The oft‐claimed correlation between curiosity and feline morbidity has never been scientifically established. Nor is there any evidence of inquisitiveness’s adverse effects on our own species. Indeed, in this issue Chris Guthrie boldly asserts that curiosity actually promotes the well‐being of negotiators.
Understanding the deep interests of our counterparts, how they think, and what they feel is the royal road to agreement, he maintains, but he also warns that curiosity doesn’t always come naturally. It’s partly a function of our general nature, but also affected by our shifting mood and how we perceive a particular task. Proactively varying our strategy and focusing on our purpose are practical tools for heightening our engagement.
Curiosity is also what motivates researchers, whether they craft methods to test a hypothesis or to make sense of puzzling data. In these pages, for example, Steve Goldberg, Margaret Shaw, and Jeanne Brett investigate how a mediator’s prior judicial experience can affect the perceptions of disputants’ attorneys. The authors conducted surveys revealing that earning parties’ confidence is paramount regardless of a particular mediator’s background but that general process skills were seen as less important for judge mediators than for their nonjudge colleagues.
In a complementary study, also included here, Jean Poitras uses a qualitative approach to identify factors that prompt parties to trust a mediator. Among them are mastery over the process (echoing a theme in the first report), personal warmth and consideration, and a lack of perceived bias toward either party.
Mediation is also the locus of Jo Daugherty Bailey and Dawn McCarty’s study of empowerment in divorce cases. The authors are quick to grant that power is both an important concept and one that is often hard to nail down. They explore it by comparing results in mediated and nonmediated custody cases to identify instances in which statutorily presumed outcomes (under Texas law) are altered. In their data set, visitation rights were almost never cut back. Indeed, noncustodial parents were often empowered in the sense of gaining more contact with their children. That may not mean corresponding disempowerment for the other parent, however, if such modifications advance the welfare of the children themselves.
In his article “Sequencing Negotiating Partners,” Jason Enia undertakes comparative case analysis in the context of negotiating free trade agreements. Specifically, he contrasts the strategies of Japan and South Korea in their initial entries into this realm. Japan put its foot into the water by securing agreement with Singapore, which was perceived to be a relatively easy transaction, before taking on what was expected to be a more difficult negotiation with Mexico. South Korea did the inverse, tackling a difficult negotiation with Chile in advance of dealing with Singapore. Enia’s analysis shows how when sequencing negotiations, decision makers may have to balance the benefits of increasing one’s external leverage against possible internal political costs.
Bruce Money and Chad Allred also consider international negotiations, in their case simulated, to explore the evolution of social networks and the distribution of power. Specifically, they connect participants’ views of coalition behavior on problem solving and ultimate satisfaction with outcomes. One intriguing finding is that amassing a dominant position may come at an unexpected cost: powerful parties tended to be less satisfied than those who were perceived as weaker.
A number of themes explored in this issue come together in Samantha Hardy’s contribution “Teaching Mediation as Reflective Practice,” which not only illuminates pedagogy but more broadly deals with our constantly evolving awareness of ourselves and the environments in which we function. With regard to teaching, she distinguishes simple knowledge transmission from more profoundly transformative learning. Students need to appreciate how mediators constantly make sense of the process as it unfolds and thus must simultaneously be aware of their own emerging perceptions and feelings. Hardy reminds us that revealing and explicitly analyzing our own thinking can model for students the necessarily reflective nature of mediation.
Maintaining a reflective stance requires us to nurture the kind of curiosity that Chris Guthrie writes about. Reading this issue through that lens reminded me of listening to President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech this past January, when I was struck by an unusual pairing of civic virtues. The president was on well‐trod ground when he said that the nation’s success depends on honesty and hard work, courage and fair play. But then he added “tolerance and curiosity.” We’ve long heard calls for the former (which reminds us that it’s always in short supply). But curiosity? How did that word find its way into political discourse?
Obama didn’t elaborate, but it may not be reading too much between his lines to take it as a call for open‐mindedness, that is, a way of looking at the world without the burdens of preconceptions and biases. If that’s the case, then curiosity should be a watchword for all of us who practice, teach, and study negotiation.
