Monday, September 21, 2009

PERCEPTION ,COGNITION,AND EMOTION



PERCEPTION, COGNITION, AND EMOTION
Perception, cognition and emotion are the building blocks of all social encounters, including negotiation, in the sense that our social actions are guided by how we perceive and analyze the other party, the situation, and our interests and positions. A working knowledge of how humans perceive and process information is important to understand why people behave the way they do during negotiations.
Perception can be defined as the process by which individuals connect to their environment. The process of ascribing meaning to messages and events is strongly influenced by the perceiver’s current state of mind, role, and comprehension of earlier communications.1 Other parties’ perceptions, the environment, and the perceiver’s disposition are also important influence on one’s ability to interpret with accuracy what the other party is saying and meaning.
PERCEPTION DISTORTION
In any given negotiation, the perceiver’s own needs, desire, motivations, and personal experiences may create a predisposition about the other party. This is cause for concern when it leads to biases and errors in perception and subsequent communication. However, there are four types of perception errors;
Stereotyping
Hallo effects
Selective perception
And, projection.
FRAMING
A key issue in perception and negotiation is framing. A frame is the subjective mechanism through which people evaluate and make sense out of situation, leading them to pursue or avoid subsequent actions.2 Frames are important in negotiation because “people can encounter the same dispute and perceive it in very different ways as a result of their background, professional training or past experiences”3.Aframe is a way of labelling these different individual interpretations of the situation.
Types of frames;
Substantive
Outcome
Aspiration
Process
Identity
Characterization
Loss—gain—low
COGNITIVE BIASES IN NEGOTIATION
A cognitive bias in negotiation is the systematic information processing errors that negotiators make and that may compromise negotiation performance. Thus, rather than being perfect processers of information, it is clear that negotiators have the tendency to make systematic errors when they process information.4 These errors that tend to impede negotiation performance include:
1. Irrational escalation of commitment
2. Mythical fixed-pie beliefs
3. Anchoring and adjustment
4. Isssue framing and risk
5. Availability of information
6. The winner’s curse
7. Overconfidence
8. The laws of small numbers
9. Self-serving biases
10. Endowment effect
11. Ignoring other’s cognitions
12. Reactive devaluation
MANAGING MISPERCEPTIONS AND COGNITIVE BIASES IN NEGOTIATION
Misrepresentations and cognitive biases typically arise out of conscious awareness as negotiators gather and process information. The question of how best to manage perception and cognitive bias is a difficult one. However, the following solutions to these systematic distortions can be observed:
Awareness of the occurrences
Problem definition and problem evaluation
Careful discussion of the issue and preferences of both negotiators
Negotiators awareness of the negative aspects of these distortions
Discuss these problems in structured manner within team and with their counterparts.
Endnotes
1. Babcock, Wang, and Lowenstein, 1996;de Deru and van Lange, 1995; and Thompson, 1995;Thompson and Hastie, 1990a.
2. Bateson, 1972; Goffman, 1974.
3. Roth and Sheppard, 1995, p. 94.
4. Bazerman, 1998; Neale and Bazerman, 1992b.

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