An award-winning social psychology experiment reveals why we often fail to bargain effectively with each other. This deceptively simple experiment examines the effect of two vital aspects of bargaining: threat and communication.

Bargaining is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it. It doesn''t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone. This agreement could be as simple as choosing a restaurant with a friend, or deciding which TV channel to watch. At the other end of the scale, bargaining can affect the fate of nations.

Big-scale or small-scale, bargaining is a central part of our lives. Understanding the psychological processes involved in bargaining can provide us with huge benefits in our everyday lives. In a classic, award-winning series of studies, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in bargaining: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats (Deutsch & Krauss, 1962).

To do this, they used a game which forces two people to bargain with each other. Eventhough Deutsch and Krauss used a series of different conditions - nine in fact - once you understand the basic game, all the conditions are only slight variations.

So, imagine you were a clerical worker at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1950s and you''ve been asked to take part in a psychology study. Every psychology study has a story, and this one revolves around two trucking companies.

Experiment 1: Keep on trucking
Before the experiment proper starts, the researcher explains that you''ll be playing a game against another participant. In the game you will run a trucking company. The object of the game is the same as a real trucking company: to make as much money as possible.

Like the real-life trucking company you have to deliver as a number of of your goods as possible to their destination in the shortest possible time. But in this game you only have one starting point, one destination and one competitor. It looks like a pretty simple game.

Here''s the catch.

The road map your one truck has to travel across presents you with a dilemma. You are the ''Acme'' trucking company and your fellow participant is the ''Bolt'' trucking company, eventhough both of you have an identical problem. Have a look below. Posted by: Jerry    Source

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