The purpose of this study is to examine the unique effect that shared metacognition has on negotiation – over and above the effect of simply having similar views.
An experiment was conducted where it was systematically varied whether the negotiators explicitly knew or did not know that their opponent had a similar view of the negotiation task.
Results showed that having shared metacognition promoted: cooperative negotiation, accurate insight into the opponent's point values (which was correlated with increased joint gain), and increased satisfaction regarding the negotiation outcome. Moreover, this was the case across different conditions in which negotiators' negotiation task view and motivation were varied.
The paper suggests that negotiators and mediators can benefit by developing a common understanding of the negotiation and explicitly exchanging this understanding with each other (establishing shared metacognition) prior to engaging in the negotiation. Future studies should examine closely the underlying process of shared metacognition in terms of its impact on negotiation.
Prior research suggests that successful, integrative negotiation depends on negotiators' view of the negotiation task and whether they hold similar views of the negotiation task (shared cognition). Implicit in this research is that the negotiating parties not only had similar views of the negotiation task but also may have explicitly known that they did so (shared metacognition).
