Further Directions: Toward a Cognitive-Oriented Post-Graduate School of Negotiation and Mediation

Abstract

International negotiation may typically advance in tandem with the actual or threatened use of power, whether military, economic, or of other sorts. The respective powers of the actors and the resulting rapports de force (balance of power) may condition the process and the results for those involved in the negotiation process and consequentially for international actors behind them (with whom they work in tandem). Because the actual or threatened use of force may also provoke conflict spirals and escalation, a psychological perspective of this kind of strategic thinking is highly useful. As Harold Nicolson stated in his famous book, Diplomacy (1963): "Because the psychological vigilance is a vital factor of the negotiation process, if a diplomat becomes so presumptuous to lose interests for the psychology of the counterpart he goes in hibernation and, in the field of the negotiation, he becomes useless." Rubin (1991-2002), instead, paid a tribute to a multidisciplinary perspective: "The challenge is to find ways to coordinate psychological expertise with the expertise afforded through other disciplinary perspectives and to renew the role of psychology." The theory of games was developed in order to provide a logically consistent framework for analysing interdependent decision-making processes. It shows through logic-mathematical experiments that cooperation is the best rational and most efficient strategy if both parties at the negotiating table jointly take into account the utility of cooperation (see also Avenhaus, 2002; Axelrod, 1984). It would be a safer and far more rational world if we could apply with diligence the strategies detected by game theory! Unfortunately, in reality the cooperative solution is not automatically adopted by parties. It is rather a long process in which situational/contextual, as well as cognitive, emotional-motivational, and relational factors come into play. A number of studies have brought to the attention of scholars the evidence of the role played by peo-ple's plans, goals, understandings, and expectations in determining their reactions to the situations in which they find themselves. As we have seen, cognitive scientists, cognitive and behavioural psychologists and psychotherapists, sociologists, and political scientists have been studying and producing results on the influence of particular human cognitive 115