We mediators spend a lot of time helping people make decisions.
And not just any decisions–informed decisions. This is particularly important when you’re dealing, as mediators often do, with people whose decision-making ability may be impaired by the strong emotional response that conflict can produce. The desire to punish an opponent, exact revenge, or teach someone a lesson can override reason and trump common sense. Sometimes you have to spend time getting people to consider whether a decision they want to make today in the heat of the moment will be one they regret ten years down the road.
Mediators then may be interested to see this video of Penn and Teller‘s recent experiment revealing how appeals to emotion over reason can sway people to commit themselves before they have all the facts–in this case to sign a petition banning “dihydrogen monoxide“–water.
(Via Boing Boing.)
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Since this is a decision making discussion, and you talked about removing the emotional aspect, you made me think of decision analysis (or decision tree analysis). It’s a strategy that helps quantify and objectify the parties risks, rewards, and experience.
There’s a bunch of software out there that helps mediators perform a full decision analysis quickly and easily. I’d recommend http://www.paperchace.com but I’m a bit biased.