Janice Nadler

Negotiating via Information Technology: Theory and Application

In this review article, we examine how people negotiate via e-mail and in particular, how the process and outcomes of e-negotiations differ from those of traditional face-to-face bargaining. We review the key tasks of negotiation and then undertake a review of the research literature that has examined e-negotiations. We outline four theories of interaction that provide insights about social behavior in e-media: rapport building, social contagion, coordination, and information exchange. Our research program has focused on the interpersonal factors and social identity factors that can enhance the quality of e-negotiations. E-negotiators often succumb to the temporal synchrony bias, the burned bridge bias, the squeaky wheel bias, and the sinister attribution bias. We discuss social psychological factors that can reduce these biases and the future of research on e-negotiations.

Order Effects in Individual and Group Policy Allocations

Although citizen panels have become quite popular for policy making, there is very little research on how the procedures these groups employ to manage consensus affect their decision making. We measured the effect of a simple procedural mechanism, agenda order, on individual and group allocations for an HIV policy. Allocations made in a large-small (state-region-city) order were substantially smaller, overall, than were allocations made in small-large (city-region-state) order, and group allocations were smaller, overall, than were individual judgments. The Social Judgment Scheme model (Davis, 1996) provided a good fit of the group allocation, and suggested a mechanism for this overall downward shift in judgment. Normative (i.e. calibration) analyses, as well as subjective impressions (e.g. confidence, repeat judgments) favored relatively smaller allocations so that judgments made in large-small order, and judgments made in groups were arguably more defensible than were individual or small-large judgments. We discuss these strong agenda influences and their implications both for citizen panels and for theoretical research on group consensus.

Distributing Adventitious Resources: The Effects of Relationship and Grouping

This study examines the effect of two variables—relationship and grouping—on the distribution of resources which are unearned, or “adventitious.” Strangers and acquaintances made decisions about the distribution of an adventitious resource either as individual decision makers or as members of a small group. Results indicate that acquaintances were more likely to share the resource than were strangers, and that group members were more likely to share than were individual allocators. Equality received the highest overall rating as a norm for distributing the adventitious resource. At the same time, subjects expected allocators to keep the resource instead of applying an equality distribution norm.

Chapter 3 Law, Psychology, and Morality

Abstract In a democratic society, law is an important means to express, manipulate, and enforce moral codes. Demonstrating empirically that law can achieve moral goals is difficult. Nevertheless, public interest groups spend considerable energy and resources to change the law with the goal of changing not only morally laden behaviors, but also morally laden cognitions and emotions. Additionally, even when there is little reason to believe that a change in law will lead to changes in behavior or attitudes, groups see the law as a form of moral capital that they wish to own, to make a statement about society. Examples include gay sodomy laws, abortion laws, and prohibition. In this chapter, we explore the possible mechanisms by which law can influence attitudes and behavior. To this end, we consider informational and group influence of law on attitudes, as well as the effects of salience, coordination, and social meaning on behavior, and the behavioral backlash that can result from a mismatch between law and community attitudes. Finally, we describe two lines of psychological research — symbolic politics and group identity—that can help explain how people use the law, or the legal system, to effect expressive goals.

The Path of Motivated Blame and the Complexities of Intent

Much headway has been made in recent years on topics in moral psychology, including: the foundations of virtuous and evil behavior, the source of moral rules and standards, the mechanisms by which conscience operates, the nature of psychopathology, the extent to which and circumstances under which moral judgments are intuitive as opposed to a product of careful reasoning, and the nature of strong moral convictions and moral disagreement.One topic that has been recently receiving more systematic attention is the psychology of blame. In their recent paper, Malle, Gugliemo & Monroe (2014) provide a comprehensive model of blame and a wide ranging discussion of evidence supporting the model. The model provides a powerful account of moral judgment of blame, but it also has some limitations and areas where clarification is needed. First, the model goes too far in its effort to minimize or even banish the role of motivation in blame judgments. It would be surprising indeed if blame was immune from being part of the wide ranging domain of motivated cognition. Second, even relatively simple instances of blame often necessitate breaking down an event into several acts and outcomes, and identifying different mental states with respect to those events and outcomes that occur within the mind of a single actor. This more fine grained analysis is necessary to illustrate how the Path Model of Blame operates according to its own terms, and also to reveal how the model needs to be extended and enriched to account for many everyday morally-charged acts.

Consent, Dignity, and the Failure of Scattershot Policing

Law enforcement officers often work under conditions that afford them a great deal of individual discretion about how to exercise their power to police. In this chapter, I explore how Fourth Amendment doctrine, as formulated by the US Supreme Court, and as interpreted and applied by lower courts, influences law enforcement policy and individual officers’ exercise of this discretion. It does so not only by articulating specific rules for conduct, but by expressing opinions and values about the power relationships between law enforcement officers and those they police. I argue that the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has encouraged the aggressive targeting of large numbers of people for stops and searches, the vast majority of whom are innocent of any crime. Many of these searches are premised on the highly questionable notion that the individuals targeted have freely consented to a search of their persons, vehicles, or belongings. The result is a set of law enforcement practices that maximize unpleasant and frightening encounters between civilians and police; the vast majority of these encounters uncover no crime, yet collectively they are gradually cultivating a popular attitude of fear and resentment, rather than a willingness to cooperate with legal authorities. In order to repair what is now an atmosphere of bitterness and distrust toward the police in some communities, law enforcement agencies and officers should follow the lead of the handful of state supreme courts which have limited the ability to conduct consent searches on a scattershot and arbitrary basis. I conclude that rather than leveraging their broad discretion into a fishing expedition for criminal activity based on little or no reasonable suspicion, law enforcement agencies should leverage the cooperation of ordinary people who share their aim to reduce crime and build safer communities.