Negotiating interests or values and reaching integrative agreements: the importance of time pressure and temporary impasses

Negotiation research and theory tends to focus on interests and ignores values. This experiment compared the influence of negotiations about interests with negotiations about values under low or high time pressure. Results showed that (1) individuals got locked into early impasses more often under low than high time pressure, (2) getting locked into early impasse produced a switch from low levels of integrative behaviour early in the negotiation to high levels late in the negotiation, but only when interests rather than values were negotiated, (3) individuals reached higher joint outcomes when interests rather than values were negotiated, especially when time pressure was low rather than high, because of (4) the relatively greater switch to high levels of integrative behaviour in the case of low time pressure and conflict of interest.