Doctoral Dissertation Research: The development of negotiation skills: children as efficient decision-makers

This research program identifies the basic building blocks that give rise to effective decision-making including cultural variance in emerging decision-making strategies. A deeper understanding of children’s negotiation abilities is useful in thinking about how children solve problems and resolve conflicts. Moreover, it is arguably more productive to intervene in maladaptive decision-making strategies as they unfold in real-time rather than waiting until adulthood when such errors are harder to undo. Developmental and cross-cultural research in this space is useful for educators and policymakers as they engage in training the next generation of critical thinkers and strategic decision-makers. Indeed, this body of work can assist educators and policymakers in creating teaching methods and curricula that foster critical thinking and problem-solving skills from an early age. This research program explores the development of strategic decision-making. In everyday life, people often must decide how to handle situations in which they either share the same interests with others or have competing interests. In negotiations, the best outcomes are achieved when each person makes concessions on lower-priority interests to make gains on higher-priority interests. Little is known about how the conceptual skills that support successful negotiations develop in the first place and across societies. Across five empirical studies, the study has five overarching goals: (a) probe early markers of effective negotiations; (b) explore young humans’ capacity to engage in effective negotiations involving competing and overlapping interests; (c) observe how efficient agreements vary across age groups and regions; (d) examine dyadic real-time negotiation strategies, including personality factors that lead to efficient agreements; and (e) determine the synchrony (or delay) in one’s basic ability to make efficient agreements and its application in real-time negotiations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.