Communicating sentiment and outlook promotes success in negotiations

The field of climate change is especially dependent upon investment. Communicating sentiment and outlook reinforces pre-existing goodwill and leads to more positive outcomes.

Communicating sentiment and outlook promotes success in negotiations
Communicating sentiment and outlook promotes success in negotiations

by Tokyo Institute of Technology

Main titles

  • An experiment was devised to reveal how group size, communication and behavioral type affected prosocial action.
  • Three behavioural types identified in the study are: cooperators, altruists, and free riders.
  • Climate change mitigation negotiations are enhanced more by the cooperator and altruist behavioral types in the test groups.
  • Cooperator and altruist types displayed more optimism in their outlook and in the negotiations.
  • Prosocial individuals combat investment deficits more effectively and are better at confronting inaction.
  • Free riders to not respond to communication opportunities the way that prosocial individuals do, therefore climate negotiations will benefit more by focusing efforts on the prosocials.
  • Communicating sentiment (i.e. emotional state and satisfaction) and outlook (i.e. expectations and aspirations) reinforces pre-existing goodwill and leads to more positive outcomes.
  • In small groups communication helped the success frequency reach levels of up to 90%.
  • Communication helped the free-rider behavior type become more optimistic and confident about the outcome.
  • Communication leads to coordination and greater possiblity of project success.
  • There is usually an inverse relationship between communication and group size.
  • In larger groups investiment deficits tended to be higher due to the fact that more people were expected to contribute and failed to do so.

Source: titech.ac.jp