There is a handful of research around about in-person mediation and mediators which emerges out of a literature in psychology. From what I can tell, the area has largely stalled in the last ten years or so, and also tends to lack a lot of formal empirical about tactics and effectiveness; both of these points are bemoaned by some reviewers of the literature in around 2012. Still, there seem to be some useful things to learn from here, at least in terms of hypothesis generation. For now, I will just organize some of the key references I have come across. A few key people seem to be:

  • James Wall
  • Ken Kressel
  • Timothy Dunne

Wall, J. A., & Dunne, T. C. (2012). Mediation research: A current review. Negotiation Journal, 28(2), 217-244.

  • Defintion: “mediation is assistance to two or more interacting parties by a third party who – at that time – has no power to presecribe agreements or outcomes.”

Factors that affect mediation:

  • Taxonomy of conflict type (2x2 matrix):
    • Disputants will vs. will not retain future relationship
    • Disputants do vs. do not have adequate negotiation skills
  • Cultural factors matter. Mediators emulate day-to-day behaviors of their culture.
  • Institutions around mediation matter and vary.
  • Mediator style / approach.
  • Reasons and goals for entering into mediation.

Wide range of mediator goals:

  • Bring about agreement – the main / simplest goal a lot of the time.
  • Improving relationships
  • Social transformation

Mediator behavior: choice of techniques and strategies. “Mediators have approximately one hundred techniques to choose from”. Conceptually categorized into abut two dozen overlapping stategies (groups of techniques).

Research question(s):

  • What are the major causes of mediator strategies?
  • What are the major impacts of the mediators’ use of particular stategies.

Wall & Dunne suggest simplifying the set of strategies into fewer groups. They suggests six categories:

  • Pressing: mediators use procedures to reduce the disputants aspirations and limits, to move them off positions, and to nudge them toward agreement. Mediators may press the disputants equally or not.
  • Neutral: mediators attempt to establish and maintain an interaction between the disputants. Gather information from each sade and transfer it, seek clarifications, and note one side’s opinion as well as feelings.
  • Relational: emphasizes the goal improved communincations, clarification of underlyhing feelings, and general improvmeent of the relationship between disputants.
  • Analytic: focuses on the problem that causes the dispute and its goal is the resolution of the problem.
  • Clarification: assist the disputants in clarifying and understanding what they personally want from the mediation.
  • Multifunctional: these strategies can be used to achieve any of the above goals.

Kressel, K., & Wall, J. (2012). Introduction to the Special Issue on Mediator Style. Negotiation & Conflict Management Research, 5(4).

Wall, J., & Kressel, K. (2012). Research on mediator style: A summary and some research suggestions. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 5(4), 403-421.

These are from a special issue on “mediator style” in 2012. In general, a lot of this is about detailing the limitations and opportunities in the research here. They suggest especially that research has not kept pace with practice. Key research questions in their framing:

  1. What do mediators say about their stylistic preferences?
  2. To what degree do mediators show stylistic flexibility?
  3. What is the impact of mediator style on the process and outcomes of mediation?

I am most interested in the last question. A lot of the article is about setting out a path forward for a more productive research agenda in this space through a set of concceptual clarifications. Some definitions:

  • Mediator style: a set of cohensive, interrelated beahviors that are strongly shaped by the mediators’ explicit and implicit cognition of the goals to be acheived and the behaviors that are acceptable (and unacceptable) for achieving those goals.
  • Mediation tactics: the specific behaviors that constitute a style.

They reiterate their preferred grouping of styles from the above article but with some slight modification which is a bit frustrating. Here they prefer:

  1. Neutral
  2. Relational
  3. Transformative
  4. Analytic
  5. Pressing

So they remove “multifunctional” and “clarification” from the list and add “transformative” instead. Transformative means that mediators “have the goals of empowering the disputants and recognizing the opponent’s needs and wishes”; agreement is not a goal. This seems to have some overlap with the Lederach conflict transformation framework, but I’m not sure exactly how much.

They then suggest breaking each of these buckets down into tactics, but do not do this work themselves. They just give an example.

They discuss different outcomes and different mediating variables that are likely important.

Kressel, K. (2014). The mediation of conflict: Context, cognition, and practice. The handbook of conflict resolution: Theory and practice, 3, 817-844.

This is a chapter in the handbook of conflict resolution. A useful taxonomy of research sources to connect some dots:

  • Extrapolation from theories of conflict (e.g. Deutsch’s work)
  • Empirical research
  • In-depth case wisdom of practiioners.

In general, more bemoaning that research has not kept pace with practice. Not a lot of RCTs, paucity of well-defined outcomes, atheoretic, one-shot.

On effectiveness of medition, Kressel discusses a few ways of defining outcomes – improvement in relationships, individuals, ability to produce agreements.

Some notes on when mediation is most likely to be effective. Kressel claims (but doesn’t cite much) that mediation is most likely to be successful in conflicts occupying “a general middle range of difficulty”:

  • Moderate rather than extreme levels of conflict
  • Parties who are motivated to resolve their difficulties and use mediation as a vehicle for doing so.
  • Available resources – material, social, emotional
  • Parties of more or less equal power
  • Absence of issues involving fundamental religious, political, or ethical principles.

Here, Kressel suggests a different taxonomy of mediator behaviors and tactics. He suggests:

  • Reflexive: efforts to orient themselves to the dispute and establish groundwork on whcih later activities will be built. Building rapport, giving a credible intro to the process and role of mediator, conveying concern about the dispute, showing empathetic understanding of each side, behaving evenhandedly, and so on. Kressel explains that “maintaining impartiality towards the parties and neutrality about the issues is often invoked as the sine qua non of rapport building and effective mediation generally”.
  • Contextual: contextual interventions refer to the mediator’s attempts to produce a climate conducive to constructive dialogue and problem solving. This includes things like: improving communications, establishing norms for respectful listening, managing anger constructively, maintaining the privacy of negotions, establishing mutually acceptable procedures for fact finding, improving communication flow. Use of caucusing here (mediator meets separately with each side) is mentioned as common and also controversial.
  • Substantive: tactics where mediator deals directly with thte issues in dispute. Three distinct substantive domains:
    • Issue identification and agenda setting:
    • Proposal shaping
    • Proposal making

Also, can vary in terms of degree of assertiveness; this cuts across the other dimensions. How forcefully the mediator behaves from mild and nondirective to forceful and highly directive at other end. Kressel says that literature is ambivalent about behaviors on assertive end, though in practice pressure seems to be common.

In this piece, Kressel distinguishes this taxonomy of tactics from a taxonomy of styles like the one that Wall and Kressel introduced in the 2012 article. Confusingly, he seems to outline a somewhat different set of styles in this piece, though he says it “draws heavily” on the Wall and Kressel taxonomy and related work. Here he discusses:

  • Problem-solving styles. The presumptive approach of most mediators. Gives priority to unblocking the parties’ stalled efforts to reach agreements.
    • Facilitative subtype: help parties identify and express their underlying interests and needs. E.g. Getting to Yes.
    • Evaluative subtype: more “distributive version” fo the problem-solving approach. Assumption is that the main barrier to settelment is their unrealistic confidence int he validity of their respective positions.
    • Strategic subtype: less common – help parties identify when their conflict is emerging from some latenet cause.
  • Relational styles: focus less on agreement making and more on opening lines of communication, and clarifying underlying feelings and perceptions. Transformational mediation is an example, which focuses on empowerment and recognition.

Kressel claims that “there is no strong empirical evidence for preferring one approach over another”.

In general, from what I have seen so far, this research area seems to include a lot of interesting directions, hypotheses, and interrelated efforts to develop taxonomies of conflicts types, mediator styles, mediator tactics, and outcomes. However, there does not seem to be all that much in the way of empirical answers or evidence about, say, which styles or tactics are the most effective in which contexts and in which senses.

It’s not clear exactly what to do with this for my purposes, but I will think about it some more….