Asymmetric De-biasing in Negotiation

Egocentric notions of fairness lead to conflict escalation, impasse, and efficiency losses. While communication may attenuate this self-serving bias, the authors find that more powerful parties are relatively less inclined to adjust their fairness views following communication in a negotiation. A more even reduction of egocentrism is achieved when parties are exhorted to communicate under deliberative democracy conditions, by justifying their offers in terms of fairness. Two experiments using a three-party distributive negotiation task render support for these claims. However, the exhortation to communicate by justifying offers in terms of fairness also resulted in a higher likelihood of exclusion of less powerful parties. Discussion focuses on implications for our understanding of egocentric biases, power imbalance, and deliberative democracy theory.