Caveats for Cross-Border Negotiators

Scholars and practitioners have detailed a number of ways that differences in national culture can affect bargaining behavior: from surface etiquette and protocol to deeper cultural characteristics and to systematic variations in decision making and governance. Such cross-national analysis can be quite useful but is prone to at least four hazardous fallacies described in this article and illustrated, in some cases, by probabilistic reasoning. Along with suggestions for avoiding them, these fallacies include: (1) The John Wayne v. Charlie Chan Fallacy (stereotyping); (2) The Rosetta Stone Fallacy (overattribution); (3) The Visual Flight Rules Fallacy (skewed perceptions and information processing); and (4) St. Augustine's Fallacy (When in Rome...).