Judgment Bias and Decision Making in Negotiation

The Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I surely ranks among the most costly of diplomatic failures, a “peace to end all peace” (Fromkin, 1992). After he directly contributed to some of the early mistakes made by the American delegation, Walter Lippmann observed these errors rapidly multiply as the negotiation process went awry. In the book Public Opinion (Lippmann, 1922), he developed a complex multilevel theory identifying certain psychological factors responsible for the cascade of mistakes committed by the negotiators along with organizational and political forces that sustained and magnified them (Bottom, 2010). Turning prescriptive, he urged social scientists to undertake a systematic “study of error,” one that would more fully reveal the operation and impact of these psychological factors…