A field exerpiment was conducted in order to demonstrate a way in which social psychological research can avoid some of the shortcomings of past research on bargaining communication. Two preprogrammed male buyers negotiated a discount on the price of new cars with 48 professional salesmen. The salespersons' verbal responses to various bargaining strategies were recorded and analyzed by a content analytic scheme with the following categories: attempted antagonistic influence; attempted cooperative influence; strategic question; justification; self‐disclosure; concession refusal; “other”. Results indicated that (a) soft bargaining is reciprocated with attempted cooperative influence, whereas tough bargaining does not provoke attempted antagonistic influence; (b) stragetic questions are used as a response to both soft and tough bargaining behavior; (c) justifications are most frequent in the last phase of a sales interaction, especially when accompanying a concession refusal; (d) self‐disclosure was only present in the last phase of bargaining; (e) concessions are most frequently found in the early phase of bargaining and a concession refusal becomes increasingly frequent as bargaining proceeds; (f) most concessions are made in response to a soft‐soft bargaining strategy.

Judgments on the subjective duration of simple and complex imagined situations are studied. Four facets, concerning the evaluation ofthe situation (pleasantJunpleasant) and the characteristics of its events (many/few, variable/monotonous, difficultJeasy), are taken into account. These facets proved significant for duration judgments in previous studies in which subjects were exposed to situations varying with respect to one of them. In this paper, we study whether these timeperception facets have comparable effects on the symbolic temporal basis of duration judgments, that is, whether they allow one to account for differences in the beliefs about duration experience in imagined situations. Two approaches were chosen: (1) Three groups of subjects compared the durations of all possible pairs of situations characterized by facet elments x and y. The confusion probabilities could be scaled in one dimension for all groups. The facet elements defined intervals that were hierarchically nested. (2) The facets allowed us to distinguish 24 structuples. For each of them, a concrete situation was described in writing. Seventy-six subjects rated the subjective durations of the situations. The structuples led to a partial order that corresponded well to the duration ratings. Moreover, three of the facets showed significant main effects, and the fourth interacted significantly with two others. Finally, the facets were useful in explaining the similarity structure of the duration ratings.There is a fairly large but somewhat confusing literature on the effects of so-called nontemporal variables on duration judgments. The varied findings are partly due to differences in experimental tasks (e.g., Falk & Bindra, 1954;Ornstein, 1969;Schiff & Thayer, 1968;Schiffman & Bobko, 1974), different durations of the intervals to be estimated (e.g., Aschoff, 1985;Michon, 1975), different test paradigms (e.g., Hicks, Miller, & Kinsbourne, 1976;Zakay & Fallach, 1984), and different timejudgment methods (e.g., McConchie & Rutschmann, 1971). Moreover, the vast majority of published research examines the effects of only one isolated nontemporal variable on duration judgments. Also, most researchers seem to assume that the observers' estimations result only from the perceptual input during the interval to be judged and from cognitive processes directly associated with it. Hence, the subjects' abstract knowledge about the subjective experience of duration and its deviation from objective time is neither considered nor controlled.Recently, some researchers found it necessary to also take into account this abstract knowledge. For example, Fraisse (1981) distinguished between (1) perceived and/or memorized temporal information and (2) the knowledge of time (e.g., the knowledge of how much time is required Address reprint requests to Ingwer Borg, Fachbereich Psychologie, Iustus-Liebig-Universitiit, Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10, 6300Giessen, West Germany. to change a flat tire) and parachronometric references provided by the action performed during the i...

Two groups of subjects were confronted with pairs of abstract situations. They were asked to indicate if the situations were likely to be experienced as equally long, or, if not, which of the two would be longer and by how much. The situations were each characterized by one stimulus attribute (pleasant, unpleasant, many, few, variable, monotonous, difficult, easy) or by the distinction of expecting something with high/low tension. Ratio judgments were collected in the format x:y, with x,y from [1, …, 9] and such that x+y = 10. The data proved to be extremely consistent and led to almost the same ratio scales for both groups. This finding strengthens the assumption that people possess highly structured belief systems about duration.