The Effects of Framing on Group Negotiation

Abstract

Several studies have shown that people pay greater attention to and are stronger influenced in their judgments and decisions by negative information than by positive information (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Cacioppo, Gardner & Bernston, 1997; Ito et al., 1998; Ito & Cacioppo, 2005). Other studies have shown that the human cognitive system is more sensitive to negative information (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Ito & Cacioppo, 2005) and especially to information signaling danger than to information signaling problems or opportunities (Miclea & Curseu, 2003). Since groups can be conceptualized as socio-cognitive systems, which can develop, store and use cognitive representations (Curseu, 2003) such framing affects groups too. In the present paper we explore the way in which groups represent the information framed as danger and the way in which this collective cognitive representations affect group performance during negotiations. One hundred and two participants were distributed into 34 threeperson groups and were involved in a negotiation game developed by Lewicki, Saunders and Minton (1999). The groups were organized in 17 pairs and every pair played the negotiation game in two rounds. The game rules and the available resources were the same for both groups, but one of the groups in each pair received the game information framed as danger, while the other group in the pair received a neutral framing. The former groups developed and used during negotiations a more defensive strategy, adopted more often a collaborative approach and had a significantly lower performance as compared with the groups in the non-framing condition. Thus, even if the decision space was similar, the group decision-making during negotiations differed according to the cognitive representation the group has formed.