Research Roundup: Recent Findings Relevant to Doing Conflict Better

Here’s the latest research roundup, my periodic summary of research that gives us practical information for doing conflict and negotiation better:

When Seeing Is Misleading: Clutter Leads to High-Confidence Errors: This study found that people make more “high-confidence” errors when confronted with visual clutter. The authors believe that the implications of the study go beyond visual chaos, though. “If people find themselves confronted with multiple events in a chaotic, confusing environment, they may decide about some aspect of the situation and be totally wrong even though they have full confidence in their decision.” Seems like it’s reasonable to suspect that a tense or high-conflict environment may increase the chance that decisions are substantially less effective. And yet you’ll feel quite confident about that decision, poor though it is. Yikes! This may be pretty important information about the high cost of workplace conflict.

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer Sausage? This Forbes article’s almost worth reading just for the title alone. The general thrust is a recap of research showing that people tend to make a certain type of systematic error when predicting their future satisfaction. The author asks, “…would you be happier working for Firm A, which will pay you $94,000 per year and pay others who do the same work $100,000, or for Firm B, which will pay you $89,000 and pay others $83,000? ” While the obvious answer is Firm A, research suggests that going with Firm B will leave you happier in the long run because “Happiness levels depend inversely on the earning levels of a person’s neighbors. Prosperity next door makes you dissatisfied. It’s relative income that matters: When everyone in a society gets wealthier, average well-being stays the same.” If you make different comparisons when you think about the future than you actually make when you get there, then there are some intriguing implications for salary negotiations.