About the causes of irrational negotiation impasses

最近，欧洲联盟和美利坚合众国之间的跨大西洋贸易和投资伙伴关系谈判突然陷入停顿。2016年8月，当德国前联邦经济事务和能源部部长西格马尔·加布里尔被公开问及谈判进展时，他回答说：“我认为，与美国的谈判事实上已经失败了，尽管没有人真正愿意承认这一点。他们举行了14次谈判会议，约27章，但他们未能为一章制定出一份联合文本。谈判最初于2013年7月开始，至今仍未结束。它们是否会重新开放仍不清楚。这只是最近谈判僵局的一个突出例子。其他问题可以在经济(例如，集体工资谈判陷入僵局；例如，《卫报》，2018年)和政府环境(例如，试图与劫持者达成和平协议的尝试失败；例如，维拉莫，2017年)中找到。它们表明，谈判僵局可能对个人、组织甚至整个社会产生严重的负面后果。这一认识引发了两个重要但仍未解答的问题：为什么谈判以僵局告终？哪些因素在防止僵局方面发挥了作用？虽然谈判研究人员已经深入研究了哪些因素最大限度地提高了协议的质量，但对于首先需要做些什么才能确保协议达成的研究要少得多。这项研究提供了对僵局的前因的见解，但导致僵局的过程及其调节因素尚未被很好地理解。因此，当前的研究项目旨在调查这一过程以及触发它的行为以及它在最近的理论描述(Mertes&Hüffmeier，准备中)中所建议的缓和条件。在前两个实验研究中，我的目标是检验两种类型的批判性谈判者行为(分配式谈判行为和不充分的社会行为)对僵局可能性的影响，以及提出的两种影响的中介因素。在随后的两个实验研究中，将研究这些中介的两个潜在的调节因子。通过这样做，本研究有助于从理论上理解僵局的出现是两种可能的谈判结果之一(即僵局VS协议)。它还兑现了承诺，因为调查这一进程的调解人将有望揭示谈判人员可以用来防止僵局及其代价高昂的后果的战略。

Recently, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the European Union and the United States of America have come to an abrupt halt. When former German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Sigmar Gabriel, was publicly asked about the progress in the negotiations in August 2016, he answered: “I believe that the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really willing to admit it. They had 14 negotiation sessions about 27 chapters and they did not manage to create a single joint text for a single chapter.” Negotiations had originally started in July 2013 and have not been concluded to this day. Whether or not they will be reopened remains unclear. This is just one prominent example of a negotiation impasse from the recent past. Others can be found in economic (e.g., stalemates in collective wage bargaining; e.g., The Guardian, 2018) and governmental contexts (e.g., failed attempts to find peaceful agreements with hostage takers; e.g., Villamor, 2017). They illustrate that negotiation impasses can have severe negative consequences for individuals, organizations, and even entire societies.This realization sparks two important, yet still unanswered questions: Why do negotiations end in impasses? And which factors play a role in preventing impasses? While negotiation researchers have thoroughly investigated which factors maximize the quality of agreements, much less research has been conducted on what has to be done to secure an agreement in the first place. This research provided insights into antecedents of impasses, but the process leading to impasses and its moderators are not well understood yet.The current research project thus aims to investigate this process along with behaviors that trigger it and the moderating conditions under which it unfolds as suggested in a recent theoretical account (Mertes & Hüffmeier, in preparation). In the first two experimental studies, I aim to test the effect of two types of critical negotiator behaviors (distributive negotiation behavior and inadequate social behavior) on the likelihood of impasses and two proposed mediators of these effects. In the two subsequent experimental studies, two potential moderators of these mediations will be studied. In doing so, this research contributes to the theoretical understanding of impasse emergence as one of two possible negotiation outcomes (i.e., impasse vs. agreement). It also has applied promise as investigating moderators of this process will hopefully reveal strategies that negotiators can use to prevent impasses and their costly consequences.