Teaching Reverse Appraisal to Improve Negotiation Skills

Individual differences in preferences allow for integrative (win-win) solutions in negotiations. However, reaching an integrative solution is difficult as each party's preferences and limits are private and must be inferred. We hypothesized that teaching people to infer a generative model of how individuals appraise outcomes and express them as emotional expressions, i.e., an appraisal model, contributes to improving the capability of mental state inference and thus facilitates integrative solutions. In the present study, we compared participants' performance in a 4-issue negotiation after training participants to infer appraisal model during three 2-issue negotiations with a visualized appraisal process and text feedback with the performance of those without inference learning. The results showed that training participants to infer appraisal model helped them better estimate their counterpart's preferences but did not lead them to negotiate more integrative solutions.