Gus Cooney

Maurice Schweitzer, Kori L. Krueger, Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, “Negotiation”. In The Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by D.T. Gilbert,  S. T. Fiske, E. J. Finkel, and W. b Mendes (Eds.), (Situational Press, 2025)

Abstract: Many of our most consequential outcomes derive from negotiations—from the price we pay for homes and cars, to the salaries we earn, to quotidian outcomes such as which household chores we perform, where we go on vacation, and what vegetables our children eat. Though the negotiation process and the nature of negotiated outcomes vary profoundly across contexts, several fundamental features apply to every negotiation.  Negotiation is a communication process between two or more parties with conflicting and convergent interests, including at least one party who is seeking to reach an agreement (Carnevale & Pruitt, 1992; Fisher et al., 2011; Kang et al., 2020; Neale & Bazerman, 1992; see Boothby et al., 2023; Bazerman, et al., 2000; Thompson et al., 2010 for reviews). This chapter provides an overview of negotiation scholarship and focuses on both the stable features of negotiations across contexts and the primary sources of variability. Every negotiation is characterized by distinctive phases. This review includes the key phases of a negotiation: Setting the stage, communicating, closing, and post-negotiation behavior. Each section highlights key inputs and outcomes of the aforementioned phases and discusses how these phases build upon one another. It is important to note that although humans have negotiated for millennia, empirical academic investigations of negotiation began in the 1960s. Extant negotiation scholarship is reviewed, and promising areas for future study are identified—such as opportunities to study negotiations in the field and with artificial intelligence. In this review, negotiations are conceptualized as a social interaction. Despite regularities and common features of negotiations, social interactions represent a highly complex and unpredictable human activity. As a result, negotiations reflect this complexity; specifically, both the negotiation process and negotiated outcomes are shaped by different personalities, cultures, idiosyncrasies of verbal and nonverbal expressions, the influence of emotion and trust, the unfolding dynamics of conversation, and the influence of situational factors. This review highlights historic and current psychology and management scholarship that addresses key features of this social interaction. Much of this work documents how variability in features such as emotion can alter the negotiation process and negotiated outcomes. Reviewing this work offers a broad understanding of negotiation scholarship and highlights opportunities for future scholarship to increase our theoretical understanding of negotiations and the prospect of negotiating more successfully...

Maurice Schweitzer, Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney (2023), Embracing Complexity: A Review of Negotiation Research, Annual Review of Psychology, 74: 12.1-12.34 ().

Abstract: We negotiate daily with employers, coworkers, merchants, friends, romantic partners, children, and more. The outcomes of these negotiations affect the prices we pay, the salaries we earn, where our next vacation will be, and whether our children will finish their vegetables. In a review of the literature, we identify emerging trends in negotiation scholarship that embrace complexity, such as research that finds moderators of effects that were initially described as monolithic, examines the nuances of social interaction, and approaches negotiation as it occurs in the real world. All told the negotiation literature has produced many important and practical insights, and the existing research highlights negotiation as an exciting context for examining human behavior, characterized by features such as strong emotions, an intriguing blend of cooperation and competition, the presence of fundamental issues such as power and group identity, and outcomes that deeply affect the trajectory of people’s personal and professional lives. Finally, of particular interest is the potential crosstalk between negotiation research and emerging research on conversation, which is something that I am actively pursuing.