Methods of Negotiation Research: Introduction

INER 9.3_f2_340-344 3/8/05 7:58 PM Page 341

PETER J. CARNEVALE* Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, Room 577, New York, NY 10003 USA E-mail: [email protected]

CARSTEN K.W. DE DREU** Organizational Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail [email protected]

Main Entry: method Function: noun 1: a way, plan, or procedure for doing something 2: orderly arrangement from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

A close look at the many methodological practices in the study of negotiation reveals a simple fact: there is no one best way, no one best plan, no single orderly arrangement that best produces understanding about negotiation. Indeed, the cornucopia of methods is impressive – as is the strength of the ﬁeld. There are historical case studies, laboratory experiments, survey studies, archival data analysis, mathematical modeling – the diversity of method is

* Peter Carnevale is professor of social and organizational psychology at New York University, moving to NYU in 2001 after many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He is a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management and past Chair of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management. His research program incorporates multiple methods and techniques – laboratory experiments, surveys of professionals, interviews, archival data analysis, multidimensional scaling, etc., to understand the interplay of cognitive, affective, and motivational processes in negotiation and mediation. ** Carsten De Dreu (Ph.D. University of Groningen, 1993) is professor of organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and director of the Kurt Lewin Graduate School for social psychology. Using a variety of methods and settings, he studies motivational, cognitive, and affective processes in conflict and negotiation, and the positive effects conflict may have on creativity and decision making in small groups. His work has been published in such outlets as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, and Journal of Applied Psychology. INER 9.3_f2_340-344 3/8/05 7:58 PM Page 342

342 PETER J. CARNEVALE AND CARSTEN K.W. DE DREU

extraordinary, but perhaps not surprising. After all, negotiation and social conflict span all levels of society, including interactions between nation states, small groups and organizations, people in close relationships, and even chil- dren on a playground. Its study reflects work in fields as diverse as political science, psychology, law, economics, communication, organization behavior, and anthropology. This diversity of method is clearly seen in the pages of International Negotiation, and in the many other journals that publish original research in the field. Yet practitioners and scholars, on occasion, may wonder if a particular research technique is remote and only distantly relevant. Practitioners in particular may not be inclined to appreciate the minutiae of method that often occupy the attention of their academic siblings. In as much as International Negotiation seeks to involve and support all aspects of a diverse audience, a special focus on matters of method is highly appropriate and desirable. This special issue of International Negotiation (as well the next issue, Vol. 10, no. 1) contains original essays on the topic of methods of negotiation research. We present here a focused thematic effort that reviews the state-of- the-art on research method in negotiation. Our goal in putting these special issues together is to provide a series of presentations that span both traditional and innovative methods, common and less than common, all that move the field forward. With these articles, we make the point that there is a wealth of methodological tools that negotiation and conflict researchers have at hand, and each has strengths and weaknesses. Our specific objectives include the fol- lowing: provide an introduction to a variety of methods and their utility; iden- tify issues and controversies with various methods; increase the accessibility of works in one empirical domain to readers in another, and thus broaden the scope of research and theory; improve communication between domains so the collective enterprise is improved; provide stimulus for yet unknown approaches and procedures that further contribute to the validity and vitality of research in this domain; and stimulate the application of a method used in one domain into another domain. Another goal that we have for these special issues is to extract valuable insights about conflict phenomena from data collected with diverse methods in different settings. Since there are synergies among the methods (multi- method approaches are greater in their impact than the sum of the parts), a synthesis is needed. To that effect, at the conclusion, we present a review article that highlights common features of effects in negotiation that have been obtained with diverse methodological tools. For example, many studies show that a forgiving strategy in negotiation can be exploited, and a tough strategy can backfire by producing a competitive response, and this has been obtained in both laboratory studies of university students and in studies of