Subjective Perceptions in Wartime Negotiation

The prevalence of negotiation in social interaction has motivated researchers to develop virtual agents that can understand, facilitate, teach and even carry out negotiations. While much of this research has analyzed how to maximize the objective outcome, there is a growing body of work demonstrating that subjective perceptions of the outcome also play a critical role in human negotiation behavior. People derive subjective value from not only the outcome, but also from the process by which they achieve that outcome, from their relationship with their negotiation partner, etc. The affective responses evoked by these subjective valuations can be very different from what would be evoked by the objective outcome alone. We investigate such subjective valuations within human-agent negotiation in four variations of a wartime negotiation scenario taken from the political science literature. We observe that the objective outcomes of these negotiations are not strongly related to the human negotiators' subjective perceptions, as measured by the Subjective Value Index. We examine the game dynamics and agent behaviors to identify features that induce different subjective values in the participants, even when separated from the effect of the objective outcomes. We thus are able to identify characteristics of the interaction between negotiation and battlefield processes that most impact people's subjective valuations.