Workshop: The Psychology of Negotiation: When, Why and How

Economic conditions are placing unprecedented pressures on universities and funding agencies. For young scholars, this translates into fewer postdoctoral and faculty lines. For highly experienced senior scholars, it emerges as fewer opportunities for new programs of research and collaborations, and this in turn limits the options available to senior scientists for training young scientists. Research and economic analyses predict that the impact of the economic crisis to be more detrimental for females than for males (see, e.g., the 2009 ILO Report on Women and the Economic Crisis). Against this backdrop, reports that recent male PhDs are almost three times more likely than recent female PhDs to initiate financial negotiations assume immense significance (Babcock & Laschever, 2003). Bowles will describe her recent work on gender and Women in Cognitive Science is organizing a series of talks and panel discussions on negotiation. At the Cognitive Science meeting, we will organize a half-day tutorial to address the issue of negotiation. Our keynote speaker is Hannah Riley Bowles talking on: Three things to know about gender and job negotiations. Negotiation takes many forms and yet, over the range of formal and unstructured contexts, men and women have different styles of negotiation. In addition, survey data reveal that men report that they have negotiated for something more recently and that they negotiate more often, and with better outcomes, than do women (e.g., Babcock & Laschever, 2003; Stuhlmacher & Walters, 1999). Further, gender based differences around willingness to negotiate are not restricted to people with lower levels of education. In fact, recent male PhDs are almost three times more likely than recent female PhDs to initiate financial negotiations in their first professional position. Finally, the pattern is as common among twenty year olds as among 40 year olds (Babcock & Laschever, 2003), and gender differences are observed both in face-to-face negotiations and in 'virtual' negotiations through email, telephone, or video (Stuhlmacher, Citera, & Willis, 2007). For both men and women, the tendency to avoid entering into even informal negotiation impacts not only one's salary and employment opportunities, but often one's productivity and visibility more generally. Importantly, a recent longitudinal study showed that the subjective value (feelings, perceptions, and emotions) that incoming employees achieved during their job negotiations significantly predicted job satisfaction, compensation satisfaction and turnover intention as measured one year after the negotiations had taken place (Curhan, Elfenbein, & Kilduff, 2009). Interestingly, this subjective value was …