Fostering Student Engagement in Negotiation Role Plays

Negotiation role‐play exercises are designed to help participants understand their own negotiation attitudes and behaviors, to give them opportunities to develop new skills, and to illustrate theories of effective negotiation practice and how they can be applied (Loewenstein and Thompson 2000). Most negotiation course syllabi include role‐play exercises as part of the pedagogy. In fact, systematic reviews of university and professional school curricula have indicated that this method of instruction is the most common single technique in use (Fortgang 2000; Loewenstein and Thompson 2000; Susskind and Corburn 2000). Given the prevalence of its use, much effort has been devoted to understanding the effectiveness of role playing as a pedagogical method.

Role playing is an active, experiential approach to learning and creates opportunities to generate student interest in the subject matter. A recent review of role‐play use in negotiation education has suggested that it generates more interest in course content when compared with conventional techniques (e.g., lectures) and that role playing leads to greater retention of negotiation concepts over time (Druckman and Ebner 2013). In their review, Daniel Druckman and Noam Ebner noted, however, that research has largely failed to demonstrate that role playing has clear advantages over other instructional methods in terms of facilitating concept learning. Their results, therefore, suggest that there is room to improve upon the ways in which this method is used for educational purposes.

One area we believe is worthy of further investigation is the extent to which features of role‐play design relate to student engagement, given that engagement assumes an important role in learning (Pascarella and Terenzini 1991, 2005). Although role playing is a potentially fruitful approach for fostering student engagement, researchers and educators have recently identified some of its limitations in this regard (Alexander and LeBaron 2009). In this article, we focus particularly on challenges related to the design of role‐playing exercises, and more specifically to the elements of role‐play design and execution that are likely to enhance student engagement.

By their very nature, role plays present simplified versions of reality that will always provide participants with less information than some might expect or desire to have prior to negotiating in the real world. In addition, for logistical purposes, many role‐playing exercises are designed to take place in one time‐limited session and to restrict the interaction to given actors “at the table” at a given point (e.g., between a seller and one potential buyer), thus limiting opportunities for participants to negotiate simultaneously on multiple fronts (e.g., with several potential buyers at once). These limitations can sometimes be addressed by increasing role‐play complexity and adaptivity (Watkins 2007).

In this article, we focus on the implications of specific design choices for student engagement. In the context of simulation‐based learning, in particular, the implications of low student engagement can be substantial, given that the integrity of a role‐play exercise is driven by the way participants behave within it. Those who fail to take the role play seriously will not play their roles with the kind of motivation that one would expect in the real world and, as such, the realism and learning value of the exercise may suffer. Moreover, unless they are sufficiently engaged, students will not experience certain critical elements of the negotiation (e.g., emotional reactions) that play an important role in negotiations outside of the classroom. As a result, students may have role‐play experiences that provide little demonstration of the underlying dynamics that the exercises are designed to evoke. The role play may thus fail to deliver opportunities for active learning or tests of skills. When role plays are unable to foster engagement among participants, they are arguably counterproductive and can even mislead students about the challenges of negotiating in “the real world.”

Nadja Alexander and Michelle LeBaron (2009) leveled fairly significant criticism against the state of role‐play usage in negotiation education, suggesting that students' heightened interest in role play‐based methods is not fully harnessed, in most cases due to a characteristic lack of authenticity in role‐play design. As a result, they recommended that instructors reduce their reliance on role playing and replace it with alternative exercises that are distinguished primarily by the fact that they are real and frequently performed outside of the classroom (e.g., a group excursion to negotiate for something of value in a local marketplace).

More recently, Druckman and Ebner (2013) suggested that, in addition to replacement or reduction of role‐play usage, learning‐based outcomes in negotiation courses could be enhanced if the way that role plays are currently used is improved. In this article, we explore improvements specifically designed to foster engagement, which we think will appeal to those instructors who currently rely on role plays and are concerned about their effectiveness but are primarily interested in modifying their use through incremental changes rather than through complete replacement.

We believe that role plays are a key tool in teaching negotiation concepts and skills, but work most effectively when participants are fully engaged with these activities. In this article, then, our objective is to propose a framework designed to gain a better understanding of what encourages participants to become engaged in role plays, and to propose ways to make them more authentic and/or more interesting, which will consequently make them more effective learning activities.

In negotiation, parties are in conflict along three potential dimensions (Wehr 1979): matters of substance, of relationship, and of process. The substance is what is at stake in the negotiation: an amount of money, a problem to solve, or a choice between priorities. Relationship concerns include the parties' feelings about each other, of liking, disliking, trusting or distrusting each other, as well as other emotions that may arise (anger, fear, etc.) that can affect how they negotiate (Druckman and Olekalns 2008). The process refers to the particular way each person negotiates, his or her attitudes, choices of techniques (conscious or unconscious), and behaviors, all of which can influence the other party and affect the negotiation outcome. We consider each of these dimensions as we examine how role‐play designs may fail to fully engage participants.

Role plays are sometimes limited by participants' failure to “willingly suspend disbelief” and their reluctance to accept the “reality” of the scenario presented. Other times, particularly if the need to finalize an agreement is not explicitly emphasized in the role information, participants will simply postpone resolving the problem. Participants may “give in” to make the negotiation easier to resolve or to avoid conflict, sometimes assuming that the consequences of their lack of effort will be dealt with forgivingly by a hypothetical principal in what is frequently an ill‐specified agent/principal relationship. In our experience, we have also found that participants will sometimes oversimplify the data provided to them in role instruction sheets by ignoring information that complicates the negotiation or by failing to question those aspects of the data that they do not completely understand. While such cases can be debriefed as preparation mistakes, they considerably limit the potential for learning from the exercise.

Although many role plays focus primarily on substantive issues (Bernard 2009), some try to recreate the hostile relations and escalated conflicts that occur in many real‐life negotiations. Participants in these role plays are expected to feel anger, distrust, and/or stress, and to experience how these feelings can hinder their negotiation abilities, provoke escalation traps, activate interpretive biases, draw out negotiations, and change the agenda. But some participants may downplay these uncomfortable emotions because they consider the role‐play exercise to be “just a game,” focusing instead on the more tangible, substantive issues, and missing an opportunity to develop important insight and skills about the relational and emotional aspects of negotiation.

In contrast, we have also seen participants in our classes “overplay” their roles in a theatrical style. Similarly, some participants have admitted to us that they behave much more competitively in classroom exercises than they would otherwise. These participants seem to forget that, in a real‐life situation, they would have to suffer the consequences of their actions, which would frequently moderate a negotiator's tendency to behave contentiously or to deliberately escalate the conflict. In cases like these, the role play is neither realistic nor fruitful as a learning experience because participants may be unable to link their role‐play experience to associated course concepts or to acquire the relational skills that may have represented the core objective of the exercise.

The process of negotiating also represents a challenge in conducting effective simulated negotiations. For operational efficiency, role plays will often oversimplify the number or complexity of steps that are implicated in brokering a deal. We have observed that this can influence participants' sense of their own power in the negotiation and may lead them to alter the game's design (i.e., participants assume they could obtain the authorization of the principal they are representing or a director to whom they must report). Once again, the implications of such deviations may be discussed as part of the exercise debriefing, but these may not necessarily be the chief objectives of the exercise.

Another process oversimplification can occur in team‐on‐team negotiations. We have observed that role‐playing exercises of this nature tend to be designed such that participants within the same team will consider themselves as partners with total transparency, and internal conflicts of interest or power struggles tend to be minimized. Teams in real‐world settings frequently will have their own intra‐team issues: power conflicts, noncompatible individual interests, and/or different hierarchies of interest (Walton and McKersie 1965). In role plays, if participants assume or overvalue their teams' common interests, they may neglect their personal interests (or, at least, fail to experience a tension between group and individual goals) to a degree that one would be less likely to observe in real‐world settings.

Another limitation related to process is that role plays tend to be short on formal commitments and frequently fail to adequately simulate the formal steps that are often necessary to obtain the support of implicated stakeholders; commitments tend to be more verbal and succinct. This very often mitigates some of the key issues because it is easier to reach agreement on the general spirit of a deal because “the devil is in the details.”

When role‐play designs are limited in these ways, participants may experience little engagement, generally giving in too easily or evading the more fundamental issues that the exercise is designed to produce. Moreover, their failure to engage fully with the role play as it is designed, or their tendency to behave artificially compared with how they would behave in a real‐world setting, can limit participants' development of insight about their own personal negotiation attitudes and skills. In short, a lack of student engagement represents a direct threat to learning. For this reason, we argue that it is essential to consider what can be done to existing role‐play designs to generate greater student engagement.

Educational researchers have suggested that one of the main drivers of learning and development is the degree to which students are engaged with the learning environment (Pascarella and Terenzini 1991). Simply put, student engagement occurs when “students make a psychological investment in learning” (Newmann 1992: 3). While student engagement can be increased in multiple ways, we focus here on two that we believe are particularly relevant to role‐play design.

The first driver of engagement is authenticity of experience (Marks 2000). A negotiation role play provides participants with an authentic experience when it closely mirrors the conditions of real‐world negotiations, and thus provides learners with a clear “need‐to‐know situation,” in which they will cognitively engage with the task and associated learning concepts (Blumenfeld, Kempler, and Krajcik 2006).

The second driver of engagement is situational interest. Situational interest is developed in relation to specific features of learning activities. Educators must sometimes rely on these features in order to capture and maintain student interest (Schraw and Lehman 2001). For example, the characteristics of a role‐play scenario itself can spark a participant's interest even when he or she lacks personal interest in the subject matter. “Although some students come to the learning environment with a well‐developed personal interest in subject areas or specific topics, for other students, features of the context are important for fostering situational interest” (Blumenfeld, Kempler, and Krajcik 2006: 476).

We propose that negotiation role plays that provide authentic experiences and generate situational interest will, by fostering student engagement, be more likely to increase student learning. To design role plays toward these ends, we suggest that it is useful to consider two theoretical frameworks in particular. The first, ecological validity, refers to designing role plays that more authentically reflect reality as students would experience it in real‐world negotiations. The second, vested interest theory, refers to ways of enhancing the situational interest in role plays themselves. Figure One illustrates our theoretical model.

For a classroom exercise to possess ecological validity, the concepts being taught, as well as the methods used to teach them, must approximate those of the real‐life problem being examined. Thus, a negotiation role‐play exercise possesses ecological validity if it approximates the typical conditions of the real‐life negotiation situation that it seeks to reproduce. Ecological validity comprises three elements: mundane realism, experimental realism, and psychological realism. We argue that role‐play designs that address each of these elements can create more authentic experiences for students and enhance their learning outcomes.

Mundane realism refers to the extent to which the setting mimics events in normal, everyday life (Brewer 2000). As discussed earlier, negotiation role plays may lack mundane realism for several reasons. First, they are frequently completed in a one‐session meeting while, in real life, negotiations tend to take place over several sessions. Role plays may be conducted in large classrooms, where participants negotiate while surrounded by other negotiation teams. In these cases, participants are likely to overhear what other teams are saying, and this can influence their negotiation. Finally, classrooms can differ significantly from formal business or legal settings in terms of dress code and etiquette. Thus, negotiation role plays often lack mundane realism because the norms governing behavior in learning settings are different from those of the settings (i.e., business, legal, political) in which students will seek to apply what they have learned.

Experimental realism includes the degree to which the task is believed to be veritable, actively attended to, and taken seriously by participants (Dobbins, Lane, and Steiner 1988). Simulated negotiations often lack this task‐based realism because the negotiation outcomes are only theoretical. Participants get a deal on paper, but it has little real impact for them — they have, as the saying goes, no “skin in the game.” For example, participants often end up paying virtual money for a project. We believe that this aspect of role‐play design is most responsible for instances in which participants give in too easily. Participants may be more cooperative and accommodating in role plays than they would be in negotiations in which they had more at stake.

Psychological realism is characterized by the extent to which the psychological processes at play in an experiment resemble the psychological processes at play in everyday life (Brewer 2000). In negotiation simulations, participants are often provided with information that suggests that the other party has offended them (e.g., an insulting offer has been presented, a presumably “baseless” accusation has been made, or vulgar language characterizes the history of prior interactions described in the role information). While instructors generally want participants to avoid experiencing certain disruptive emotions (e.g., genuine anger) in role plays, it is not uncommon in our experience to observe participants who “forgive” their opponents too easily because they are not really offended. But research has demonstrated the significant impact of emotions on negotiation processes and outcomes (Sinaceur and Tiedens 2006; Thompson, Wang, and Gunia 2009). As a result, negotiation role plays based on scenarios intended to elicit emotions, such as anger or pride, often lack psychological realism. The same principle applies when a role‐play scenario involves interactions between strangers, but the participants actually know each other well (or vice versa).

How much ecological validity does a simulated negotiation need to have? Authors who have looked at the issue of role‐play realism and effectiveness have come to different conclusions. Stephen Weiss has argued that a “mega‐simulation,” which aims to represent and recreate the key features of a complex situation, is an effective negotiation teaching tool (Weiss 2008). Other authors have argued in favor of simplifying certain aspects of role plays to better elicit particular lessons (Susskind 1985; Susskind and Corburn 2000). Thus, crafting a good role‐play exercise often involves trade‐offs among realism, ease of use, and pedagogical goals. Nevertheless, we argue that, because one goal of negotiation instruction is to teach transferable concepts and skills, and because students/participants typically want to know how they will apply these lessons, ecological validity is essential for creating the authenticity that can foster student engagement (Beck and Kosnik 2006).

The second theoretical framework that is useful to explore with respect to developing student engagement is vested interest theory (Crano 1995). Originally developed by researchers studying attitudes, vested interest theory helps explain the conditions under which people are more likely to become actively involved in situations. It focuses primarily on how people assess the extent to which their behavioral involvement will affect their personal satisfaction in specific situations. Applied to role plays, vested interest refers to the degree to which a participant conceives that classroom role‐playing activities will have important personal consequences. We propose that vested interest theory is particularly useful as a means for suggesting how role plays can be designed to generate situational interest. The more a negotiation role play can generate vested interest, the more we believe participants will engage with the activity in ways that facilitate learning. William Crano (1995) identified five factors that can foster vested interest and which we believe can be applied to improving role‐play design.

Stake refers to the degree and magnitude of the perceived personal consequences of behaving in a manner consistent with an attitude (Crano 1995). In negotiation role plays, the stakes are sometimes quite low because results obtained in the exercise (i.e., terms of negotiated settlements) will have little direct impact on participants outside of the exercise. As mentioned earlier, the resources to be exchanged between the fictional parties remain theoretical. In addition, participants' final grades are frequently unaffected by their performance in the role‐play exercise. Depending on the design of the session, moreover, actual outcomes may not necessarily even be discussed as part of the exercise debriefing. In situations such as these, students' performance is not exposed to scrutiny by peers, which we feel eliminates much of the very real concern that students would otherwise have in preserving their self‐image and reputation. In such cases, it is clear to see how the absence of significant stakes might undermine participants' engagement.

Salience refers to how much the negotiation issues matter to participants. In other words, the prominence of an issue, as perceived by a participant, shapes the strength of his or her resulting attitude, and renders it more influential in guiding behavior (Crano 1995). In simulated negotiations, participants may often be asked to negotiate a deal regarding a subject they find unimportant. For instance, participants may be asked to participate in a simulated car sale, but some may have very little interest in cars and may not be planning to negotiate a car purchase anytime soon. In such cases, one would expect the salience of the exercise to be quite low. As a result, these participants' levels of engagement might be lowered.

Certainty refers to the gain–loss consequences of an action and the extent to which outcomes are linked to specific behaviors. Even if a negotiation exercise has high stakes and salience, participants must believe that gains and losses result from their own behaviors in order for vested interest to develop. Unfortunately, in some role plays, participants are able to avoid real gains and losses, by, for example, terminating the negotiation with an open‐ended agreement, agreeing to “meet later to finalize the contract,” or concluding deals contingent on future commitments that have uncertain implications in terms of their present value (see Coben 2012). In addition, even when clear terms are agreed upon, it can be difficult for participants to see how their behaviors have affected their outcomes, and to compare their own outcomes with those of other participants. This is particularly true when exercise debriefing is shallow or where no established metric for evaluating outcomes is used. Participants who are unable to evaluate their own negotiation effectiveness are less likely to be engaged in role plays.

Immediacy refers to the amount of time that will transpire between an action and its resulting consequences (Crano 1995). In general, the shorter the time between behavior and consequences, the higher the vested interest. In the context of negotiation role plays, immediacy functions similarly to certainty: both have direct relevance to the practice of debriefing negotiation role‐play experiences. When the role‐play debriefing is insufficient or delayed, vested interest is less likely to develop.

Self‐efficacy refers to a person's belief in his or her capacity to produce a desired result (Bandura 1986). Applied to negotiation role plays, self‐efficacy is the degree to which participants believe that they are capable of performing an action associated with an attitude or advocated position. We propose that participants will be more likely to have a vested interest in a negotiation role play when they believe they can successfully apply the negotiation strategies that the scenario calls for, particularly strategies and tactics already discussed in class. When instructors create conditions that enable students to practice the skills they are learning, we believe engagement can be increased.

We now offer some recommendations, based on our experience and in reference to supporting research, for how to increase role‐play authenticity by enhancing the ecological validity of role‐play design. Table One summarizes our proposed strategies for fostering student engagement by increasing the authenticity of participants' role‐play experiences.

Alexandra Crampton and Melissa Manwaring (2008) discussed how to inject elements of reality into an otherwise controlled and artificial negotiation role play. For instance, in the context of a role‐play exercise based on a real‐world case (e.g., a corporate merger, labor management dispute, or international conflict), participants could be provided with source materials from the real‐world situation upon which the case was based (e.g., media coverage, contracts, or peace treaties). Noam Ebner and Kimberlee Kovach (2010) have suggested that the medium through which role information is provided to participants, rather than being just sheet(s) of paper, can be modified to achieve more connection to the real‐world setting of the role play. For instance, for those playing the role of lawyers, role information could be presented in the form of a realistic “case file” containing initial pleadings, and documents related to the case.

In addition to these suggestions, we feel that requiring participants to dress appropriately and providing them with opportunities to meet privately during the negotiation are simple, yet effective ways to inject mundane realism into many role‐play exercises. Wearing a T‐shirt is incongruent with negotiating a corporate merger. Asking students to dress in a manner more congruent with the setting (i.e., business formal) represents one way to improve mundane realism. In addition, providing breakout rooms for management and union representatives in a labor negotiation may enhance mundane realism. At the very least, we suggest that providing private meeting rooms may help foster mundane realism in most negotiation exercises because it will free participants from the distractions of hearing or seeing other negotiations occurring in the same room.

While increasing mundane realism, instructors should be careful to avoid drawing too much attention to surface‐level details. Crampton and Manwaring (2008) note that the value of enhanced realism can be undermined if it draws attention away from the goals of the exercise. Therefore, the goal should be to use moderate amounts of mundane realism, to strive for what Noam Ebner and Yael Efron (2005) refer to as “pseudo‐reality,” by which an exercise captures sufficient student interest without shifting the focus away from its underlying pedagogical goals.

Another strategy to make a role play realistic is to increase task‐based realism. Some authors have recommended that simulation designers avoid crafting overly complex role plays because, if they are too complex, the key lessons can get lost (Feinman 1995). But when role‐play materials fail to include information that participants perceive as useful, it encourages imprecision and oversimplification of the issues. And if the pedagogical goals for the exercise include having participants sort through data to determine what is important, then having access to a richer set of information would be important. In general, we agree with Bruce Patton (2009) that a good role‐play exercise should thoroughly explain the parties' interests, as well as provide ample information concerning their options. In particular, clear information about the best alternative to a negotiated agreement is crucial for participants to be able to evaluate whether it is in their interest to conclude an agreement. For example, if there is a potential alternative buyer in a sales negotiation, we recommend clearly describing the details of the potential alternative offer.

Furthermore, rather than including all pertinent information in participants' private role instructions, we propose that instructors or trainers might consider withholding certain details, which would be available only upon request and only to those to whom it occurs to ask for additional information. Making additional information available only upon request not only helps make the negotiation more realistic, but it also highlights an important lesson: that complete information is rarely available at the outset of negotiations and additional research is often necessary.

Finally, real‐life negotiations are not always linear predictable processes and may involve unpredictable turning points. Thus, unforeseen events could be introduced midway through an exercise, such as a financial problem or a union strike to add a realistic twist to the unfolding of the role play (Ebner and Efron 2005). For example, in a complex, commercial real estate role play, we have introduced an expert report midway through the simulation that pinpoints potential structural flaws in the building. As a result, participants in this exercise have needed to adjust their strategies in real time, as they would have had to do in a real‐life situation.

In some role plays, the level of psychological realism for participants may be low because they may not have had experience in the negotiation context, or because aspects of the role they are asked to play stray far from their personal values, beliefs, knowledge, and/or personality. For example, asking an introverted participant to play the role of a narcissistic actor may limit the authenticity of the experience before it has even begun. To increase psychological realism, one option is to cast roles based on participants' experience, or affinity with certain roles or characters to be played. From our experience, casting is a simple but effective strategy for increasing realism. On the other hand, we realize that it is frequently helpful for participants in role plays to recognize the limits of their prior experiences and preferred ways of negotiating. Therefore, casting participants deliberately against type may also be effective when the pedagogical goal is to help them further develop their skills or view the problem from another perspective.

In addition, we also believe coaching can increase the level of psychological realism. We often whisper suggestions to participants who are behaving unrealistically — presumably because they may not know how someone in that position would realistically behave — to enhance the realism of the negotiation scenario. For example, when participants introduce too much humor into a role play, we ask them whether this choice of behavior is intended to accomplish strategic goals, whether they would do so were it not a simulation, and if they are deviating from authentic behavior. Finally, a more intensive strategy would be to use external people or even professional actors as negotiation counterparts. For example, we used actors for the final examination of a mediator certification program because we felt the existing relationships between students would prevent them from negotiating realistically against one another. Knowing each other too well, we suspected that they would not want to challenge their peers. Based on our experience, carefully briefing actors on their roles, their interests, and their best alternatives to a negotiated agreement, as well as on the learning goals, is a key success factor, given that most actors know little about the pedagogy of negotiation teaching. Because the use of professional actors will typically entail the expenditure of financial resources and require considerable preparation time, we reserve this recommendation for situations in which the educator or trainer feels that it is crucial for participants to learn how to negotiate with a party who is exhibiting high levels of emotion (e.g., anger or sadness) and where one cannot rely on participants themselves to play this type of role authentically.

We will now provide some specific recommendations, based on our experience and our interpretation of the related literature, which we believe educators should bear in mind when designing or employing role plays in order to increase situational interest and thereby student engagement. These recommendations are provided in relation to the five antecedents of vested interest and are outlined in Table Two.

Some authors have suggested methods for raising the stakes in role plays. For example, Joseph F. Byrnes (1990) has proposed an in‐class negotiation entitled “Negotiating with Your Professor.” During this negotiation game, participants are asked to negotiate with their professor in front of the classroom based on the premise that being observed by their classmates would raise the stakes (i.e., fear of losing face). Roger Volkema (2007) suggested that one way of increasing the stakes for students was to use real money in the simulations. In some of his negotiation classes, students had to pay a player's fee at the beginning of the course, and each negotiation exercise had an actual dollar value at risk.

More recently, several authors have argued that another effective way to increase the stakes is to link role‐play outcomes to students' grades (Coben 2012; Ebner, Efron, and Kovach 2012). A possible drawback of this strategy, however, is that participants may be tempted to “play it safe” and avoid trying new strategies for fear of risking their grades, which could limit their learning. This practice also supposes that role‐play outcomes can be compared easily. Moreover, it may inadvertently put too much emphasis on substantives issues or scores as opposed to relational or process outcomes, which are more subjective to assess (Susskind 1985). Indeed, focusing only on “bottom‐line” numbers risks neglecting the development of other important negotiation skills, such as developing a long‐term focus, fostering good relationships among parties, and maintaining a trustworthy reputation, and may send students unintended messages about what is most important in negotiations (see Ebner, Efron, and Kovach 2012).

For these reasons, we recommend that those who choose to link role‐play outcomes to students' grades do so for only a limited number of exercises in the course. Another option for increasing the stakes without overemphasizing the bottom line is to base part of each student's grade on his or her reputational ranking, based on evaluations made by classmates (see Welsh 2012). In a recent article, Nancy Welsh has argued that this practice provides a “useful counterweight” to the more traditional narrow focus on bottom‐line numbers, and underscores for students the long‐term importance of reputation to their careers.

Another option for increasing the stakes would be to seek a consensus among students as to the relative merits of various negotiated outcomes discussed during the exercise debriefing (Coben 2012). Similarly, Joel Lee (2012) has discussed a method by which students determine, in advance of the role play, the criteria upon which they will be evaluated. These methods make participants' performance more subject to public scrutiny, thus increasing the stakes. Moreover, because participants have a say in the determination of these criteria, this practice can also make them more salient.

Another technique for increasing participants' sense that they have a stake in the role play is to announce in advance that a select number of more and less “valuable” deals will be chosen for in‐depth discussion in the classroom debriefing. We have used this strategy and have observed that participants' desire to maintain a positive image can go a long way toward increasing their engagement in the exercise. With any of these strategies, however, care must be taken to make sure the participants are not embarrassed in front of their classmates. Establishing a positive, safe climate for experimentation in the classroom is a necessary precondition for these techniques to work.

In some role plays, salience may be low because the facts and issues involved in the negotiation are not personally relevant to the participants. Some authors have suggested inducing salience by crafting a role‐play exercise that elicits a context or a topic that is more meaningful to participants. For example, in the “negotiate with your professor” exercise (Byrnes 1990), participants must simulate a negotiation about their grade for the course, a topic that would be personally meaningful to them.

Depending on the heterogeneity of interests in the class, however, it could be difficult to select contexts or topics that would interest every student. One method for inducing salience would be to describe how a chosen case is similar to other situations that might be more meaningful to participants (for instance, reminding MBA students that hiring an opera singer or a football player, is, with the exception of the surface‐level details, much like hiring a corporate employee). Instructors could also ask students directly to identify different settings in which the concepts learned could be usefully applied — this could be particularly effective at increasing the salience of the concepts themselves as well as of the simulation (Loewenstein, Thompson, and Gentner 2003; McAdoo and Manwaring 2009). In fact, learning theorists recommend comparing multiple cases to avoid becoming overly focused on the particular details of specific role‐play exercises to the exclusion of the more universal lessons that can be drawn from them.

This same concern applies when using “pseudo‐reality” in role‐play designs. Ebner and Efron (2005) presented a framework for role‐play design that rested upon the balanced use of real‐life events and facts as backdrops to negotiation role plays to increase their salience. According to their approach, however, if reality threatens to get in the way of the learning experience, the real‐life facts can be altered or masked. For example, parties might simulate Israeli–Palestinian negotiations to practice their skills in an exciting, engaging, and closer to real‐life setting. But a group of Israeli and Palestinian participants might benefit more from a negotiation scenario that includes many of the same details, interests, and alternatives — but has a different setting (e.g., a crisis in Cyprus) that is less likely to trigger their anxieties about the real conflict or force them to “represent” the side they belong to in real life.

Coaching students regarding the importance of intangible issues can also increase salience. For example, when role plays seek to elicit emotions or other experiences that can be challenging to simulate in controlled settings, the instructor could briefly ask all those playing one role to vividly describe how that person feels humiliated by the actions taken by the other party in order to help the participants better understand why some issues are more relevant to the role they are playing.

Similarly, the instructor could coach participants about how important it is to accomplish a particular objective. Based on our experience, this is most useful when a role play involves intangible issues, such as honor. For example, in an exercise concerning a joint venture that went sour, we coached participants who played the role of a betrayed party to make sure that the importance of receiving an apology would be taken seriously. We should clarify that our recommendation here is not to encourage participants to “overact,” but simply to draw their attention to the importance of taking certain qualitative aspects of the exercise seriously.

Participants in negotiation role plays sometimes decide to avoid or postpone making clear “deal or no deal” decisions. For instance, parties may both agree to “meet next week” to continue discussions. Although such an outcome is plausible in real life, it can significantly impair the ability of students to benefit from the exercise debriefing. Because the role play remains unfinished, the lack of certainty about the ultimate outcome makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of their negotiation strategy and behavior.

As a result, it may help to explicitly request final agreements only or to add details to the role information that clarify parties' real need to make a decision in the near term (e.g., deadlines are looming, alternative offers are expiring, etc.). Similarly, asking for written agreements, whether signed or unsigned, may help create vested interest through certainty because research has shown that the act of agreeing to something in writing strengthens a person's commitment to it (Deutsch and Gerard 1955).

Formulating explicit agreement terms does not preclude parties from adding contingency clauses or future commitments to their deals. But it does help prevent the conclusion of incomplete deals or those containing ill‐specified commitments. For instance, as James Coben (2012) has noted, role‐play participants frequently underestimate the value of future commitments as part of their deal making (e.g., giving a tenant free rent for life in exchange for dropping a potential lawsuit). To increase the certainty of the value of deals containing future commitments, instructors should consider providing a mechanism by which participants can calculate the present value of these types of clauses.

In certain prior approaches to facilitating participants' evaluation of their negotiation experiences in role plays, the emphasis has been placed on the extent to which an outcome can be clearly assessed. For example, Lawrence Susskind (1985) promoted scorable games as an effective way of teaching negotiation, arguing that, when outcomes are readily scorable, participants will have a clear idea of where they stand relative to one another at the completion of the exercise. Furthermore, a scorable exercise facilitates comparison and analysis during debriefing. We agree that role plays with scorable outcomes have these advantages. For the reasons we described previously in the section on increasing the stakes, we also believe that providing additional information — such as reputational indexes (Welsh 2012) and rankings (Coben 2012) — can complement the feedback provided by scorable exercises.

Another option for increasing certainty would be to present brief surveys at the end of role‐play exercises to assess the “subjective value” that students believe marked their experience in the exercise. The subjective value inventory (Curhan, Elfenbein, and Xu 2006), for instance, gives those who have just participated in a negotiation (simulated or otherwise) an opportunity to assess how they feel about the experience along four distinct dimensions: their satisfaction with the instrumental outcome, with themselves, with the process, and with the relationship. This instrument could also give participants feedback about their counterparts' experiences when negotiating with them. (This could be aggregated across multiple partners to preserve confidentiality and to highlight broader trends.) Given that the ultimate effectiveness of a negotiation is multidimensional, discussing a variety of outcomes as part of the debriefing would help participants gain insight about the effectiveness of their approaches to negotiating.

Even when a “deal or no deal” decision is reached, participants need ways of comparing their behaviors and associated outcomes with others' — this is a chief advantage of role plays. Thus, to increase students' engagement by designing role plays that offer them reliable means of judging the results of their actions, educators must structure their debriefing sessions to incorporate not only related theoretical concepts, but also the particular behaviors and outcomes that were experienced by participants in the exercise (see Robert Bordone and Chad Carr 2013, also in this issue.) Otherwise, participants are less likely to develop certainty regarding the effectiveness of their behaviors, and in turn will have less vested interest in subsequent role plays. The ultimate goal of debriefing is to provide students with “… tools to analyze specific situations and make choices informed by an understanding of why certain techniques might work or how they might be adapted to work” (Deason et al. 2013: 306).

As Patton (2009) has pointed out, feedback has always been a key part of simulated negotiation. Moreover, vested interest theory suggests that how quickly participants receive feedback after a role play may also affect their engagement in the exercise. As such, establishing a practice of discussing negotiation outcomes immediately following the exercise (i.e., rather than postponing this discussion until the next class session, for instance) could increase participants' sense of immediacy, and thus vested interest. Where this is not possible due to timing restrictions, instructors and trainers should always look for ways to give participants feedback as soon as possible (Deason et al. 2013). For example, many trainers and professors ask participants to record their insights in a diary or a class blog. When a blog is used, the instructor or trainer should comment on participant posts to provide rapid feedback. Based on our experience, the systematic provision of timely feedback increases learning through the sharing of insights, but it also increases participants' satisfaction levels with the course.

Research on self‐efficacy (Bandura 1997) suggests that it can be fostered in four distinct ways in classroom settings: enactive mastery, vicarious experience, feedback, and physiological arousal. More specifically, in relation to negotiation skills, self‐efficacy may be increased by providing opportunities for individuals to correctly enact the requisite behaviors (e.g., practice sessions), to observe others' behavior in similar situations (e.g., prerecorded clips or classroom demonstrations of negotiation techniques by experts), to receive verbal feedback, and to experience positive facilitating physiological arousal (e.g., enthusiasm) rather than inhibiting arousal (e.g., anxiety).

Research on negotiator self‐efficacy suggests that it positively predicts performance in role‐play exercises (Sullivan, O'Connor, and Burris 2006). In addition, the theorized antecedents of self‐efficacy clearly have direct correspondence to elements of role‐play design and usage. Role plays are frequently preceded by lectures, or at least assigned readings about negotiation strategy and/or tactics. Although participants may have significant interest in employing these strategies, they may lack confidence in their abilities to do so. More specifically, if participants have had little opportunity to practice recommended approaches prior to the negotiation role play, have witnessed few examples of their effective use by others, have received no feedback on how or whether they are effectively employing them, and/or are overcome by anxiety with regard to the upcoming exercise, then their engagement with the exercise is likely to suffer as a result.

Leaving students to take unmanaged “trial and error” approaches to their behavior in role plays may not be an effective way of fostering self‐efficacy. We believe a good alternative strategy is to focus on specific skills and to design role plays that allow participants to practice these skills (Patton 2009). In particular, we believe that negotiation instructors and trainers should include ample amounts of “how to” recommendation in their courses and challenge participants to try out these strategies in the role plays. We routinely ask participants to select one strategic process goal before starting a role‐play exercise. For example, participants could set a goal to first exchange information with their counterparts about interests and priorities, before exploring potential solutions. Not only does having a strategic goal help foster engagement with the role‐play exercise, but it also facilitates debriefing as participants can assess whether their goals have been met and discuss why they succeeded or failed. Through discussions of how their process goals related to their negotiation outcomes, participants can obtain the kind of feedback they need to develop their skills and increase their self‐efficacy.

As Bobbi McAdoo and Melissa Manwaring (2009) have pointed out, a key element of lasting and flexible learning is the use of learning activities tailored toward specific performance‐oriented goals. Therefore, by helping participants establish clear goals before a role play and evaluate their performance afterward (following the recommendations discussed previously for exercise debriefing), teachers or trainers will help participants gain greater confidence in their capabilities and, as a result, achieve a heightened level of vested interest in subsequent role‐play activities. Fostering self‐efficacy may be particularly important in this regard because research has shown that negotiators with high self‐efficacy are more likely to achieve performance‐oriented goals (Stevens and Gist 1997).

Because negotiation role plays are a core element of negotiation pedagogy, attention must be paid to ensuring they are effective at facilitating learning. We applaud those who have proposed, in recent years, a variety of ways to improve student learning through innovative alternatives to traditional in‐class, role‐play exercises for negotiation education and training (e.g., learning through designing role plays, Druckman and Ebner 2008; e.g., adventure learning, Manwaring, McAdoo, and Cheldelin 2010). Because the design of role‐play exercises may sometimes fail to fully engage students, we have provided in this article a series of theoretically grounded recommendations for how more incremental changes can be incorporated into role‐play design in order to increase student engagement and improve learning‐based outcomes. More specifically, we have proposed that participants' degree of engagement depends on the extent to which role‐play designs exhibit authenticity and promote situational interest. While attention to ecological validity should result in role plays that consist of more authentic learning experiences, role‐play exercises designed in light of vested interest theory should encourage participants to take them more seriously.

In this article, we have proposed a number of recommendations for increasing engagement in negotiation role plays. Because there is a likely limit to the number of strategies that can be implemented in any given instance, we have summarized our recommendations in Tables One and Two, in which we further distinguish what we believe are the more basic steps from the more advanced, although we acknowledge that it would be unrealistic to attempt to apply all of these recommendations in every negotiation role‐play exercise. Therefore, we have classified our recommendations in such a way that educators can choose from basic or more advanced strategies. Because learning goals will vary across contexts, we leave the decision as to which recommendations are most suitable to a given situation to the educator. Given the importance of engagement for student learning, however, we recommend that all negotiation educators strive to make their role plays more engaging, and thus more enriching, for their students.