Abstract
This special issue was conceived as a way to highlight how social cognition researchers are using the paradigm of negotiations to ask and answer a range of important questions central to their core concerns: how do communication media affect social information processing; how do different roles affect preferred processing styles; how do goals and expectancies shape interactions and outcomes? It brings together classic and contemporary theories (from dissonance to expectancies, from regulatory focus to construal level) to understand how the wonderful complexities of negotiations shed insight into how the processes of social cognition play out in mixed-motive settings. The issue also collectively investigates how social cognition processes affect important outcomes: how value is created at the bargaining table; how that value is distributed; what leads people to walk away from a negotiation; and how people subjectively feel about their outcomes.