There are currently two conflicting messages about negotiator aggressiveness and risk of impasse. Literature on self-serving biases, biased information assimilation, na ve realism, and overconfidence tend to predict conflict polarization and negotiation breakdown as parties overconstrue the situation in their own favor. The first study is based on data from 264 randomly assigned dyads in a buyer-seller negotiation simulation.
Results demonstrate that optimistic targets correlate positively with individual performance.
Theoretical and prescriptive implications of these somewhat preliminary findings, and areas for future research, are discussed.