The Time Course of Language Use in Multiparty Negotiations

The Time Course of Language Use in Multiparty Negotiations Eyal Sagi (eyal@u.northwestern.edu) Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA Daniel Diermeier (d-diermeier@kellogg.northwestern.edu) Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA Abstract Language use is an important part of a negotiation. Prior research has shown that similarity in language use is conducive to reaching agreements. This paper uses Latent Semantic Analysis to explore how the similarity of language use develops and changes over the time course of a three- party negotiation. Results support theories that suggest that a gradual alignment of semantic representation increases the likelihood that parties will form a coalition. Keywords: Negotiation, Coalition Formation, Linguistic Entrainment, Psycholinguistics, Latent Semantic Analysis. Introduction The language used by parties in a negotiation is a crucial aspect of their negotiation strategy and can greatly affect the outcome of the negotiation. Research over the past few decades has demonstrated that an agreement in a negotiation is often preceded by convergence in language use among the negotiating parties (cf. Miller, 2005). In the context of multi-party negotiation, such convergence is evident between the parties that reach an agreement, but not the excluded parties (Huffaker, Swaab, and Diermeier, 2011). In this paper we extend the results of Huffaker et al. by analyzing the similarity of adjacent conversation moves. This type of analysis enables us to look at the time course of coalition formation and not just at the overall similarity of language use between participants. Multi-party negotiation is naturally more complex than that a two-party negotiation (Bazerman et al., 2000). This is especially true since an agreement can be reached among a subset of the negotiating parties. Therefore being excluded from an agreement is a real possibility. Nevertheless, partial coalition agreements are often less desirable than agreements that involve the group as a whole because they are less efficient or do not use all of the available resources. However, even being part of a partial agreement is more preferable than no agreement at all or of being excluded from an agreement reached by others. The added complexity of multi-party negotiation has been shown to affect the patterns of language use in such negotiations. Following the framework of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT; cf. Giles et al., 2007), Huffaker et al. (2011) demonstrates how the formation of coalition is affected by specific aspects of language use by the negotiating parties. Specifically, they find that partners to a coalition show more similarity in language use than participants who were not part of a coalition. The use of assents was also found to correlate positively with being a part of the coalition agreement. In contrast, the use of negative emotion words was a detrimental predictor to being a part of a coalition. These results are congruent with empirical findings in psycholinguistics that show that in successful dialogues the representations and language used by dialogue partners tend to converge over time (e.g., Brennan and Clark, 1996). However, while Huffaker et al. show that similarity in language use is a factor in the outcome of the negotiation, they use the entire negotiation as the unit of analysis. Consequently, their results do not explore the time course of this similarity. This paper aims to extend their results by looking at whether the language used by the participants changes over time. On the one hand, theories of entrainment and alignment in language use by dialogue participants, such as that put forth by Pickering and Garrod (2004), argue that language similarity is the result of gradual alignment of language use by the participants in the negotiation. The better the alignment the more likely the aligned parties would be to form a coalition. Such theories would lead to the prediction that language similarity should increase over the course of the negotiation and ultimately result in the parties forming a coalition. In contrast, Swaab et al. (2011) shows that language mimicry during a negotiation is a factor in the outcome of the negotiation, but only when it occurred early in the negotiation. Therefore, we might expect that early similarity in language use might lead to the forming of a coalition later on. It is also possible that both of these factors contribute to the effect that similarity in language use has on the resulting coalition. If that is the case we would expect to find not only that eventual coalition partners show more similar language early on than non-coalition partners, but that this difference increases over time. Measuring similarity in language use Convergence of language use in a dialogue or negotiation has traditionally been measured by hand coding the transcripts of negotiation dialogue. Such hand coding is time consuming and, to a certain degree, requires the coders to interpret the language used by the negotiators. In contrast, the metric we use in this paper is automatically derived by