Reality Negotiation Research Articles

Simulated thoughts in virtual reality for negotiation training enhance self-efficacy and knowledge

Abstract Negotiating serves as an essential skill in our daily life, however, it is quite challenging to negotiate well. Various negotiation training systems have been developed to solve this problem and improve people’s performance in negotiation. Nevertheless, these systems mainly focus on skills practice and less on negotiation understanding or self-efficacy development. Aiming at improving both people’s negotiation knowledge and self-efficacy, a virtual reality negotiation training system is proposed that exposes users to virtual cognitions during negotiating with virtual characters. The virtual cognitions, delivered as a personalised voice-over, provide users with a stream of thoughts that reflects on the negotiation progress and their performance, and also presents self-motivational statements. To study the effectiveness of the system and the self-motivational statements included in virtual cognitions, an empirical study with 48 participants was conducted. The study employed a between-subjects design with three groups: waitlist, training with self-motivational statements, and training without self-motivational statements. 24 waitlist participants were also randomly assigned to and completed the training following the waiting period. The results indicated that 1) the system significantly enhanced people’s knowledge about negotiation and increased their self-efficacy, 2) the self-motivational statements included in virtual cognitions even further improved self-efficacy. Furthermore, these effects remained after multiple weeks.

Impact sourcing ventures and local communities: a frame alignment perspective

AbstractUsing qualitative methods, this paper explores how impact sourcing (ImS) ventures frame their activities to marginalized communities. In doing so, the paper attempts to unearth the social–psychological processes undergirding ImS strategies. The findings highlight the difficulties faced by ImS ventures in operationalizing their strategic intent. More specifically, the paper provides insights into how different and diverse framings are used by ImS ventures to influence the local community. From a strategic perspective, the paper suggests that framings related to progress, family, material benefit and egalitarianism can help overcome the inevitable tensions and misunderstandings with the community. Drawing on the findings, we develop a process model that describes how competing framings of an ImS venture and the community could eventually align. Theoretically, the paper illuminates the day to day micro‐processes of reality negotiation between socially driven information technology – business process outsourcing businesses and the local communities they seek to impact.

The alignment of competing frames in impact sourcing ventures

In this paper we use qualitative methods to explore how impact sourcing (ImS) ventures frame their activities to marginalized communities. We use the theory of frame alignment to unearth the various social-psychological processes which undergird the venture’s efforts. The results of our study broadly point to the difficulties which ImS ventures face during their initial phases of establishment. More specifically, our study illuminates the day to day micro- processes of reality negotiation between the venture and the community. We found that the ImS venture invoked different ‘frames’ or schemata of interpretation to influence their audience in the community. Frames of impact, family, fairness and partnership were steadfastly deployed during their interactions with the community. Drawing on our empirical data, we develop a process model which describes how competing frames invoked by the ImS venture and the community eventually aligned.

A Positive Life

IN MEMORIAM This special issue of the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy is dedicated to the memory of Rick Snyder. I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to write this dedication to Rick, my graduate school mentor, colleague, and friend. Rick was one of the first pioneers of positive psychology. Although positive psychology did not exist then as a term, early in his career Rick had already realized that sources of strength play an immeasurably important role in defining humans as a species, and aid in effectively dealing with the vicissitudes of life. His earliest foray into positive psychology was to explore the meaning and role of uniqueness in adaptive functioning. Not only did his work uncover important insights into the meaning of uniqueness, his work was unique among psychologists-so much so that it even became the subject of a "Doonesbury" cartoon sequence. Few psychologists can add such a citation to their vitas, but it shows the widespread influence of Rick's work. Later, when positive psychology became more formally recognized as a substantive approach to human functioning, Rick did not jump on the bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon was merely catching up with where he was already heading. His long-standing interest in the psychology of hope melded nicely with the developing concepts of positive psychology. Rick had begun thoroughly exploring the avenues in which hope could inform us about functioning. For example, in his own words, the "Hope Doctor" (as he was known in some parts) was passionate about the refinement of a cognitive theory of hope. I define hope as a thinking process in which the person perceives that s/he can: (1) conceptualize goals; (2) produce the routes to these goals (pathways thinking), and; (3) initiate and sustain movement along those pathways (agency thinking). Topics pursued have been the developmental antecedents of hope, measuring hope in children and adults, how hope operates in psychotherapy, how to increase hope-especially for persons who are low in it, the role of hope in sports, its relationship to health and coping, issues of attachment and hope in children and adolescents, spirituality and meaning in life as related to hope, hope and depression, how hope operates in reality negotiation and the maintenance of the self-concept, hope in work and business settings, and, perhaps most importantly, how hope can be used to help students from grade school through college. …

Negotiating Realities to Understand Others: Teaching About Meaning and Well–Being

Abstract Students often question the authenticity of meaning found by others (though rarely themselves) because they do not understand how people psychologically negotiate their individual realities. “Reality negotiation” is a term that encompasses a variety of flexible cognitive responses for managing self–referential information while searching for, adapting, and maintaining positive beliefs about the self. I discuss various tools, exercises, and goals for instructing about meaning and well–being through the lens of reality negotiation.

Charting New Courses, Generating Positive Momentum: A Handbook For Positive Psychology

Synergies do happen, even intellectual ones. Rare is the intellectual synergy, however, that not only organizes psychological theory and empirical direction, but also has practical implications for promoting people’s well being. Positive psychology represents such a synergy, one comprised of threads of research and theory from social, cognitive, clinical, health, and even biological psychology, among other areas of the discipline, during the last 20 years or so. The story is well known: Since World War II, psychology has been preoccupied with dysfunction, the how and why of disease and disorder. Psychologists identified, studied, and treated mental health issues through a largely etiological lens; the focus was problems, not prospects or prevention. A change in focus, one highlighting who does well in the face of threat or illness, not to mention who is happy and thriving, gradually developed. In retrospect, interest in normative well–being represents a sea change in disciplinary emphasis and attitude—it seems like a long time coming but suddenly the (research) world in psychology looks new again. The Handbook’s editors represent both experience and new perspectives and are familiar to JSCP’s readers. C. R. Snyder is the author and editor of numerous books, chapters, and articles discussing with constructs related to positive psychology, including hope, reality negotiation, forgiveness, and uniqueness. As former editor of JSCP, Snyder is well qualified to edit works on positive psychology; his own research and writing are integrative along the social–clinical interface, exploring Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 5, 2002, pp. 580-582

Living With The Facts, Negotiating The Terms: Unrealistic Beliefs, Denial, and Adjustment In The First Year Of Acquired Physical Disability

This study examined the correlates of unrealistic beliefs about spinal cord injury [SCI), denial tendencies, and defensiveness over the first year following injury onset (JV = 40). Individuals were interviewed at three different times after their return to the community. Specific overly optimistic beliefs about SCI were not associated with any index of adjustment at the first two assessments; however, these beliefs were associated with greater distress and perceived handicap 1 year following return to the community. Greater denial and defensiveness were consistently associated with less distress, hostility, and perceived handicap at each assessment. No self-report variables were associated with the occurrence of preventable secondary complications diagnosed 1 year following discharge from the rehabilitation unit. Results are discussed as they pertain to models of reality negotiation and adjustment to the onset of severe physical disability.

Reality Negotiations: Motivated Strategies Underlying Judgments of Oneself and Other People

In 1983, my colleagues I published a book called Excuses: Masquerades in Search of Grace (Snyder, Higgins, & Stucky, 1983). In subsequent talks about the workings of excuses, I routinely suggested that we humans are strongly motivated to protect our positive images, in support of this contention, I would describe numerous studies. I came to dread the colloquia at psychology departments, however, because it was apparent that my ideas were swimming upstream of those held by many faculty members. Time again, psychologists in the audiences of these talks would heatedly assert that they had reasons for their transgressions, that they did not make excuses, that they were not motivated to protect their positive images. Chagrined at these responses, I turned for advice to my colleague neighbor, Fritz Heider. Wait, said Fritz, and the data eventually will rule out. Based on the trilogy of target articles in this issue, I believe that Fritz was correct. Some 15 years later, evidence appears to be amassing that we humans indeed are ruled by our motivations that the preservation of positive self-images is one such prime motive. As a potential contribution to this topic, I describe the reality negotiation processes that I have been working on since my earlier excuse theory days.

Reality negotiation in non-depressed and depressed persons.

Non-depressed and depressed persons were hypothesized to input and recall self-referential information that was consistent with their self theories. Non-depressed and depressed persons were compared. Non-depressed (14) and depressed (14) students chose between positive or negative audio statements, and then recalled the statements. Non-depressed relative to depressed participants: (i) listened more to the positive than the negative tapes; and (ii) fabricated (i.e. incorrectly recalled) less negative messages. Partial support is given to reality negotiation processes.

Reality Negotiation: Governing One's Self and Being Governed by Others

Self-theories are posited along 2 related cognitive dimensions. First, the valence of an act varies from negative to positive. Second, the linkage to an act reflects the degree (ranging from none to high) to which one is perceived as being the causal agent for that act. Plotting these 2 dimensions, with valence reflecting the ordinate (negative at the bottom to positive at the top) and linkage reflecting the abscissa (no linkage at the left to high linkage at the right), most people have a positive self-theory regression line linking themselves most strongly to positive valence acts. A minority, however, have negative self-theories showing decreasing linkage to positive valence acts. Reality negotiation strategies are psychological mechanisms used to preserve self-theories when confronted with theory-discrepant information. These strategies are detailed, and it is shown how they ultimately foster societal control over the person.

Reality negotiation: Governing one's self and being governed by others.

Reality negotiation: Governing one's self and being governed by others.

Negotiating the Reality of Caregiving: Hope, Burnout and Nursing

Examined the relation of hope to occupational burnout among 81 nurses in chronic-care rehabilitation units. Hypothesizing from Snyder's (1989) model of hope in the reality negotiation process, it was predicted that hope would be significantly predictive of three separate components of burnout. Nurse burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1981). Separate regression equations revealed higher levels of hope to be signficantly associated with lower emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and greater personal accomplishment

Examining the process and dilemmas of reality negotiation.

Reality negotiation is the process people use to examine information from their environment and make judgments about the accuracy and importance of that information. Although this process has been found to be inaccurate, nurses often express discomfort when clients hold perceptions of reality that run counter to their own views. Nurses in these circumstances see the client as denying or as having unrealistic hopes. This article examines reality negotiation in light of this clinical dilemma, focusing on three areas: 1) the assumptions made regarding the nature of reality; 2) the potential and real outcomes of different types of reality negotiation; and 3) the process by which reality is redefined and how unrealistic perceptions are threatened and/or abandoned. These issues are explored as they relate to nursing research and practice.

Negotiating reality after physical loss: Hope, depression, and disability.

The utility of different reality negotiation strategies among 57 persons who had traumatically acquired severe physical disabilities was examined. It was predicted that a sense of goal-directed determination ("agency"; Snyder, 1989) would predict lower depression and psychosocial impairment scores soon after injury. To meet the demands of rehabilitation and social integration, however, it was hypothesized that a sense of ability to find ways to meet goals ("pathways") would predict lower depression and psychosocial impairment among persons who had been disabled for a longer period. The expected interaction was significant in the prediction of psychosocial impairment but not of depression. The sense of pathways was predictive of impairment and depression regardless of the time since injury. Results suggest that in the reality negotiation process the different components of hope as defined by Snyder have salient effects on perceptions of ability to function in social capacities.

The Meaning and Measurement of Explanatory Style: Unresolved issues

of social and clinical psychology: The health perspective (pp. 509522). Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. Peterson, C., & Stunkard, A. J. (1989). Personal control and health promotion. Social Science and Medicine, 28, 819-828. Snyder, C. R. (1989). Reality negotiation: From excuses to hope and beyond. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 130-157. Snyder, C. R., & Higgins, R. L. (1988). Excuses: Their effective role in the negotiation of reality. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 2335. Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193-210.

Explanatory Style as Reality Negotiation With One's Self-Theory, or Vice Versa

Our journals, whether they have clinical, personality, or social psychology as their emphasis, all reference something relevant to the revised theory (see Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). Scholarly books and textbooks in psychology pay similar attention to this perspective. A graduate student, recently returned from the meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, informed me that many of the papers presented there were on explanatory style. Let there be no doubt about it, explanatory style is the rage. In part, this explosion of interest is driven by our American fascination with winners and losers, and how such persons construe their lives. 1 It also reminds me of a prediction made by a former colleague. Speaking about the burgeoning research on attribution theories, Fritz Heider (who is recognized in many circles as the founding father of attributional principles) noted that it would merely be a matter of time before theories emerged for understanding the role of attributions (i.e., explanatory style) as they relate to clinical symptoms and populations; moreover, Heider predicted that one theory would become the most popular. Peterson's article gives us a sense of the progress that has been made in regard to a theoretical heir-apparent to Heider's forecast. Indeed, the helplessness bashing that is encountered in some arenas is evidence that this theoretical approach and its associated measurement have achieved a prominent status. Where does this leave me as I offer my commentary on the Peterson article? Perhaps it would be succinct to say that I have not come to bash explanatory style, but rather to rehash it. In particular, my purpose is to argue that explanatory style gives us information about a person's underlying theory of self, as well as the processes associated with maintaining such personal self-theories. To posit that persons have explanatory styles relating themselves to events in their world implicitly suggests that people have self theories. In this latter vein, the list of writers emphasizing the importance of self theories reads like a Who's Who of psychological thinkers, and includes, among many others, Freud, James, Adler, Cooley, Mead, Lecky, Snygg and Combs, Hilgard, Rogers, Sarbin, Sullivan, Allport, Kelley, Gergen, Epstein, Rosenberg, Stryker, Greenwald, Schlenker, and Markus. Common across these writers are two basic questions: What are the dimensions by which the self is charted? Where do people appraise themselves on these dimensions? My candidates for the two basic dimensions (or schemata) by which people form their self theories are linkage-to-act and valence-of act (Snyder, 1989). Linkage-to-act reflects the degree to which the person believes that he or she is yoked to a particular act or outcome (Snyder, 1989, p. 134). This sense of linkage-to-acts may go from the extremes of none to total perceived linkage for any given outcome, and I argue that one of our major developmental tasks (from the

Reality Negotiation: From Excuses to Hope and Beyond

Following a brief review of the traditional viewpoint regarding the adaptiveness of accurately perceiving reality, the emerging perspective on the usefulness of illusions about the self is presented. In this latter vein, a model of how people negotiate with “reality” so as to maintain their personal theories of being “good and in-control” people is described, and excuse-making and hoping are discussed as examples of such reality negotiation processes. The implications of the reality negotiation processes for society in general and individuals in particular are also explored. Last, theoretical speculations are made in regard to the conditions in which the illusion-based reality negotiation processes change from being adaptive to maladaptive.

Responses to labeling attempts: Deviant drinkers’ pathways of label manipulation

Recognizing the traditional labeling approach's view of the label recipient as a passive participant in the labeling process, this paper argues that the symbolic interactional roots of this approach indicate this to be an inappropriate formulation. Rather, it is suggested that label recipients are active participants in the process and their major goal is the reduction of stigma and limited conforming opportunities inherent in label application. For the deviant drinker, there are two available pathways of label negotiation. With initial labeling attempts, it is hypothesized that label recipients should attempt to negotiate reality through deviance avowal, whereas with increasing numbers of prior labeling attempts, deviance avowal becomes the only viable means of reality negotiation. Because of the medicalization of deviant drinking, deviance avowal becomes a means of reducing label‐based social costs through occupation of the repentant‐deviant role. Given the need to invoke certain aspects of the medicall...

The Politics of Analyzing Social Problems

Issues which become public are selected from among the social problems which parts of the population may perceive. Groups differ in their definitions of social problems in accordance with their self-interests and their ideology. For a social problem to become a public issue, a complex political process develops around the activities of major institutional actors: the media, officialdom, and private interest groups. Yet conflicts arise not only over what is to be a public issue, but also over how the problem is to be diagnosed and responded to. A somewhat different set of institutional and social actors are more intimately involved in the conflict between competing diagnoses of publicly recognized social problems. That is, official authorities, underdog partisans, privileged partisans, policy advisors and planners, and ideologues, all tend toward their own distinct set of attributions. The parties may handle the conflict by confronting each other, directly or indirectly. Alternatively, or in addition, they may attempt tacit bargaining over tangible matters such as economic resources and power, and reality negotiation over the symbolic matter of different problem definitions or diagnoses. Legislation provides a third way of handling the conflict. Whatever the strategies used, the conflict generates significant political outcomes for the policy process and the various parties concerned.