Online mediation had been spreading rapidly as a mode of practice, even before the entire profession shifted online during the COVID-19 era. In this chapter, Ebner and Rainey survey the development of online mediation within the wider context of the growth of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). The chapter presents a snapshot of the field’s status quo with respect to stakeholders, modes of communication and the technology utilized, and addresses substantive and process issues in online mediation: mediation process models, stages and issues; practitioner skills; professional issues; ethics, and practitioner standards.
As the field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has grown and evolved, it has often met resistance from practitioners and theorists alike. One core theme has always been that the interpersonal processes of negotiation and mediation are fundamentally dependent on an elusive quality or aspect dubbed 'the human touch'. The cold impersonal environment of the internet, the arguments went, is inherently bereft of the human touch.
ODR had been growing rapidly even before the COVID-19 pandemic drove all forms of professional practice, including negotiation and mediation, online. The time has come, therefore, to reframe these objections into appreciative exploration:
Just what is this 'human touch' and in what sense is it absent in online communication? How can practitioners regain the human touch, and bring it to bear in online interactions? Might there be ways in which we can imbue online negotiation and mediation processes with the human touch even beyond the levels encountered in-person interactions?
To transform an ineffable notion into applicable theory and practice, the chapter outlines three key human-touch areas: trust, empathy, and social intuition. The chapter explains each area through a human-touch perspective. It then maps out the challenges to each in the online environment, and recommends helpful practices for enhancing each of these human-touch areas in online negotiation and mediation processes.
Star Wars characters are often called to choose between their destinies and their preferred paths of action.
So are negotiators, who are wired for one basic conflict mode yet choose to act strategically.
This chapter explains the world of conflict orientation and strategic choice through the lens of Star Wars... and explains Star Wars through negotiation and conflict theory.
We are currently approaching the midpoint of the first century of ADR development in the U.S and around the world. It is a remarkable point in time to be involved in the ADR field, marked as it is by reflection upon the first half of The ADR Century and planning ahead for the second.
This article begins by briefly surveying presentations and conversations at recent field-wide gatherings, aimed at bridging the past and future of ADR.
Turning to the future, the article explains how the ADR field can build on its previous successes by refining its conceptual models in both theory and practice. Focusing on ADR education in law schools, its key suggestion is that ADR’s educational model also needs paradigmatic revision in the form of a strategic pivot, if we wish the field to maintain and expand its beneficial impact across systems, professions, and society at large.
Prescriptively, the article recommends the educational arm of the ADR field adopt a broader vision of its educational scale and impact, and offers a number of examples of such broadly-aimed activity. Bringing large numbers of non-students—members of the public who are not enrolled in our schools or our courses—into the circle of those we affect through ADR education will benefit our schools, expand ADR practice, and strengthen the overall impact of the ADR field.
Teachers of conflict, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution who have transitioned their in-person courses to synchronous video conferencing are posed with significant pedagogical challenges. How will they stoke their students’ curiosity and maintain their students’ interest? How will students find the motivation and energy necessary to engage in nonstop videoconferences, day in and day out? How are they to maintain the high cognitive function required for our courses in the face of Zoom fatigue and reduced social interaction?
In light of these challenges, we explored another activity that students (and their teachers) not only engage in, but can’t pull themselves away from. Drawing on the literature examining psychological and neuroscientific aspects of binge-watching television shows, we propose an innovative approach to designing courses our students will want to binge-learn.
Washington University Journal of Law and Policy , 2020
This paper adopts a systems-design approach to focus courts and lawyers on the hitherto unexamine... more This paper adopts a systems-design approach to focus courts and lawyers on the hitherto unexamined question of how involving lawyers in the design, development, and implementation of online dispute resolution (ODR) programs, will strengthen ODR justice outcomes and court-delivered justice overall. Behind the scenes of every courthouse in the United States today, justice system professionals are grappling with the same set of basic questions: how to get by on fewer resources, how to cope with the access to justice crisis, and how to provide better justice outcomes. To help solve these justice problems, courts have begun to appreciate technology’s potential to streamline processes, increase access, and reduce costs. Indeed, over the course of the past few years, courts across the United States have been designing and piloting online dispute resolution (ODR) systems. We are currently at a tipping point, at which court ODR, at once a new approach to caseflow management and a court-imple...
This paper discusses the ways in which people have changed over the past few decades, largely owi... more This paper discusses the ways in which people have changed over the past few decades, largely owing to the influences of being increasingly immersed in a technological world. Our daily patterns, as well as the way we go about tasks at home and on the job have significantly changed. The literature on neuroscience and physiology suggest that our very brains are physically changing, resulting in changes in the way we act, process information and relate to one another.
How might all this affect negotiation? Surveying the literature on negotiation, one finds few suggestions that significant change has occurred in the technological era. Change is recognized only regarding negotiators’ instrumental use of technology. We negotiate over new platforms, and must tweak our actions to cope with the effects of each medium. Negotiation itself, though, is not considered to be in flux, and neither are negotiators.
This paper suggests that negotiators have changed, and that as a result, perhaps negotiation itself is in the midst of a change-process. The paper suggests a new research agenda for the negotiation field, re-exploring frameworks, assumptions and practices long held as near-axiomatic.
Download at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2915204
St. John's University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 19-0004, 2019
This paper is a wake-up call for the legal profession: Heed the justice changes that are upon us ... more This paper is a wake-up call for the legal profession: Heed the justice changes that are upon us or risk extinction. Online dispute resolution (hereinafter ODR) is currently being incorporated into U.S and international court systems, re-shaping and re-defining justice as we know it today. Courts and clients, two stakeholders in our justice system, are increasingly receptive to ODR as a viable option to help provide and access justice efficiently and affordably. The legal profession, the third stakeholder in our justice system, however, has been slower to react. As ODR plays an increasingly prominent role in the court system, it will eliminate some of the justice roles currently reserved for lawyers, diminish others, and create new areas of practice. We highlight ODR innovations already in the justice system and project the paths of ODR’s likely expansion. This paper alerts the legal profession and legal education community to take heed of these developments and become active contributors in shaping these justice innovations.
Viewing ODR’s entry into the court as an evolution of the justice system, we identify six adaptive skills that will redefine “thinking like a lawyer” and help the legal profession avoid extinction and remain relevant. Some of these are currently marginally addressed in the law school curriculum, others are entirely absent. Law schools, the primary disseminators of legal education, must re-align their curriculum with the skills that practice-competent lawyers require to succeed in the ODR-infused justice system.
In C. Honeyman, J. Coben & G. DiPalo (Eds.) Venturing Beyond the Classroom: Vol. 2 in the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Series. DRI Press. , Aug 25, 2009
Druckman and Ebner carefully review an overwhelming number of studies that conclude that simulations (in all fields, not just negotiation) typically fail to live up to their promise. One quirk of the studies, however, drew their particular interest and inspired their own research: it seemed that students who designed simulations learned more than those who participated in them. Druckman and Ebner use this clue to develop a different kind of negotiation simulation–one in which the student simulates being a teacher, and designs ...
Increasingly, negotiation interactions are taking place through channels other than face-to-face meetings. Negotiators find themselves engaging through e-communication channels–primarily e-mail. The communication channel through which the negotiation is conducted affects the dynamics of the interaction, the degree of inter-party trust and cooperation, the information shared and the outcome.
In C. Honeyman, J. Coben & G. DiPalo (Eds.) Venturing Beyond the Classroom: Vol. 2 in the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Series. DRI Press. , Aug 25, 2008
Matz and Ebner consider the impending collision between teachers' strong desire to use role-play and other simulation exercises, and the rise of online teaching, in which the students may never see each other. They outline a series of tools that might bring the central advantages of using simulations to electronically mediated courses.
Of all the direct and oblique spotlights President Donald Trump has cast on negotiation, which will trigger a historical trajectory that will significantly change negotiation teaching? I suggest one such enduring impact concerns the key negotiation concepts of truth, facts, and trust. This paper describes how the traditional essence of these concepts is under direct assault by President Trump and his administration, considers implications for the negotiation classroom, and suggests methods that negotiation teachers can use in order to cope with them.
As ODR enters the court system, it is eagerly embraced by two of the justice system's traditional stakeholders: the public, and the courts. The third stakeholder, lawyers and the legal profession, has largely been absent from the table when discussions on initiating and designing court-ODR systems have taken place.
In this paper, we explain the roots of this phenomenon and describe a conference session at the 2019 International Forum on ODR at which we shared them with ODR experts and court leaders. We engaged participants in a community conversation about engaging the legal profession in this justice evolution, in order to ensure its success and strengthen its justice outcomes. Together with participants, we generated a list of suggestions and best practices for engaging the legal profession constructively around these issues.
This paper was written together with Elayne Greenberg of St Johns University School of Law.
Two approaches to the process of guided discovery learning are compared for their impacts on concept understanding. One, referred to as design, emphasizes invention and draws on the simulation literature. The other, referred to as case analysis, focuses on discovery and draws on the case-based reasoning literature. Following a lecture on four cognitive-bias concepts, management students were assigned randomly to a design, case analysis, or lecture-only condition: A first experiment compared a design with a lecture-only condition and a second experiment compared case analysis with a lecture-only condition. Both design and case analysis students understood the concepts better than lecture-only students. Designers in the first experiment retained their understanding of the concepts better than the case analysts in the second experiment. The impacts on learning for design were similar to those obtained in earlier research where design was compared with role-playing and a classroom lecture. Implications of the findings for theory development and practice are discussed.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036029
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the practice of resolving disputes via the Internet or digital applications, has been developing since the mid-1990s. As the field has grown and gained traction, it has increasingly received attention from professional associations and industry leaders in the world of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field – in both the public and private sectors.
As the field develops and individual initiatives become widely adopted, the attention it receives from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions – already beginning to be heard from within the field – derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field.
In this paper, we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field’s governance and make the case that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low-to-no” state of governance in ODR – and the developments that are likely should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher-governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why – addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed – no matter how beneficial internal governance may be.
We do not, in this article, intend to decide any of these questions – but rather to pose them to the ODR field and to the wider fields of ADR and conflict management. We point out why the ODR field is at a developmental point that is highly suitable for discussing and deciding these questions – and why these decisions might have far-reaching implications for a wide range of conflict-related fields.
The 2006 ASTD Training & Performace Sourcebook, Feb 9, 2006
Yael Efron, LLM, an attorney-mediator, specializes in mediation and negotia-tion training. She te... more Yael Efron, LLM, an attorney-mediator, specializes in mediation and negotia-tion training. She teaches conflict resolution and law at the College of Management and at Tel-Hai College, Israel. Yael and Noam co-direct Tachlit Mediation Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Specializing in designing conflict resolution simulations and games, their writing on the subject has been accepted for publication in Negotiation Journal and The Creative Problem Solver's Handbook for Negotiators and Mediators.
If forced to be concise and pithy, what would a room full of negotiation scholars cook up? The compilation of recipes was in response to the request for each person’s own definition of negotiation effectiveness put in the form of a recipe. Not only is this interesting in terms of seeing the similarities and differences among this leading and diverse group of scholars, the exercise itself is one that can easily be replicated in negotiation or dispute resolution classes. It forces each participant to think about (a) ingredients; (b) amount of each; and (c) the order in which each skill is utilized. Have fun cooking up your own favorite dish!
Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2419712
Online mediation had been spreading rapidly as a mode of practice, even before the entire profession shifted online during the COVID-19 era. In this chapter, Ebner and Rainey survey the development of online mediation within the wider context of the growth of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). The chapter presents a snapshot of the field’s status quo with respect to stakeholders, modes of communication and the technology utilized, and addresses substantive and process issues in online mediation: mediation process models, stages and issues; practitioner skills; professional issues; ethics, and practitioner standards.
As the field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has grown and evolved, it has often met resistance from practitioners and theorists alike. One core theme has always been that the interpersonal processes of negotiation and mediation are fundamentally dependent on an elusive quality or aspect dubbed 'the human touch'. The cold impersonal environment of the internet, the arguments went, is inherently bereft of the human touch.
ODR had been growing rapidly even before the COVID-19 pandemic drove all forms of professional practice, including negotiation and mediation, online. The time has come, therefore, to reframe these objections into appreciative exploration:
Just what is this 'human touch' and in what sense is it absent in online communication? How can practitioners regain the human touch, and bring it to bear in online interactions? Might there be ways in which we can imbue online negotiation and mediation processes with the human touch even beyond the levels encountered in-person interactions?
To transform an ineffable notion into applicable theory and practice, the chapter outlines three key human-touch areas: trust, empathy, and social intuition. The chapter explains each area through a human-touch perspective. It then maps out the challenges to each in the online environment, and recommends helpful practices for enhancing each of these human-touch areas in online negotiation and mediation processes.
Star Wars characters are often called to choose between their destinies and their preferred paths of action.
So are negotiators, who are wired for one basic conflict mode yet choose to act strategically.
This chapter explains the world of conflict orientation and strategic choice through the lens of Star Wars... and explains Star Wars through negotiation and conflict theory.
We are currently approaching the midpoint of the first century of ADR development in the U.S and around the world. It is a remarkable point in time to be involved in the ADR field, marked as it is by reflection upon the first half of The ADR Century and planning ahead for the second.
This article begins by briefly surveying presentations and conversations at recent field-wide gatherings, aimed at bridging the past and future of ADR.
Turning to the future, the article explains how the ADR field can build on its previous successes by refining its conceptual models in both theory and practice. Focusing on ADR education in law schools, its key suggestion is that ADR’s educational model also needs paradigmatic revision in the form of a strategic pivot, if we wish the field to maintain and expand its beneficial impact across systems, professions, and society at large.
Prescriptively, the article recommends the educational arm of the ADR field adopt a broader vision of its educational scale and impact, and offers a number of examples of such broadly-aimed activity. Bringing large numbers of non-students—members of the public who are not enrolled in our schools or our courses—into the circle of those we affect through ADR education will benefit our schools, expand ADR practice, and strengthen the overall impact of the ADR field.
Teachers of conflict, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution who have transitioned their in-person courses to synchronous video conferencing are posed with significant pedagogical challenges. How will they stoke their students’ curiosity and maintain their students’ interest? How will students find the motivation and energy necessary to engage in nonstop videoconferences, day in and day out? How are they to maintain the high cognitive function required for our courses in the face of Zoom fatigue and reduced social interaction?
In light of these challenges, we explored another activity that students (and their teachers) not only engage in, but can’t pull themselves away from. Drawing on the literature examining psychological and neuroscientific aspects of binge-watching television shows, we propose an innovative approach to designing courses our students will want to binge-learn.
Washington University Journal of Law and Policy , 2020
This paper adopts a systems-design approach to focus courts and lawyers on the hitherto unexamine... more This paper adopts a systems-design approach to focus courts and lawyers on the hitherto unexamined question of how involving lawyers in the design, development, and implementation of online dispute resolution (ODR) programs, will strengthen ODR justice outcomes and court-delivered justice overall. Behind the scenes of every courthouse in the United States today, justice system professionals are grappling with the same set of basic questions: how to get by on fewer resources, how to cope with the access to justice crisis, and how to provide better justice outcomes. To help solve these justice problems, courts have begun to appreciate technology’s potential to streamline processes, increase access, and reduce costs. Indeed, over the course of the past few years, courts across the United States have been designing and piloting online dispute resolution (ODR) systems. We are currently at a tipping point, at which court ODR, at once a new approach to caseflow management and a court-imple...
This paper discusses the ways in which people have changed over the past few decades, largely owi... more This paper discusses the ways in which people have changed over the past few decades, largely owing to the influences of being increasingly immersed in a technological world. Our daily patterns, as well as the way we go about tasks at home and on the job have significantly changed. The literature on neuroscience and physiology suggest that our very brains are physically changing, resulting in changes in the way we act, process information and relate to one another.
How might all this affect negotiation? Surveying the literature on negotiation, one finds few suggestions that significant change has occurred in the technological era. Change is recognized only regarding negotiators’ instrumental use of technology. We negotiate over new platforms, and must tweak our actions to cope with the effects of each medium. Negotiation itself, though, is not considered to be in flux, and neither are negotiators.
This paper suggests that negotiators have changed, and that as a result, perhaps negotiation itself is in the midst of a change-process. The paper suggests a new research agenda for the negotiation field, re-exploring frameworks, assumptions and practices long held as near-axiomatic.
Download at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2915204
St. John's University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 19-0004, 2019
This paper is a wake-up call for the legal profession: Heed the justice changes that are upon us ... more This paper is a wake-up call for the legal profession: Heed the justice changes that are upon us or risk extinction. Online dispute resolution (hereinafter ODR) is currently being incorporated into U.S and international court systems, re-shaping and re-defining justice as we know it today. Courts and clients, two stakeholders in our justice system, are increasingly receptive to ODR as a viable option to help provide and access justice efficiently and affordably. The legal profession, the third stakeholder in our justice system, however, has been slower to react. As ODR plays an increasingly prominent role in the court system, it will eliminate some of the justice roles currently reserved for lawyers, diminish others, and create new areas of practice. We highlight ODR innovations already in the justice system and project the paths of ODR’s likely expansion. This paper alerts the legal profession and legal education community to take heed of these developments and become active contributors in shaping these justice innovations.
Viewing ODR’s entry into the court as an evolution of the justice system, we identify six adaptive skills that will redefine “thinking like a lawyer” and help the legal profession avoid extinction and remain relevant. Some of these are currently marginally addressed in the law school curriculum, others are entirely absent. Law schools, the primary disseminators of legal education, must re-align their curriculum with the skills that practice-competent lawyers require to succeed in the ODR-infused justice system.
In C. Honeyman, J. Coben & G. DiPalo (Eds.) Venturing Beyond the Classroom: Vol. 2 in the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Series. DRI Press. , Aug 25, 2009
Druckman and Ebner carefully review an overwhelming number of studies that conclude that simulations (in all fields, not just negotiation) typically fail to live up to their promise. One quirk of the studies, however, drew their particular interest and inspired their own research: it seemed that students who designed simulations learned more than those who participated in them. Druckman and Ebner use this clue to develop a different kind of negotiation simulation–one in which the student simulates being a teacher, and designs ...
Increasingly, negotiation interactions are taking place through channels other than face-to-face meetings. Negotiators find themselves engaging through e-communication channels–primarily e-mail. The communication channel through which the negotiation is conducted affects the dynamics of the interaction, the degree of inter-party trust and cooperation, the information shared and the outcome.
In C. Honeyman, J. Coben & G. DiPalo (Eds.) Venturing Beyond the Classroom: Vol. 2 in the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Series. DRI Press. , Aug 25, 2008
Matz and Ebner consider the impending collision between teachers' strong desire to use role-play and other simulation exercises, and the rise of online teaching, in which the students may never see each other. They outline a series of tools that might bring the central advantages of using simulations to electronically mediated courses.
Of all the direct and oblique spotlights President Donald Trump has cast on negotiation, which will trigger a historical trajectory that will significantly change negotiation teaching? I suggest one such enduring impact concerns the key negotiation concepts of truth, facts, and trust. This paper describes how the traditional essence of these concepts is under direct assault by President Trump and his administration, considers implications for the negotiation classroom, and suggests methods that negotiation teachers can use in order to cope with them.
As ODR enters the court system, it is eagerly embraced by two of the justice system's traditional stakeholders: the public, and the courts. The third stakeholder, lawyers and the legal profession, has largely been absent from the table when discussions on initiating and designing court-ODR systems have taken place.
In this paper, we explain the roots of this phenomenon and describe a conference session at the 2019 International Forum on ODR at which we shared them with ODR experts and court leaders. We engaged participants in a community conversation about engaging the legal profession in this justice evolution, in order to ensure its success and strengthen its justice outcomes. Together with participants, we generated a list of suggestions and best practices for engaging the legal profession constructively around these issues.
This paper was written together with Elayne Greenberg of St Johns University School of Law.
Two approaches to the process of guided discovery learning are compared for their impacts on concept understanding. One, referred to as design, emphasizes invention and draws on the simulation literature. The other, referred to as case analysis, focuses on discovery and draws on the case-based reasoning literature. Following a lecture on four cognitive-bias concepts, management students were assigned randomly to a design, case analysis, or lecture-only condition: A first experiment compared a design with a lecture-only condition and a second experiment compared case analysis with a lecture-only condition. Both design and case analysis students understood the concepts better than lecture-only students. Designers in the first experiment retained their understanding of the concepts better than the case analysts in the second experiment. The impacts on learning for design were similar to those obtained in earlier research where design was compared with role-playing and a classroom lecture. Implications of the findings for theory development and practice are discussed.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036029
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the practice of resolving disputes via the Internet or digital applications, has been developing since the mid-1990s. As the field has grown and gained traction, it has increasingly received attention from professional associations and industry leaders in the world of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field – in both the public and private sectors.
As the field develops and individual initiatives become widely adopted, the attention it receives from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions – already beginning to be heard from within the field – derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field.
In this paper, we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field’s governance and make the case that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low-to-no” state of governance in ODR – and the developments that are likely should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher-governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why – addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed – no matter how beneficial internal governance may be.
We do not, in this article, intend to decide any of these questions – but rather to pose them to the ODR field and to the wider fields of ADR and conflict management. We point out why the ODR field is at a developmental point that is highly suitable for discussing and deciding these questions – and why these decisions might have far-reaching implications for a wide range of conflict-related fields.
The 2006 ASTD Training & Performace Sourcebook, Feb 9, 2006
Yael Efron, LLM, an attorney-mediator, specializes in mediation and negotia-tion training. She te... more Yael Efron, LLM, an attorney-mediator, specializes in mediation and negotia-tion training. She teaches conflict resolution and law at the College of Management and at Tel-Hai College, Israel. Yael and Noam co-direct Tachlit Mediation Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Specializing in designing conflict resolution simulations and games, their writing on the subject has been accepted for publication in Negotiation Journal and The Creative Problem Solver's Handbook for Negotiators and Mediators.
If forced to be concise and pithy, what would a room full of negotiation scholars cook up? The compilation of recipes was in response to the request for each person’s own definition of negotiation effectiveness put in the form of a recipe. Not only is this interesting in terms of seeing the similarities and differences among this leading and diverse group of scholars, the exercise itself is one that can easily be replicated in negotiation or dispute resolution classes. It forces each participant to think about (a) ingredients; (b) amount of each; and (c) the order in which each skill is utilized. Have fun cooking up your own favorite dish!
Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2419712
At the heart of the Star Wars saga is the most common social phenomenon in human existence: conflict. Can Star Wars help us recognize and manage aspects of conflict in our own lives? We’ve got a good feeling about that. Exploring Star Wars through a conflict perspective, this book provides insights into our own conflicts while illuminating some of the most iconic themes and scenes in the films:
• Let’s assume Han shot first. Should he have? • What negotiation failures turned Anakin to the dark side? • Is it better to approach conflicts like a Jedi or a Sith?
Experts from academia and the professional world answer these questions and many others. The book introduces negotiation and conflict resolution skills that are far more effective than Jedi mind tricks or uncivilized blasters, providing practical tools you can employ the next time you try to restore peace and justice to a relationship, a workplace, a community, or a galaxy.
-----Editorial Reviews-----
“Star Wars may have taken place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but the insights of the chapter authors in this book could not be more relevant today…. Star Wars and Conflict Resolution is a brilliant idea for a book. These editors are my kind of scum!” - Kevin S. Decker, co-editor of Star Wars and Philosophy (vols I, II & III)
“A must-read for any Jedi in training - or managers searching for an accessible and fun but science-based book on conflict resolution.” - Alfred Zerres, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, University of Amsterdam
“When I saw the title of this book, I had to buy it! I always love links with popular culture as a way of teaching and exploring concepts. Whether or not you’re a Star Wars fan, this book will intrigue and delight you… terrific reading, whether you are a practitioner, a trainer or a Jedi knight! - Samantha Hardy, Conflict Management Specialist, Coach, Mediator, Consultant, and Trainer
“Looking to another galaxy long ago and far, far away, this remarkable book shows how words, not weapons, win peace in our galaxy today.” - William Irwin, General Editor of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series
“…whether you have watched the films dozens of times or you know Yoda only from popular culture – you will be rewarded with gems of insight.” - Michelle LeBaron, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia; author of Bridging, Troubled Waters: Conflict Resolution from the Heart
“Negotiation can be tough, regardless of whether it’s with Darth Vader or Vladimir Putin or your boss - and this collection of remarkable papers shows how to do it…. Read this book to learn how to not make the wrong deal with the devil, to never suffer “bait-and-switch” and other nefarious negotiation tactics, and to learn to negotiate from Star Wars negotiating, which is, and this is the fun part, just as much about negotiating here on Earth.” - Peter Carnevale, Professor of Management and Organization, University of Southern California; co-author of Negotiation in Social Conflict
“…This book shows why the Jedi Academy should have taught mediation, and how we could use this assisted negotiation process in our own lives. It also reminds us to always feel the Force!” - Rosa Abdelnour, Mediator, Costa Rica
“Even for someone who dislikes pretty much everything Star Wars, I find this book to be a well-written and accessible introduction to the evidence-based science of negotiation and conflict management. And if you like Star Wars then even better!” - Bruce Barry, Vanderbilt University, Brownlee O. Currey, Jr., Professor of Management; co-author of Essentials of Negotiation
“When we experience conflict, it’s easy to go to “the Dark Side” and let anxiety, uncertainty, and discomfort take control of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In this insightful and enjoyable read, the authors share concrete and helpful perspectives for anyone trying to get better at managing difficult people and tricky situations. (On second thought, Do or Do Not. There is no try.)" - Deborah Grayson Riegel, author of Overcoming Overthinking: 36 Ways to Tame Anxiety for Work, School, and Life and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and Wharton Business School
“This exceptionally creative book can make profound contributions to our work. In the law school context, it offers unique opportunities for insight—and laughter, which we can all use in today’s world. Portions of this book could enrich many of the courses we teach. Likewise, the book could support a variety of courses that include students from other disciplines.” - Leonard L. Riskin, Professor of Dispute Resolution, Northwestern University School of Law; author of Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think
“Star Wars is full of power plays, double crosses, promises made, and promises broken. In other words, just another day at work! These authors do a great job of analyzing key scenes and key players from the Star Wars saga and link them to social science research. It’s a great way to learn more about the scholarship on psychology and business in a fun and interesting way.” - Don Conlon, Professor of Management, Michigan State University
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Papers by Noam Ebner
Online mediation had been spreading rapidly as a mode of practice, even before the entire profession shifted online during the COVID-19 era. In this chapter, Ebner and Rainey survey the development of online mediation within the wider context of the growth of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). The chapter presents a snapshot of the field’s status quo with respect to stakeholders, modes of communication and the technology utilized, and addresses substantive and process issues in online mediation: mediation process models, stages and issues; practitioner skills; professional issues; ethics, and practitioner standards.
As the field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has grown and evolved, it has often met resistance from practitioners and theorists alike. One core theme has always been that the interpersonal processes of negotiation and mediation are fundamentally dependent on an elusive quality or aspect dubbed 'the human touch'. The cold impersonal environment of the internet, the arguments went, is inherently bereft of the human touch.
ODR had been growing rapidly even before the COVID-19 pandemic drove all forms of professional practice, including negotiation and mediation, online. The time has come, therefore, to reframe these objections into appreciative exploration:
Just what is this 'human touch' and in what sense is it absent in online communication?
How can practitioners regain the human touch, and bring it to bear in online interactions?
Might there be ways in which we can imbue online negotiation and mediation processes with the human touch even beyond the levels encountered in-person interactions?
To transform an ineffable notion into applicable theory and practice, the chapter outlines three key human-touch areas: trust, empathy, and social intuition. The chapter explains each area through a human-touch perspective. It then maps out the challenges to each in the online environment, and recommends helpful practices for enhancing each of these human-touch areas in online negotiation and mediation processes.
Star Wars characters are often called to choose between their destinies and their preferred paths of action.
So are negotiators, who are wired for one basic conflict mode yet choose to act strategically.
This chapter explains the world of conflict orientation and strategic choice through the lens of Star Wars... and explains Star Wars through negotiation and conflict theory.
We are currently approaching the midpoint of the first century of ADR development in the U.S and around the world. It is a remarkable point in time to be involved in the ADR field, marked as it is by reflection upon the first half of The ADR Century and planning ahead for the second.
This article begins by briefly surveying presentations and conversations at recent field-wide gatherings, aimed at bridging the past and future of ADR.
Turning to the future, the article explains how the ADR field can build on its previous successes by refining its conceptual models in both theory and practice. Focusing on ADR education in law schools, its key suggestion is that ADR’s educational model also needs paradigmatic revision in the form of a strategic pivot, if we wish the field to maintain and expand its beneficial impact across systems, professions, and society at large.
Prescriptively, the article recommends the educational arm of the ADR field adopt a broader vision of its educational scale and impact, and offers a number of examples of such broadly-aimed activity. Bringing large numbers of non-students—members of the public who are not enrolled in our schools or our courses—into the circle of those we affect through ADR education will benefit our schools, expand ADR practice, and strengthen the overall impact of the ADR field.
Teachers of conflict, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution who have transitioned their in-person courses to synchronous video conferencing are posed with significant pedagogical challenges. How will they stoke their students’ curiosity and maintain their students’ interest? How will students find the motivation and energy necessary to engage in nonstop videoconferences, day in and day out? How are they to maintain the high cognitive function required for our courses in the face of Zoom fatigue and reduced social interaction?
In light of these challenges, we explored another activity that students (and their teachers) not only engage in, but can’t pull themselves away from. Drawing on the literature examining psychological and neuroscientific aspects of binge-watching television shows, we propose an innovative approach to designing courses our students will want to binge-learn.
How might all this affect negotiation? Surveying the literature on negotiation, one finds few suggestions that significant change has occurred in the technological era. Change is recognized only regarding negotiators’ instrumental use of technology. We negotiate over new platforms, and must tweak our actions to cope with the effects of each medium. Negotiation itself, though, is not considered to be in flux, and neither are negotiators.
This paper suggests that negotiators have changed, and that as a result, perhaps negotiation itself is in the midst of a change-process. The paper suggests a new research agenda for the negotiation field, re-exploring frameworks, assumptions and practices long held as near-axiomatic.
Download at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2915204
Viewing ODR’s entry into the court as an evolution of the justice system, we identify six adaptive skills that will redefine “thinking like a lawyer” and help the legal profession avoid extinction and remain relevant. Some of these are currently marginally addressed in the law school curriculum, others are entirely absent. Law schools, the primary disseminators of legal education, must re-align their curriculum with the skills that practice-competent lawyers require to succeed in the ODR-infused justice system.
Download at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3317567
Druckman and Ebner carefully review an overwhelming number of studies that conclude that simulations (in all fields, not just negotiation) typically fail to live up to their promise. One quirk of the studies, however, drew their particular interest and inspired their own research: it seemed that students who designed simulations learned more than those who participated in them. Druckman and Ebner use this clue to develop a different kind of negotiation simulation–one in which the student simulates being a teacher, and designs ...
Increasingly, negotiation interactions are taking place through channels other than face-to-face meetings. Negotiators find themselves engaging through e-communication channels–primarily e-mail. The communication channel through which the negotiation is conducted affects the dynamics of the interaction, the degree of inter-party trust and cooperation, the information shared and the outcome.
Matz and Ebner consider the impending collision between teachers' strong desire to use role-play and other simulation exercises, and the rise of online teaching, in which the students may never see each other. They outline a series of tools that might bring the central advantages of using simulations to electronically mediated courses.
Of all the direct and oblique spotlights President Donald Trump has cast on negotiation, which will trigger a historical trajectory that will significantly change negotiation teaching? I suggest one such enduring impact concerns the key negotiation concepts of truth, facts, and trust. This paper describes how the traditional essence of these concepts is under direct assault by President Trump and his administration, considers implications for the negotiation classroom, and suggests methods that negotiation teachers can use in order to cope with them.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3325902
As ODR enters the court system, it is eagerly embraced by two of the justice system's traditional stakeholders: the public, and the courts. The third stakeholder, lawyers and the legal profession, has largely been absent from the table when discussions on initiating and designing court-ODR systems have taken place.
In this paper, we explain the roots of this phenomenon and describe a conference session at the 2019 International Forum on ODR at which we shared them with ODR experts and court leaders. We engaged participants in a community conversation about engaging the legal profession in this justice evolution, in order to ensure its success and strengthen its justice outcomes. Together with participants, we generated a list of suggestions and best practices for engaging the legal profession constructively around these issues.
This paper was written together with Elayne Greenberg of St Johns University School of Law.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3493411
Two approaches to the process of guided discovery learning are compared for their impacts on concept understanding. One, referred to as design, emphasizes invention and draws on the simulation literature. The other, referred to as case analysis, focuses on discovery and draws on the case-based reasoning literature. Following a lecture on four cognitive-bias concepts, management students were assigned randomly to a design, case analysis, or lecture-only condition: A first experiment compared a design with a lecture-only condition and a second experiment compared case analysis with a lecture-only condition. Both design and case analysis students understood the concepts better than lecture-only students. Designers in the first experiment retained their understanding of the concepts better than the case analysts in the second experiment. The impacts on learning for design were similar to those obtained in earlier research where design was compared with role-playing and a classroom lecture. Implications of the findings for theory development and practice are discussed.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036029
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the practice of resolving disputes via the Internet or digital applications, has been developing since the mid-1990s. As the field has grown and gained traction, it has increasingly received attention from professional associations and industry leaders in the world of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field – in both the public and private sectors.
As the field develops and individual initiatives become widely adopted, the attention it receives from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions – already beginning to be heard from within the field – derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field.
In this paper, we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field’s governance and make the case that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low-to-no” state of governance in ODR – and the developments that are likely should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher-governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why – addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed – no matter how beneficial internal governance may be.
We do not, in this article, intend to decide any of these questions – but rather to pose them to the ODR field and to the wider fields of ADR and conflict management. We point out why the ODR field is at a developmental point that is highly suitable for discussing and deciding these questions – and why these decisions might have far-reaching implications for a wide range of conflict-related fields.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2845639
If forced to be concise and pithy, what would a room full of negotiation scholars cook up? The compilation of recipes was in response to the request for each person’s own definition of negotiation effectiveness put in the form of a recipe. Not only is this interesting in terms of seeing the similarities and differences among this leading and diverse group of scholars, the exercise itself is one that can easily be replicated in negotiation or dispute resolution classes. It forces each participant to think about (a) ingredients; (b) amount of each; and (c) the order in which each skill is utilized. Have fun cooking up your own favorite dish!
Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2419712
Online mediation had been spreading rapidly as a mode of practice, even before the entire profession shifted online during the COVID-19 era. In this chapter, Ebner and Rainey survey the development of online mediation within the wider context of the growth of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). The chapter presents a snapshot of the field’s status quo with respect to stakeholders, modes of communication and the technology utilized, and addresses substantive and process issues in online mediation: mediation process models, stages and issues; practitioner skills; professional issues; ethics, and practitioner standards.
As the field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has grown and evolved, it has often met resistance from practitioners and theorists alike. One core theme has always been that the interpersonal processes of negotiation and mediation are fundamentally dependent on an elusive quality or aspect dubbed 'the human touch'. The cold impersonal environment of the internet, the arguments went, is inherently bereft of the human touch.
ODR had been growing rapidly even before the COVID-19 pandemic drove all forms of professional practice, including negotiation and mediation, online. The time has come, therefore, to reframe these objections into appreciative exploration:
Just what is this 'human touch' and in what sense is it absent in online communication?
How can practitioners regain the human touch, and bring it to bear in online interactions?
Might there be ways in which we can imbue online negotiation and mediation processes with the human touch even beyond the levels encountered in-person interactions?
To transform an ineffable notion into applicable theory and practice, the chapter outlines three key human-touch areas: trust, empathy, and social intuition. The chapter explains each area through a human-touch perspective. It then maps out the challenges to each in the online environment, and recommends helpful practices for enhancing each of these human-touch areas in online negotiation and mediation processes.
Star Wars characters are often called to choose between their destinies and their preferred paths of action.
So are negotiators, who are wired for one basic conflict mode yet choose to act strategically.
This chapter explains the world of conflict orientation and strategic choice through the lens of Star Wars... and explains Star Wars through negotiation and conflict theory.
We are currently approaching the midpoint of the first century of ADR development in the U.S and around the world. It is a remarkable point in time to be involved in the ADR field, marked as it is by reflection upon the first half of The ADR Century and planning ahead for the second.
This article begins by briefly surveying presentations and conversations at recent field-wide gatherings, aimed at bridging the past and future of ADR.
Turning to the future, the article explains how the ADR field can build on its previous successes by refining its conceptual models in both theory and practice. Focusing on ADR education in law schools, its key suggestion is that ADR’s educational model also needs paradigmatic revision in the form of a strategic pivot, if we wish the field to maintain and expand its beneficial impact across systems, professions, and society at large.
Prescriptively, the article recommends the educational arm of the ADR field adopt a broader vision of its educational scale and impact, and offers a number of examples of such broadly-aimed activity. Bringing large numbers of non-students—members of the public who are not enrolled in our schools or our courses—into the circle of those we affect through ADR education will benefit our schools, expand ADR practice, and strengthen the overall impact of the ADR field.
Teachers of conflict, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution who have transitioned their in-person courses to synchronous video conferencing are posed with significant pedagogical challenges. How will they stoke their students’ curiosity and maintain their students’ interest? How will students find the motivation and energy necessary to engage in nonstop videoconferences, day in and day out? How are they to maintain the high cognitive function required for our courses in the face of Zoom fatigue and reduced social interaction?
In light of these challenges, we explored another activity that students (and their teachers) not only engage in, but can’t pull themselves away from. Drawing on the literature examining psychological and neuroscientific aspects of binge-watching television shows, we propose an innovative approach to designing courses our students will want to binge-learn.
How might all this affect negotiation? Surveying the literature on negotiation, one finds few suggestions that significant change has occurred in the technological era. Change is recognized only regarding negotiators’ instrumental use of technology. We negotiate over new platforms, and must tweak our actions to cope with the effects of each medium. Negotiation itself, though, is not considered to be in flux, and neither are negotiators.
This paper suggests that negotiators have changed, and that as a result, perhaps negotiation itself is in the midst of a change-process. The paper suggests a new research agenda for the negotiation field, re-exploring frameworks, assumptions and practices long held as near-axiomatic.
Download at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2915204
Viewing ODR’s entry into the court as an evolution of the justice system, we identify six adaptive skills that will redefine “thinking like a lawyer” and help the legal profession avoid extinction and remain relevant. Some of these are currently marginally addressed in the law school curriculum, others are entirely absent. Law schools, the primary disseminators of legal education, must re-align their curriculum with the skills that practice-competent lawyers require to succeed in the ODR-infused justice system.
Download at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3317567
Druckman and Ebner carefully review an overwhelming number of studies that conclude that simulations (in all fields, not just negotiation) typically fail to live up to their promise. One quirk of the studies, however, drew their particular interest and inspired their own research: it seemed that students who designed simulations learned more than those who participated in them. Druckman and Ebner use this clue to develop a different kind of negotiation simulation–one in which the student simulates being a teacher, and designs ...
Increasingly, negotiation interactions are taking place through channels other than face-to-face meetings. Negotiators find themselves engaging through e-communication channels–primarily e-mail. The communication channel through which the negotiation is conducted affects the dynamics of the interaction, the degree of inter-party trust and cooperation, the information shared and the outcome.
Matz and Ebner consider the impending collision between teachers' strong desire to use role-play and other simulation exercises, and the rise of online teaching, in which the students may never see each other. They outline a series of tools that might bring the central advantages of using simulations to electronically mediated courses.
Of all the direct and oblique spotlights President Donald Trump has cast on negotiation, which will trigger a historical trajectory that will significantly change negotiation teaching? I suggest one such enduring impact concerns the key negotiation concepts of truth, facts, and trust. This paper describes how the traditional essence of these concepts is under direct assault by President Trump and his administration, considers implications for the negotiation classroom, and suggests methods that negotiation teachers can use in order to cope with them.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3325902
As ODR enters the court system, it is eagerly embraced by two of the justice system's traditional stakeholders: the public, and the courts. The third stakeholder, lawyers and the legal profession, has largely been absent from the table when discussions on initiating and designing court-ODR systems have taken place.
In this paper, we explain the roots of this phenomenon and describe a conference session at the 2019 International Forum on ODR at which we shared them with ODR experts and court leaders. We engaged participants in a community conversation about engaging the legal profession in this justice evolution, in order to ensure its success and strengthen its justice outcomes. Together with participants, we generated a list of suggestions and best practices for engaging the legal profession constructively around these issues.
This paper was written together with Elayne Greenberg of St Johns University School of Law.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3493411
Two approaches to the process of guided discovery learning are compared for their impacts on concept understanding. One, referred to as design, emphasizes invention and draws on the simulation literature. The other, referred to as case analysis, focuses on discovery and draws on the case-based reasoning literature. Following a lecture on four cognitive-bias concepts, management students were assigned randomly to a design, case analysis, or lecture-only condition: A first experiment compared a design with a lecture-only condition and a second experiment compared case analysis with a lecture-only condition. Both design and case analysis students understood the concepts better than lecture-only students. Designers in the first experiment retained their understanding of the concepts better than the case analysts in the second experiment. The impacts on learning for design were similar to those obtained in earlier research where design was compared with role-playing and a classroom lecture. Implications of the findings for theory development and practice are discussed.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036029
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the practice of resolving disputes via the Internet or digital applications, has been developing since the mid-1990s. As the field has grown and gained traction, it has increasingly received attention from professional associations and industry leaders in the world of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field – in both the public and private sectors.
As the field develops and individual initiatives become widely adopted, the attention it receives from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions – already beginning to be heard from within the field – derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field.
In this paper, we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field’s governance and make the case that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low-to-no” state of governance in ODR – and the developments that are likely should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher-governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why – addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed – no matter how beneficial internal governance may be.
We do not, in this article, intend to decide any of these questions – but rather to pose them to the ODR field and to the wider fields of ADR and conflict management. We point out why the ODR field is at a developmental point that is highly suitable for discussing and deciding these questions – and why these decisions might have far-reaching implications for a wide range of conflict-related fields.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2845639
If forced to be concise and pithy, what would a room full of negotiation scholars cook up? The compilation of recipes was in response to the request for each person’s own definition of negotiation effectiveness put in the form of a recipe. Not only is this interesting in terms of seeing the similarities and differences among this leading and diverse group of scholars, the exercise itself is one that can easily be replicated in negotiation or dispute resolution classes. It forces each participant to think about (a) ingredients; (b) amount of each; and (c) the order in which each skill is utilized. Have fun cooking up your own favorite dish!
Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2419712
At the heart of the Star Wars saga is the most common social phenomenon in human existence: conflict. Can Star Wars help us recognize and manage aspects of conflict in our own lives? We’ve got a good feeling about that. Exploring Star Wars through a conflict perspective, this book provides insights into our own conflicts while illuminating some of the most iconic themes and scenes in the films:
• Let’s assume Han shot first. Should he have?
• What negotiation failures turned Anakin to the dark side?
• Is it better to approach conflicts like a Jedi or a Sith?
Experts from academia and the professional world answer these questions and many others. The book introduces negotiation and conflict resolution skills that are far more effective than Jedi mind tricks or uncivilized blasters, providing practical tools you can employ the next time you try to restore peace and justice to a relationship, a workplace, a community, or a galaxy.
-----Editorial Reviews-----
“Star Wars may have taken place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but the insights of the chapter authors in this book could not be more relevant today…. Star Wars and Conflict Resolution is a brilliant idea for a book. These editors are my kind of scum!” - Kevin S. Decker, co-editor of Star Wars and Philosophy (vols I, II & III)
“A must-read for any Jedi in training - or managers searching for an accessible and fun but science-based book on conflict resolution.” - Alfred Zerres, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, University of Amsterdam
“When I saw the title of this book, I had to buy it! I always love links with popular culture as a way of teaching and exploring concepts. Whether or not you’re a Star Wars fan, this book will intrigue and delight you… terrific reading, whether you are a practitioner, a trainer or a Jedi knight! - Samantha Hardy, Conflict Management Specialist, Coach, Mediator, Consultant, and Trainer
“Looking to another galaxy long ago and far, far away, this remarkable book shows how words, not weapons, win peace in our galaxy today.” - William Irwin, General Editor of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series
“…whether you have watched the films dozens of times or you know Yoda only from popular culture – you will be rewarded with gems of insight.” - Michelle LeBaron, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia; author of Bridging, Troubled Waters: Conflict Resolution from the Heart
“Negotiation can be tough, regardless of whether it’s with Darth Vader or Vladimir Putin or your boss - and this collection of remarkable papers shows how to do it….
Read this book to learn how to not make the wrong deal with the devil, to never suffer “bait-and-switch” and other nefarious negotiation tactics, and to learn to negotiate from Star Wars negotiating, which is, and this is the fun part, just as much about negotiating here on Earth.” - Peter Carnevale, Professor of Management and Organization, University of Southern California; co-author of Negotiation in Social Conflict
“…This book shows why the Jedi Academy should have taught mediation, and how we could use this assisted negotiation process in our own lives. It also reminds us to always feel the Force!” - Rosa Abdelnour, Mediator, Costa Rica
“Even for someone who dislikes pretty much everything Star Wars, I find this book to be a well-written and accessible introduction to the evidence-based science of negotiation and conflict management. And if you like Star Wars then even better!” - Bruce Barry, Vanderbilt University, Brownlee O. Currey, Jr., Professor of Management; co-author of Essentials of Negotiation
“When we experience conflict, it’s easy to go to “the Dark Side” and let anxiety, uncertainty, and discomfort take control of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In this insightful and enjoyable read, the authors share concrete and helpful perspectives for anyone trying to get better at managing difficult people and tricky situations. (On second thought, Do or Do Not. There is no try.)" - Deborah Grayson Riegel, author of Overcoming Overthinking: 36 Ways to Tame Anxiety for Work, School, and Life and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and Wharton Business School
“This exceptionally creative book can make profound contributions to our work. In the law school context, it offers unique opportunities for insight—and laughter, which we can all use in today’s world. Portions of this book could enrich many of the courses we teach. Likewise, the book could support a variety of courses that include students from other disciplines.” - Leonard L. Riskin, Professor of Dispute Resolution, Northwestern University School of Law; author of Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think
“Star Wars is full of power plays, double crosses, promises made, and promises broken. In other words, just another day at work! These authors do a great job of analyzing key scenes and key players from the Star Wars saga and link them to social science research. It’s a great way to learn more about the scholarship on psychology and business in a fun and interesting way.” - Don Conlon, Professor of Management, Michigan State University