The Development of Negotiation Skills: Insights from the U.S and India

• In Event: 3-083 - “The Art of the Deal”: Children Balance Competing Concerns in Exchange Contexts

Integrative Statement

Despite the prevalence of negotiation skills in many aspects of human social interactions, little is known about how negotiation skills develop during childhood, and in different sociocultural contexts. Across a series of studies (N=384 total sample size) tested in two cultural contexts, we tested the development of conceptual abilities that support successful negotiation skills. We presented 3-10-year-old children in the U.S and India with two novel tasks to measure children’s early thinking about resource distribution in situations in which two individuals had different preferences for the resources. At what age do children understand that different people have disparate preferences and interests which motivate their desire for different resources? How do children allocate resources in situations in which two people’s preferences conflict, and how do children’s choices in third-party distributions (when they are an impartial actor) differ from their choices when they are directly involved in the negotiation themselves?

First, children participated in a Distribution Task, in which they were asked to distribute two different resources (candies: chocolate and gummy candies) to two targets who expressed different preferences for the candies (including absolute differences in their preferences, and also more subtle relative differences in their respective preferences). In Studies 1 and 2 (N=96 per study), participants distributed resources between two third-party targets. In Studies 3 and 4 (N=96 per study), participants distributed resources between themselves and a target.

When considering other people’s relative preferences in Studies 1 and 2, by age 5, children in both cultures distributed resources according to other individuals’ relative preferences. In contrast, when navigating a situation that involved a conflict between their own interests and the conflicting interests of someone else, children in the U.S. prioritized their own preferences (i.e., gave themselves more of their preferred candy) whereas children in India prioritized the preferences of the other individual.

Next, in a second task completed by participants in all conditions, children participated in an Interests task. Here, we tested the development of children’s understanding that people’s stated positions are often motivated by underlying interests. Children viewed a video of two people who expressed the same position: they both wanted a single, limited resource (an orange). But the underlying interests that motivated their stated position differed—one wanted the inside of the orange to make juice and one wanted the outside of the orange to make cake.

Across both populations, with age, children increasingly proposed the value-maximizing option of giving one person the peel and one person the pulp (rather than the alternative of splitting the orange in half). Notably, children in India chose the value-maximizing option at an earlier age than did children in the U.S. To conclude, an appreciation of other people’s interests in a negotiation framework develops with age and varies with cultural contexts. Understanding the development of the conceptual abilities that support negotiation skills may help inform small-scale interventions that instill in children the tools to become successful negotiators.

Authors

• Radhika Santhanagopalan, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Katherine Kinzler, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Boaz Keysar, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sunita Sah, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author