Schweitzer, M. E., Kruger, K.L., Boothby, E., & Cooney, G*. (2025). Negotiations. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, E. J. Finkel, & W. B. Mendes (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (6th ed). Situational Press. https://doi.org/10.70400/NUZE7621
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
