BazermanMoore

58 Chapter 3: Bounded Awareness
Radzevick and Moore (in press) observed a closely related effect in predictions
regarding the outcomes of athletic contests. They reasoned that if people focused on
their own team, they would be excessively confident of winning when their own team
was strong, regardless of the strength of the competition. Indeed, that is what they
found. Casino betting patterns suggest that people tend to bet on the home team primarily
when the home team is good. This effect is largely attributable to the fact that
people have better information about the home team than they do about the competition,
and they don’t bother collecting more balanced information before placing their
bets.
Moore (2004b, 2005) documented bounded awareness in the context of negotiation
deadlines. In a negotiation between a buyer and seller in which both parties get
zero payoff if no agreement is reached, a publicly known deadline on one of the parties
intuitively appears to put that party at a disadvantage. Of course, if one party has a
deadline, the other cannot go on negotiating without them. Objectively, the deadline
affects the two parties symmetrically, but negotiators fail to consider the deadline’s effect
on the other side, and so think that a deadline puts them at an asymmetric disadvantage.
Because they think that the deadline represents their own weakness, when
they have to decide whether they want to tell the other side about the time constraint,
most negotiators choose not to do so (Gino & Moore, 2008; Moore, 2004a). Ironically,
this does turn the deadline into a real disadvantage because the negotiator who knows
about it is hurrying to get a deal before the deadline, while the other side continues at a
more leisurely pace.
Massey and Wu (2005) have examined ‘‘system neglect,’’ or the human tendency of
people to undervalue the importance of the general context in which they are making
their decision. To us, the most important example of this type of bounded awareness is
the widespread failure of U.S. citizens to consider campaign-finance reform as a means
of curbing the undue political influence of special-interest groups (Bazerman, Baron, &
Shonk, 2001). When people are asked whether they support and care about the issue of
campaign-finance reform, they say, ‘‘Yes.’’ Yet, when asked to rank the importance of
campaign-finance reform relative to other issues, they rank it very low. Bazerman et al.
(2001) argue that voters undervalue campaign-finance reform because their awareness
of the indirect impact of campaign-finance reform is bounded. Yet, we believe that people
should care deeply about such reform, since it affects virtually every other issue
(and its effects could be enormous). People do not tend to think through this process.
They value issues that are more clearly seen as end states or outcomes (such as tax cuts
or education), rather than using a broader awareness that would direct their attention
toward a set of outcomes that would have a large, positive effect on many issues
(Bazerman, Baron, & Shonk, 2001).
Finally, bounded awareness can keep negotiators from considering the impact of
their decisions on others outside the negotiation. Decision and negotiation scholars
often study and teach cooperation in prisoner dilemma games and social dilemmas. A
prisoner dilemma game exists when two parties or more would be jointly better off both
cooperating with each other than both defecting (betraying each other), yet each party
would be better off defecting on the other, regardless of the behavior of the other party.
The prisoner dilemma problem has been used as a model to understand defection in