SANTA FE, N.M. — Sometimes negotiations appear to be going all right — and then somebody assassinates the High Peace Council chairman. A new way of simulating how groups make decisions combines social psychology and nonlinear mathematics, revealing how forces may unexpectedly conspire to send negotiations off the rails.
The approach captures the unpredictable nature of group decision making and might be used to predict which members of a jury, legislature or corporate board will be supporters or dissenters of a policy, or if consensus is even possible. It may also help explain how Burhanuddin Rabbani, a key figure in negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, ended up the victim of a suicide bomber in September 2011.
Many methods for assessing how negotiations unfold assume a linear, relatively predictable relationship between the group members’ opinions, their influence on each other and the outcome of the negotiations. These methods can work well for small groups, says policy analyst Hilton Root of George Mason University in Arlington, Va. “But,” he said, “there’s a lot you can’t do with them.”
To capture the complicated turns and twists that occur in many negotiations, University of Washington physicist Michael Gabbay developed a different approach that allows for a traditional linear discussion path but also incorporates nonlinear dynamics, where outcomes can be unpredictable and driven by a seemingly random variable, such as who does the talking first.