Abstract
AbstractLay intuition suggests that some people are better than others at strategic social interaction. Nonetheless, identifying reliable predictors of individual differences in negotiation performance has been difficult. In this investigation, we hypothesized that an individuals' skill in understanding the structure of socially interdependent situations, and in best responding to others' likely behavior in such situations, should predict their negotiation performance. We adapted existing and novel social guessing games to measure such skills. In a series of studies with students and business executives in Russia and Sweden, performance in the guessing games predicted better individual outcomes and better joint outcomes in dyadic negotiations. Guessing‐game performance remained predictive of both outcomes after proxies for general mental ability were controlled for. Potential applications to larger‐scale phenomena are discussed.
Highlights
Influential paradigms in social science (e.g., Mas-Colell et al, 1995) hold that the outcomes of interacting agents are determined by the incentive structures present
Participants' performance in the row contest was related to their total individual negotiation outcomes (r(198) = −.21, p = .004; Table 4)
Two hundred and one university students enrolled in programs in English or Swedish located in Stockholm, Sweden (M = 24.55 years, SD = 4.61; 97 women, 104 men, divided into samples of between 18 and 40 members) took part in a guessing game and a negotiation, as well as answered an instrument of perspective-taking, as part of their education
Summary
Influential paradigms in social science (e.g., Mas-Colell et al, 1995) hold that the outcomes of interacting agents are determined by the incentive structures present. We propose that individuals' skill differences may affect their outcomes in such social interactions. Prior work in behavioral game theory has used cognitive hierarchies or steps of thinking to differentiate among individual actors (Camerer et al, 2004; Nagel, 1995; Stahl & Wilson, 1995). In contrast to this conceptualization (by Nagel and by Stahl and Wilson) of types of individuals who undertake a particular number of steps of thinking, we drew on research in social decision making and negotiation that examined people's difficulties in situations involving social interdependence (Hedberg, 2012). We speculate briefly on possible implications of our findings for handling social interdependence in market or organizational settings
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