PB458      Half Unit
Dialogue: Conflict & Negotiation

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Dialogue is central to interpersonal conflicts, societal debates, and corporate negotiations. While dialogue is popularly construed in terms of reaching consensus, the reality entails rhetoric, manipulation, and deception. This course takes the view that conflict is necessary, and it examines how dialogue can make a clash of difference productive and creative.

Topics covered will include: theory and science of dialogue; misunderstandings (when you see it, it is gone); reading verbal and non-verbal cues (listening beyond the words); negotiation and bargaining (creating wins, and win-wins); conflict mediation (when negotiation didn’t work); the dark arts and their detection (persuasion, framing, deception); crisis dialogue & speaking up (power and dissent); the defences and their detection (denial, dismissing, rationalizing); creativity & dialogue (the emergence of something new); artificial and authentic dialogue (the role of AI in dialogue); and digital dialogues (silos and improving the ‘quality’ of online dialogue).

The course includes practical hands-on experience. In workshops students will gain experience intervening in dialogue, analysing dialogue (transcripts, videos), and trying out cutting edge methods for the automated analysis of dialogue.

10 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

A 500-word plan outlining the approach to the summative assessment. 

Burris, E. R. (2012). The risks and rewards of speaking up: managerial responses to employee voice. Academy of Management Journal, 55(4), 851–875.Deutsch, M., Coleman, P. T., & Marcus, E. C. (2011). The handbook of conflict resolution: theory and practice. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
Dingemanse, M., & Enfield, N. J. (2023). Interactive repair and the foundations of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(1), 30–42. 
Gillespie, A., & Corti, K. (2016). The body that speaks: Recombining bodies and speech sources in unscripted face-to-face communication. Frontiers in Psychology, 1300.
Gillespie, A., & Richardson, B. (2011). Exchanging social positions: enhancing perspective taking within a cooperative problem solving task. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 608–616.
Harmon, D. J. (2019). When the fed speaks: Arguments, emotions, and the microfoundations of institutions. Administrative Science Quarterly, in press.
Ireland, M. E., Slatcher, R. B., Eastwick, P. W., Scissors, L. E., Finkel, E. J., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship initiation and stability. Psychological Science, 22(1), 39–44.
Marková, I. (2016). The dialogical mind: common sense and ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Linell, P. (2017). Dialogue, dialogicality and interactivity: A conceptually bewildering field? Language and Dialogue, 7(3), 301–335. https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.3.01lin
Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). The secret life of pronouns. London, UK: Bloomsbury Press.
Taylor, M., & Kent, M. L. (2014). Dialogic engagement: Clarifying foundational concepts. Journal of Public Relations Research, 26(5), 384–398.
Rubin, J. Z., & Brown, B. R. (2013). The social psychology of bargaining and negotiation. London, UK: Academic Press.
Vrij, A., Hartwig, M., & Granhag, P. A. (2019). Reading lies: nonverbal communication and deception. Annual Review of Psychology, 70(1), 295–317.
Yarkoni, T. (2010). Personality in 100,000 words: A large-scale analysis of personality and word use among bloggers. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(3), 363–373.
 

Essay (100%, 3000 words)

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the period between WT and ST. Summative oral assessment with course leader.