Negotiating over Mobile Phones: Calling or Being Called Can Make the Difference

作者：Vinciarelli Alessandro^*; Salamin Hugues; Polychroniou Anna

来源：Cognitive Computation, 2014, 6(4): 677-688.

DOI：10.1007/s12559-014-9267-y

• Negotiation
• Persuasiveness
• Mobile phones
• Personality
• Conflict handling style

Mobile phones pervade our everyday life like no other technology, but the effects they have on one-to-one conversations are still relatively unknown. This paper focuses on how mobile phones influence negotiations, i.e., on discussions where two parties try to reach an agreement starting from opposing preferences. The experiments involve 60 pairs of unacquainted individuals (120 subjects). They must make a %26quot;yes%26quot; or %26quot;no%26quot; decision on whether several objects increase the chances of survival in a polar environment or not. When the participants disagree about a given object (one says %26quot;yes%26quot; and the other says %26quot;no%26quot;), they must try to convince one another and reach a common decision. Since the subjects discuss via phone, one of them (selected randomly) calls while the other is called. The results show that the caller convinces the receiver in 70 % of the cases ( value = 0.005 according to a two-tailed binomial test). Gender, age, personality and conflict handling style, measured during the experiment, fail in explaining such a persuasiveness difference. Calling or being called appears to be the most important factor behind the observed result.

• 出版日期2014-12