As a teacher of organizational behavior and classes in negotiation, I use experiential exercises extensively. These exercises involve a great deal of student role-playing. An important challenge for the teacher of negotiations is first to help students to overcome ethnocentrism as they learn about effective negotiation styles that differ from their own preferred style. To be an effective negotiator, a student must develop empathy for a negotiating partner's approach. To develop this empathy, students must learn to more thoroughly understand whether and how their negotiating partners' styles are influenced by demographics, for example, gender or ethnicity.
Students vary a great deal in their exposure to and knowledge of diverse cultures.
Asking students to read about a different demographic group or culture and asking them to enact a negotiating style associated with that different group may result in the reinforcement of simplistic stereotypes. Current approaches to dealing with these challenges appear to be in a preliminary stage. Thus, for example, some texts present Hofstede and colleagues' cultural dimensions. Others might offer readings from Debra Tannen among others on cross-gender issues. Another technique is to create artificial cultures in which certain behavioral or cognitive peculiarities are highlighted and introduced into the negotiation exercise.