Social judgment, feedback, and interpersonal learning in negotiation

We examined the impact of feedback on the accuracy of people's judgments of their opponents' interests and on the quality of negotiated outcomes. Pairs of subjects engaged in four bargaining tasks. Following each task, some subjects received a complete diagnosis of their opponent's interests in the preceding task (full feedback); others learned only about their opponents final outcomes (outcome feedback); some did not receive any information about their opponent (control). We predicted that subjects who received a complete diagnosis would make more accurate judgments about their opponent's interests and reach more integrative agreements in subsequent negotiation situations. Results supported the hypothesis. However, outcome-only feedback did not improve judgment accuracy and performance. We interpret the results as supporting a judgment-action-outcome model of feedback.