PERSUASION IN THE CONTEXT OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION

In recent years, persuasion theory has been increasingly incorporated into research on the processes underlying negotiation and conflict resolution. In this section, we discuss these advances in light of our heuristic-systematic perspec­tive and address other areas of persuasion research that have implications for conflict situations.

Heuristic and Systematic Processing in Negotiation Settings

Recent research exploring heuristic and systematic processing in negotiation simulations has confirmed the utility of the dual-process perspective for under­standing information processing in conflict settings. When negotiators have modest levels of motivation (or low cognitive capacity), they often rely on heuristics such as fixed pie assumptions (the perception that a negotiation is a zero-sum game), initial anchor values (for example, first offers, or information about the value of agreements typically reached), and stereotypes about an opponent’s group membership. (See De Dreu, 2004, for a review.) In contrast, when motivation and capacity are relatively high, reliance on these heuristics tends to decrease as systematic processing increases.

Researchers have identified several factors that influence the extent to which people process information in negotiations. (See De Dreu, 2004.) These factors include both stable individual differences and temporary elements of a given situation that influence motivation and/or capacity. For instance, individuals high in the dispositional need for cognitive closure—that is, the desire to reach a judgment quickly and avoid ambiguity (Webster and Kruglanski, 1994)—are more likely to rely solely on heuristics than are those who have a low need for closure.

Temporary, situation-specific factors such as the presence of a highly involv­ing task or process accountability (the need to justify the way in which a decision is made) tend to increase the extent of systematic processing, whereas time pressure and aversive conditions (noise, for instance) tend to decrease such processing.

Multiple Motives in Conflict Resolution

Historically, the study of conflict has emphasized the importance of underlying motives in driving behavior. A negotiator may be motivated to further her own party’s interests, to cooperatively explore integrative potential in an effort to expand the pie, to defend her own beliefs and those of her group, and/or to convey a favor­able image of herself to her opponent, any third parties, and her constituency. Although the classic definition of the negotiation as a “mixed-motive” situation focuses mainly on negotiators’ conflicting motives of cooperation and competition, conflict settings can be characterized by a wide range of motivations held by a wide range of participants. In the following discussion, we examine the cooperation­competition distinction common in the negotiation field, and then return to our three broad motives of accuracy, defense, and impression, now in the context of conflict resolution.

Social Motivation. The theory of cooperation and competition (Deutsch, 1973) and dual-concern theory (Pruitt and Rubin, 1986) suggest that social motives are critical to understanding negotiator behavior. A basic distinction between two broad social motives—motivation to maximize one’s own outcomes (a competitive, egoistic motivation) and motivation to maximize joint outcomes (a cooperative, prosocial motivation)—is frequently utilized in conflict research and has been shown to influence information processing in these settings. (See De Dreu and Carnevale, 2003.)

Social motivation may arise from individual differences (such as social value orientation: the tendency to prefer a certain distribution of outcomes between oneself and another person, see Kuhlman and Marshello, 1975) or from elements of the situation. Situational elements shown to increase prosocial moti­vation include instructions from trusted authorities to be cooperative (versus competitive), reinforcement for cooperative (versus competitive) behavior, expecting a future interaction with the other party, viewing a task as a cooper­ative (rather than competitive) enterprise, and focusing on similar (versus differing) group memberships. (See De Dreu, 2004, for a review.) For example, Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) found that simply changing the title of a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game from “The Wall Street Game” to “The Community Game” drastically increased cooperative behavior among Stanford undergradu­ates, presumably by increasing participants’ motivation to cooperate with their partner during the task. Negotiators and mediators can use such techniques to increase prosocial motivation in conflict settings. Changing the terminology associated with a negotiation (for example, calling it “joint problem solving”), emphasizing the ongoing relationship between parties, and highlighting shared group membership could all help to increase cooperative behavior.

Like defense and impression motivation, social motivations can lead to selec­tive processing geared toward fulfilling competitive or cooperative goals.

Although competitive and cooperative motives are clearly basic elements of conflict situations, we may gain a finer-grained understanding of persuasion in these contexts by linking social motives with the tripartite analysis of moti­vation discussed earlier. Competitive, or egoistic, motivation is often compara­ble to defense motivation: both involve concern with protecting the self or the in-group against threats to actual resources or to self- or group esteem. Consis­tent with this idea, cross-cultural research has shown that members of individ­ualist cultures (typically assumed to be more egoistic) often view themselves as more fair than other people, whereas members of collectivist cultures (typically assumed to be more prosocial) are less likely to exhibit this self­serving bias (Gelfand and others, 2002). Egoistic motivation may therefore involve a desire to defend oneself and one’s group.

In contrast, prosocial motivation may often be associated with accuracy and/or impression motivations. Concern with both parties’ outcomes should give rise to accuracy motivation, because open-minded processing of all avail­able information provides the best route to discovering integrative potential and maximizing joint outcomes. Prosocial motivation may also be associated with impression motivation: the desire to cooperate and the desire to make a good impression seem reciprocally linked.

Thus, whereas egoistic motivation and defense motivation seem closely inter­twined, prosocial motivation may be linked to accuracy and/or impression moti­vation. We turn now to consider how these three broad motives operate in conflict settings.

Accuracy Motivation. Accuracy motivation in conflict situations may be induced by a number of factors, including prosocial motivation as discussed above. Cer­tain kinds of accountability can also give rise to accuracy motivation (see Lerner and Tetlock, 1999). When an individual expects to discuss an issue with, justify a decision to, or be evaluated by an unknown audience, he or she tends to engage in preemptive self-criticism, displaying motivation to arrive at an accu­rate conclusion (see for example Tetlock, Skitka, and Boettger, 1989). Thus, when a negotiator is accountable to an audience whose views are unknown, he is likely to process information in an open-minded fashion. To test this idea in a negoti­ation context, De Dreu, Koole, and Steinel (2000) randomly assigned business student participants to high-accountability and low-accountability conditions before asking them to engage in a mock negotiation over the purchase of a car. In the high-accountability condition, participants expected that their negotiation strategies and decisions would be reviewed and evaluated several days later by an experienced negotiator and a psychologist. In the low-accountability condi­tion, participants did not receive this information. The results showed that under high accountability, participants were more likely to revise their fixed-pie assumptions and obtain higher joint outcomes. Increasing accuracy motivation therefore increases the likelihood that integrative solutions will be identified and utilized when they exist.

Defense Motivation. Unfortunately, we suspect that accuracy motivation is unlikely to naturally dominate in conflict situations, especially in the early stages of a negotiation. Parties often assume that their interests are diametri­cally opposed, at least in Western cultures (see Morris and Gelfand, 2004), and therefore any gain by an opposing party seems to mean a loss for one’s own. Group or individual identities can also be perceived as zero-sum, in that the validation of one party’s identity and history delegitimizes that of the other (Kelman, 1999). A wife involved in a divorce might assume not only that her husband values the antique dresser as much as she does, but also that any acknowledgment of the validity of his position will undermine the legitimacy of her own. Such perceptions motivate people to defend their resources and identities and result in selective processing of information to bolster their positions.

Egoistic, competitive motives may also be triggered by aspects of the situation that cue competition in a given culture. For example, Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, and Ross (2004) found that exposing participants to objects associated with the business world (such as briefcases and business suits) increased their selfish, competitive behavior in an ultimatum game (a task in which participants proposed a take-it-or-leave-it split of money between themselves and an unknown partner). Simply seeing objects typically associated with competition can therefore lead to competitive behavior and may trigger defense-motivated, selective information processing. Removing such objects from a negotiation context or using a setting associated with cooperation may help limit defense motivation and encourage cooperation between parties.

Accountability to a mediator, arbitrator, or one’s constituents can also activate defense motivation when a negotiator is committed to a certain position. Research shows that although accountability to an unknown audience can increase accu­racy motivation, as discussed above, accountability instead results in “defensive bolstering” of an initial viewpoint when a person is highly committed to this posi­tion (Tetlock, Skitka, and Boettger, 1989). Because opposing parties often enter negotiations highly committed to their opinions, accountability to others may tend to activate defense, rather than accuracy, motivation.

Persuasion research indicates that if systematic processing is activated by defense motivation, parties seek out and attend to information that supports the desire to dismiss, resist, and reject an opponent’s overtures, and they resist attending to information that supports the appropriateness of cooperative responses. When defense motivation is primary, one’s goal in processing is to resist influence, to maintain prior beliefs and commitments, and to look for confirmation of those beliefs in the messages that are processed. This sort of motivated processing leads parties to overestimate the divergence between their positions and can exacerbate conflict (Keltner and Robinson, 1993).

Impression Motivation. In addition to defense motives, impression motives may also operate in the early stages of negotiation, since parties are eager to create a spe­cific impression for various audiences. The actual or imagined presence of others determines the audience toward whom an impression motive is geared. For exam­ple, a negotiator may focus on conveying an impression of toughness when face- to-face with an opponent, but might instead play the role of a victim when communicating with a third party to gain sympathy. If both parties are in the room at once, the target of the impression goal may vary depending on the relative salience of the two parties from moment to moment. When the negotiator’s atten­tion is drawn toward one party as opposed to the other, the salient party may become the focus of impression management attempts.

A number of factors may influence impression motivation in negotiation situations. When an individual is accountable to a known audience and has low commitment to a position, impression motivation is triggered and the individ­ual processes information so as to align his own position with that of the target audience (Lerner and Tetlock, 1999). If, for example, a mediator is accountable to his superiors and knows that they believe Party A aggressed against Party B, he may process information to selectively support his superiors’ position and therefore come to believe in Party A’s culpability himself.

One’s role as an advisor may also affect impression motivation. Jonas, Schulz-Hardt, and Frey (2005) found that participants playing the role of an advisor who made a nonbinding recommendation to a client were more even­handed in their information processing than were the clients. However, when advisors were asked to make a binding decision on behalf of their client, impres­sion motivation was triggered, and information processing was selectively geared toward being able to justify their recommendation to their client. These results suggest that when a representative is negotiating on behalf of a client, asking for a nonbinding recommendation will maximize accuracy motivation, whereas allowing the representative to make a binding decision on behalf of the client can lead to biased processing and suboptimal decisions.

Impression motivation may have both positive and negative effects on infor­mation processing in conflict situations. On the one hand, when negotiators wish to project an image of themselves as cooperative, they may be motivated to process information open-mindedly and seek to maximize fairness and joint outcomes. For example, Ohbuchi and Fukushima (1997) found that individuals higher in general impression-management concerns were more cooperative in their responses to an unreasonable request, when capacity and motivation were sufficient. In such instances, impression motivation and cooperative tendencies may be closely associated. On the other hand, when the desired image is more competitive, impression motivation may lead to selective processing toward justifying one’s competitive behavior. If a negotiator wants to appear tough, she may selectively attend to and remember information that allows her to successfully convey and justify a tough image. An impression-motivated nego­tiator seeking to project a cooperative image should be especially likely to discover integrative potential in a conflict situation; an impression-motivated negotiator who instead wants to project a competitive image may be especially unlikely to question fixed-pie assumptions.

Implications. Parties in conflict often perceive their positions to be opposing and irreconcilable. Initially, negotiators may therefore attempt to coerce the opposition into accepting an outcome that fails to achieve the latter’s own stated position. However, successful conflict resolution requires that opposing parties turn away from their public positions to find compatible issues within their

underlying interests (Neale and Bazerman, 1991; Rouhana and Kelman, 1994). The discussion of underlying needs and interests makes it increasingly possible to persuade one another both that these needs are legitimate and that sacrificing some things of lesser interest may allow each side to gain what is more impor­tant to them. It is only through this sort of persuasion—rather than coercion— that successful and lasting resolution can be achieved. This can occur, however, only if opponents are both willing and able not only to transmit but also to receive information. In other words, negotiators must be willing and able to per­suade and to be persuaded. Moreover, they must want to search for informa­tion that disconfirms, as well as information that confirms, their prior beliefs about their opponents’ interests. If parties in negotiation begin to change one another’s minds about the nature of the conflict, the issues at stake, and the compatibility of underlying interests, then cooperation can ensue.

From a persuasion perspective, then, the key to successful conflict resolution is to move parties toward open-minded, accuracy-motivated processing. Partic­ipants should seek to increase the accuracy motivation of all parties, including themselves, and to dampen defense and impression motives that inhibit cogni­tive flexibility and willingness to consider information that disconfirms prior beliefs.

In the final sections of this chapter, we discuss other factors that may influ­ence the extent of accuracy-driven processing in conflict situations. Awareness of these factors should help negotiation participants craft situations that encour­age open-minded processing and identify potential sources of bias in their own and others’ reasoning.

Self-Affirmation

Affirming an important aspect of self-image can reduce defense-motivated processing in response to self-relevant threats in other domains. According to self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988), individuals are motivated to maintain a pos­itive image of themselves and respond to threatening information defensively in order to maintain this positive self-concept. However, if the self is positively affirmed in some way, this can buffer the self-concept against a subsequent threat and reduce defensive processing.

To test this idea, Sherman, Nelson, and Steele (2000) asked undergraduates who did or did not drink coffee to read an (actually fictitious) article about the serious health risks posed by caffeine consumption. Beforehand, some partici­pants rated their agreement with ten statements, half of which were associated with a personal value that they had previously ranked as highly important. This manipulation therefore affirmed a central value for each participant. The experimenters then measured participants’ acceptance of the message relating caffeine and health risks. In the absence of self-affirmation, coffee drinkers (for whom the message was personally threatening) showed less acceptance of the article’s conclusions, compared to noncoffee drinkers. Self-affirmation reversed this effect: coffee drinkers were even more accepting of the message than non­coffee drinkers, suggesting that affirmation decreased defensive processing and allowed accuracy motivation to dominate. After self-affirmation, coffee drinkers were motivated to systematically process the self-relevant information in an open-minded way.

Further research has confirmed that self-affirmation increases openness to belief-disconfirming information, buffering against the threat of messages that counter self-relevant attitudes. When such messages no longer feel threatening, self-relevance motivates systematic and accuracy-driven processing. (See, for example, Correll, Spencer, and Zanna, 2004.) Self-affirmation has also been shown to effectively de-bias processing when identity concerns are high and can increase concession-making and positive attitudes toward one’s partner in a negotiation situation (Cohen and others, 2005). The most salient identities in conflict situations tend to be those most likely to interfere with open-minded processing of information related to the conflict: an individual is most likely to think of his identity as a Democrat when debating with a Republican, as a manager when negotiating with labor, and as a father when arguing with his son. Research on self-affirmation suggests that affirming the self-concepts of those involved in conflict resolution can reduce motivation to defend salient identities and increase accuracy-motivated processing.¹

Social Identity

Because social identities tend to be highly activated in conflict situations, it is important to understand the role that group identification plays in persuasion. Group identification, or the subjective perception that one belongs to a group, defines a particular group as an in-group, opposing groups as out-groups, and irrelevant groups as neutral groups. For example, during the Balkan civil wars, a Bosnian Serb would probably have considered other Bosnian Serbs part of their in-group, Bosnian Muslims part of an opposing out-group, and Italians a neutral group.

Despite the intuitive importance of understanding how group categorizations affect persuasion, there is relatively little research on the topic. Early theories of social influence suggested that an in-group can exert considerable impact on the attitudes and behaviors of its members, either through normative pressure resulting in public compliance or through providing information about reality, result­ing in more private, long-term acceptance (for example, Deutsch and Gerard, 1955). Kelman (1958) expanded this dichotomy, proposing three general processes by which social influence occurs: compliance, or public acceptance of a group’s stance in response to social incentives for agreement; identifica­tion, or private and relationship-specific acceptance of another’s position in order to maintain a positive relationship; and internalization, or private and complete acceptance of another’s position by integrating it into one’s own value system.

In recent years, persuasion researchers have again begun to explore how group membership influences attitude change. The application of dual-process logic and methods has provided new insight into when and how group identi­fication affects persuasion, although much remains to be learned. Here, we sum­marize findings of particular relevance to conflict resolution.

In general, shared group membership—the perception that the audience and the source belong to the same social category—tends to increase persuasion relative to unshared group membership. Depending on the context, this can occur primarily through heuristic or systematic processing. (See Fleming and Petty, 2000; Mackie and Queller, 2000 for reviews.) When an issue is not particularly relevant to an individual or their in-group (for example, acid rain problems in the northeastern United States are not particularly relevant to university students in California), and when a source’s position is known, individuals tend to rely on an in-group agreement heuristic and accept the position advocated by the in-group member without attention to argument strength. However, when an in-group source’s position is unknown, individu­als process systematically in an effort to determine the source’s position, and thus strong arguments lead to greater persuasion compared to weak arguments. Moreover, when an issue is relevant to group members (for example, oil drilling off the California coast is relevant to university students in the area), the attribution of a message to an in-group source may increase both motivation and capacity for systematic processing by making the in-group salient. (See Mackie and Queller, 2000.)

In all of these studies, messages from a neutral group source had no substantial effect on attitudes. There is little research on out-group sources. A message from an opposing group may be subject to the same “ignore” heuristic as messages from a neutral group; on the other hand, because the presence of an out-group source is likely to make in-group identity salient, “ignore” or “don’t trust out-groups” heuristics may combine with more motivated, systematic processing to determine persuasion outcomes.

It is clear, however, that highlighting a common in-group identity between source and target can increase persuasion by providing an important heuristic cue that the message is valid. Negotiators and mediators would therefore do well to make common in-groups salient when conveying information to each other. For example, a mediator might increase the persuasiveness of a proposed agreement by highlighting an identity she shares with each negotiator (such as mother or Muslim). Importantly, a social identity must be salient in order to influence persuasion (Fleming and Petty, 2000). So, a mediator and negotiator’s shared identity as mothers will increase mutual persuasion only so long as they continue to think of themselves as mothers.

Group endorsement of a position can also lead individuals to selectively process information. Individuals may be motivated by defense or impression concerns to agree with the in-group and disagree with the out-group and may therefore process information selectively to arrive at these preferred judgments (Fleming and Petty, 2000). For example, Cohen (2003, Study 4) asked liberal undergraduate students to evaluate a proposal for a generous (stereotypically liberal) federally funded job training program. Half the participants learned that Democrats opposed and Republicans supported the program, while half received no information about group endorsement. On average, participants in the latter condition supported the program, in keeping with their ideological beliefs. However, when participants were told that their in-group opposed the program, they showed biased processing of the information presented in the proposal, selectively interpreting ambiguous information and selectively attending to unambiguous information to support the in-group position. As a result, partic­ipants in the in-group-oppose condition were more likely to oppose the program themselves, compared to participants in the no-information condition. More­over, the Democrat participants believed that group endorsement influenced the attitudes of other Democrats and (even more strongly) Republicans, but perceived themselves to be relatively unaffected by this information.

Information about group positions can thus strongly influence attitudes by inducing selective information processing in support of the in-group position, but people may be unaware of this bias in their own judgments. Such effects can hinder conflict resolution: once a group takes a position on an issue, in­group and out-group members will likely diverge in their attitudes regardless of actual issue content, exacerbating conflict. Furthermore, self-serving and group- serving perceptions of bias (“I am more objective than anyone else,” “my group is more objective that the out-group”) make it difficult to convince someone that other opinions may be legitimate or that changing their own opinion may be necessary. On the other hand, there may be a silver lining: if individuals tend to follow their group’s lead in forming opinions about relevant issues, then in­group endorsement of peaceful conflict resolution should be a powerful per­suasive tool. Publicizing in-group support for de-escalation, or later in the process for a particular agreement, may help consolidate general support for reconciliation.

Majority and Minority Sources

In addition to being delivered by an in-group, neutral group, or out-group, mes­sages can come from numerical majority or minority sources within those groups. Initially, theorists assumed that majority and minority sources always led to fundamentally different modes of processing. Moscovici (1980) proposed that numeric majorities engender relatively superficial information processing, which is focused on the stated position and geared toward aligning oneself with that position to gain approval and avoid rejection. This, he suggested, leads mainly to short-term public compliance, rather than true change in one’s private attitudes. Minorities, on the other hand, can instigate deeper processing of information as an individual attempts to “see what the minority saw, to under­stand what it understood” (Moscovici, 1980, p. 214). This should lead to more real, enduring change in an individual’s privately held attitudes. In a similar vein, Nemeth (1986) argued that majority sources focus the perceiver’s attention on the proposed position, resulting in convergent thinking (concentration on information that relates to the position), whereas minority sources focus attention on the existence of alternate positions, resulting in divergent thinking (examination of information that does not necessarily relate to the majority position and detection of novel solutions). In both theories, majorities are associated with more superficial processing and minorities with deeper, more systematic processing.

Subsequent research provided considerable support for these dual-process views. (See Maass and Clark, 1984.) Majority influence was often associated with public conformity, while minority influence tended to cause changes in private judgments. Furthermore, private acceptance of minority positions, but not public conformity to majority positions, was found to be associated with increased systematic processing and increased resistance to counterpersuasion (Martin, Hewstone, and Martin, 2003). Several limiting conditions on minority influence were also identified. For example, a minority source is influential to the extent that it behaves consistently; that arguments are presented flexibly as opposed to rigidly; that the position advocated is becoming more, rather than less, mainstream over time; and that minority and majority differ only in terms of position, not group membership. (See Maass and Clark, 1984.)

Although evidence from numerous studies confirmed that minority influence can lead to private attitude change (see Wood, Lundgren, Ouellette, Busceme, and Blackstone, 1994), other research challenged the notion that minority sources are uniquely associated with systematic processing. For instance, Mar­tin and Hewstone (2003) found that when an advocated position would only moderately affect participants’ self-interest, a minority source led to systematic processing, whereas a majority source did not. However, when the advocated position was linked to a highly negative personal outcome, only majority sources instigated systematic processing.

One way to integrate these findings is to consider how majority and minority sources can influence information processing at a number of distinct steps. First, heuristic associations with majority and minority sources initially suggest to per- ceivers that the majority is correct and the minority is incorrect. Thus, when capac­ity or motivation are relatively low, majority positions should be accepted and minority positions rejected with little further processing of information (Moskowitz and Chaiken, 2001). Second, when majority or minority positions are unexpected (for example, a majority arguing against its own interests or a minority consistently and thoughtfully arguing against the majority), it may lead people to question their initial preconceptions and increase their motivation to accurately understand a given issue. Third, majorities and minorities may influence type of motivation, as well as overall level: a majority source, if present, will probably induce impression motiva­tion, as well as accuracy motivation in some cases (Maass and Clark, 1984); a minor­ity source may instigate accuracy motivation when countering the majority on a low-relevance issue, but defense motivation when countering the majority on a high- relevance issue (Martin and Hewstone, 2003). Thus, although a variety of contex­tual variables may influence whether majority and/or minority sources lead to systematic processing and attitude change, understanding the effects of these vari­ables at each stage of information processing should allow us to predict whether a persuasion attempt is likely to be successful.

Taken as a whole, the literature on majority and minority influence has a number of implications for conflict resolution. First, it suggests that when seeking to persuade a constituency to adopt a peaceful resolution strategy or a particular agreement, the impact of the appeal may depend upon whether a majority of the public endorses the advocated position. Much of the research on minority influence suggests that minority sources will promote greater systematic processing and longer lasting attitude change, but it may be that if negative personal outcomes are salient (as they may often be in such situations), majority persuasion will induce more extensive processing. In addition, appeals will be more persuasive when support for the advocated change seems to be increasing. (See also Kay, Jimenez, and Jost, 2002.)

Finally, this literature draws attention to the idea that what is unexpected can sometimes induce accuracy-motivated, systematic processing, leading to a revision of assumptions and an open-minded consideration of all available information. Negotiators often assume their opponents to be competitive and self-interested; these assumptions may be revised if negotiators offer unexpected concessions, talk about the other’s interests rather than their own, or focus on gains that the other can accrue from settlement rather than losses that loom if a suboptimal set­tlement is adopted. Initially, the opposition might meet such tactics with great suspicion, since defense motives are apt to be strong and the belief that com­munications are motivated by something other than self-interest seems unlikely. Nevertheless, with persistence, this sort of tactic should gradually induce the opposition to adopt more of an accuracy motivation orientation, at which point true persuasion rather than coercion is possible.

Affect

Specific emotions and general positive or negative moods permeate our lives across a variety of situations, including those involving conflict. Initially, dual-process-oriented research suggested that mood influences whether infor­mation is predominantly processed in a heuristic or systematic mode. The picture that emerged from a large number of experiments indicated that peo­ple in a positive mood rely more heavily on heuristics and show reduced lev­els of systematic processing, whereas people in a negative mood rely less on heuristics and process more systematically. (For a review, see Mackie and Worth, 1991.) For example, Bodenhausen, Kramer, and Susser (1994) induced positive mood in a variety of ways, asking some participants to write about a happy event, to contract facial muscles associated with smiling, or to lis­ten to happy music. After the mood manipulation, happy and neutral mood participants took part in an ostensibly unrelated study, in which they were asked to make judgments about the guilt of a student who had been accused of an offense (such as cheating). Half the participants also learned that the student was a member of a group stereotypically associated with that offense. The results showed that participants in a neutral mood did not rely on the stereotype information when making their judgments about the students’ guilt, whereas participants in a happy mood believed it was more likely that the student was guilty when stereotype information was present. In other words, happy mood increased reliance on stereotypes as heuristic cues about the student’s guilt.

Why might positive and negative moods influence reliance on heuristic and systematic processing? Schwarz (1990) has proposed that positive moods signal a safe and satisfactory environment, indicating that effortful processing and problem solving is unnecessary. In contrast, negative moods suggest that some­thing is wrong with the current situation and promote systematic processing in an effort to address the current problem. Other researchers have proposed that individuals are motivated to maintain positive moods and therefore avoid complex thinking that might detract from general elation; meanwhile, negative moods motivate people to change how they feel and therefore process system­atically in order to discover what is causing the negative state and how to fix it. (See, for example, Cialdini, Darby, and Vincent, 1973.)

Mood may also function as a heuristic. When motivation and capacity are low, individuals may tend to assume that their moods are related to a per­suasive message or source, and form their attitudes accordingly. For exam­ple, Schwarz and Clore (1983) asked participants to remember happy or sad events or interviewed them on sunny or rainy days to induce positive or neg­ative moods, respectively. When subsequently asked about their general life satisfaction, happy participants reported higher satisfaction than sad partici­pants. Such results suggest that even when mood is unrelated to the ques­tion at hand, people may use their feelings as a heuristic cue in forming their attitudes. Schwarz and Clore (1983) also found that when participants in a negative mood realized their mood state was unrelated to the current judgment, it ceased to influence their attitudes. Negotiators may therefore lessen the negative effects of a bad mood on their own or others’ attitudes by attributing the mood to an outside source when possible. For instance, acknowledging a rainy day’s influence on one’s mood should decrease one’s tendency to mistakenly attribute a dejected feeling to the proposed agreement at hand.

The general picture emerging from the research just described suggests that positive mood increases heuristic processing, while negative mood increases systematic processing. However, the story is more complex. Alice Isen and her colleagues have demonstrated that positive mood can lead to increased cogni­tive flexibility and heightened creativity. For example, Carnevale and Isen (1986) explored the effect of positive mood on integrative behavior in a bargaining task. Positive- and neutral-mood dyads negotiated over the purchase price of three commodities in a hypothetical market. In a face-to-face interac­tion, positive-mood pairs found more creative, integrative solutions than negative-mood pairs. Other research has shown that positive affect can lead people to focus on shared group memberships (Dovidio, Gaertner, Isen, and Lowrance, 1995). Thus, whereas a large body of literature would suggest that positive mood should increase reliance on heuristics, such as fixed-pie assump­tions and stereotypes, other research indicates that a happy mood can improve integrative outcomes in a bargaining task and increase perceptions of common in-group identity.

Other complexities deserve attention as well. Although dividing affect into the broad categories of positive and negative mood is parsimonious, specific emotions and the intensity of affect are also important to consider. For example, anxiety could be categorized as a negative mood, but further attention to this specific emotion has revealed that its effects on information processing are con­siderably more complex than the positive-negative mood distinction would imply (see Sengupta and Johar, 2001). Categories besides positive versus negative may also prove useful for understanding the effects of moods. For example, some researchers have distinguished between affect associated with uncertainty (including sadness, anxiety, fear, and so on) and affect associated with certainty (including many positive moods, as well as anger and disgust; see, for example, Tiedens and Linton, 2001).

New theories in the field continue to emerge in an attempt to reconcile and integrate these diverse findings. One particularly promising class of theories suggests that mood influences type of processing: negative moods increase bottom-up, detail-oriented, externally focused processing, whereas positive moods increase top-down, schema-oriented, internally focused information processing (Fiedler, 2001). This distinction is similar to a heuristic-systematic perspective and helps to integrate many diverse findings. By increasing attention to the concrete, external stimulus details, negative moods facilitate systematic processing based on information in the external environment, with little reliance on internal associations and assumptions about the stimulus. In contrast, pos­itive moods facilitate top-down processing or the application of prior knowledge structures (stereotypes, heuristics, and other associations) to the stimulus. This increases stereotyping and reliance on heuristic cues, but also creative, “big-pic­ture” thinking.

Additionally, individuals may be motivated to seek out positive, pleasant moods and avoid negative, unpleasant moods. They therefore may be motivated by the affective consequences of information processing in certain situations, processing information only when it improves a negative mood or maintains a positive mood (Handley and Lassiter, 2002). These mood regulation effects may apply particularly when mood is an individual’s primary concern at the moment, so that affect is used to assess enjoyment, rather than whether suffi­cient processing has occurred (Clore and Schnall, 2005).

In general, then, positive moods seem to increase heuristic, associative, and creative processing, whereas negative moods tend to increase systematic, detail- oriented processing. Positive moods are therefore a mixed blessing in conflict resolution: they may increase creative, integrative behavior, but they may also increase stereotyping and hinder systematic processing of persuasive arguments. Optimal mood may vary across different time points in a negotiation. Positive affect is often portrayed as a general panacea for integrative negotiations (for example, Barry, Fulmer, and Van Kleef, 2004) but inducing positive mood at the start of a negotiation may also prevent negotiators from revising their stereo­types about each other. It may be better to induce positive mood later, ideally after stereotypes are revised but before parties begin looking for an integrative solution. More research is obviously necessary to clarify the benefits and draw­backs to introducing certain moods at different time points in the negotiation process.

In summary, affect plays an important role in persuasion and social influ­ence. The recent decades have witnessed large strides in understanding how general moods and, to some extent, specific emotions may influence informa­tion processing, yet further research is needed to determine how best to integrate existing findings and explanations, as well as how best to apply these results to negotiation settings. The dual-process perspective has proven integral to the accumulation of knowledge in the field, and the sophistication of current theorizing and research suggests that a clearer and crisper picture of affect may soon emerge. Meanwhile, however, practitioners should be aware of the mixed findings in this area, and generalizations from one context to another should be made carefully and critically.