Perception, Cognition and Emotion & Mind Map

PERCEPTION, COGNITION, AND EMOTION

            The basic building blocks of all social encounters, including negotiation is: perception, cognition and emotion. These building blocks guide how we perceive and analyze the others, situations and our own positions.

            Understanding perception is important in the negotiation process because it helps us understand why people behave the way they do.

            Perception is the process by which individuals connect to their environment. Perceptual distortion is when a person’s own needs, desires create a predispotion about the other party.

There are four major perceptual errors: Sterotyping, halo effects, selective perception and projection. Sterotyping is when one individual assign characteristics to another based upon the individual’s social or demographic category.

Halo effects are similar to steotrypes. Halo effects occur when people generalize characteristics based on the knowledge of one trait of an individual. Selective perception occurs when the perceiver singles out certain information that supports or reinforces a prior belief and filters out information that does no confirm that belief. Projection occurs when people assign to others the characteristics or feelings that they possess themselves.

Another important issue in perception is framing. A frame is a mechanism through which people evaluate and make sense out of situations, leading them to pursue or avoid actions. The different types of frames are:

§         Substantive-what the conflict is about

§         Outcome- a party’s predispotion to achieving a specific result or outcome

§         Aspiration-a predispotion toward satisfying a set of interest or needs

§         Process-how the parties will go about resolving their dispute.

Framing should be used to focus and shape the world around us, we should use framing

to help things make sense in ways that is significant to us.

            Negotiators sometimes make errors when they process information; these errors are called cognitive biases. The biases include: the irrational escalation of commitment, the mythical belief that issues under negotiation are all fixed pie, the process of anchoring and adjustment in decision making, issue and problem framing, the availability of information, the winner curse, negotiator overconfidence, the law of small numbers, self serving biases, the endowment effect, the tendency to ignore other cognitions and the process of reactive devaluation

            Misperception and cognitive biases typically arise out of conscious awareness as negotiators gather and process information