The Effects of Framing on Inter-group Negotiation

The present paper explores the way in which groups cognitively represent information framed as danger and the way in which such collective cognitive representations influence group performance during inter-group negotiations. One hundred and two participants were distributed over 34 three-person groups and were involved in a negotiation game developed by Lewicki et al. (1999, Negotiation: readings, exercises and cases. McGraw-Hill, Boston). The groups were organized in 17 pairs and each pair played the negotiation game in two rounds. The game rules and the available resources were the same for both groups, but one of the groups in each pair received the game information framed as “danger”, while the other group in the pair received a neutral framing. The groups with a “danger” frame developed a more defensive strategy during negotiations, adopted more often a collaborative approach and had a significantly lower performance as compared to the groups in the non-framing condition.