What do novices think about the negotiation process? Though scholars have assumed that negotiators rely on cognitive scripts to guide their behavior in negotiation, scant empirical evidence documents the existence and content of these scripts. A sample of novice negotiators listed all the actions that they believed constituted successful negotiation. The findings indicate that people have a socially‐shared sense of the appropriate sequence of behaviors for negotiating. Closer scrutiny, however, shows that many of these behaviors are associated with poor negotiated outcomes. Specifically, an investigation of the content of these scripts shows that novices believe that incompatible interests, sequential issue settlement, impasses, and competitive behavior are common to the negotiation process.