losses. Unfortunately, in reality, negotiations are rarely this straightforward, and negotiations often fail to play out according to the predictions of rational choice models (Neale & Bazerman, 1991). As a result, negotiation researchers have demonstrated a growing interest in a social cognition approach to negotiation, which aims to understand the human psychological influences on negotiation processes and outcomes. Rooted in social psychology, social cognition concerns how individuals make sense of their environment and think about the world around them (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). In the context of negotiation, research on social cognition investigates how negotiators' perceptions and attributions affect their desires and behavior in negotiations and, subsequently, their negotiated agreements. Thus, unlike traditional economic models of negotiator behavior, the social cognition approach to negotiation recognizes that two negotiators, facing the same objective circumstances, may have different goals, express different behaviors, and obtain different benefits, simply because these two negotiators perceive their circumstances differently.
