We mediators play midwife to decision making. We patiently assist in an arduous and sometimes painful process while parties labor, struggling to make the right choices in difficult circumstances. We strive to ensure that those who weigh those choices are able to reach rational decisions based on accurate and complete information.

But just how rational are the decisions that people make, whether at the mediation table or anywhere else? How much control do any of us really exert over those choices?

A new book has some surprising answers and explains why it is that we are more susceptible than we realize to the vagaries of our own minds and vulnerable to the forces of emotions and social norms. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, written by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a visiting professor at Duke University.

As much fun as the book (and of course more interactive) is the Predictably Irrational web site. Don’t miss the Demonstrations page with cool optical illusions and games you can test yourself with.

Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

How perceptive are you? How accurately do you see the world?

With a quiz created by Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Visual Attention Lab and Harvard Medical School, test yourself for change blindness — the perplexing difficulty that all of us have in perceiving alterations in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

As philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for so kindly sending me the link to this story.)

In poignant tribute to the U.S. service members who have lost their lives in the Iraq war, the New York Times has created a graphic that literally puts a face to the numbers who have perished.

Each face that appears is made up of many small squares, each representing another face. Click on any square to see another face appear, with information about that person displayed to the right. The squares are ordered by date of death, the most recent deaths appearing in the upper left corner of the image. You can also search by last name, home state, or home town.

(With thanks to ICT4Peace. Please read Sanjana Hattotuwa’s observations, including his thoughts on those who are missing from this moving depiction of the human cost of war.)

Online misunderstandings flare up easily, but there’s a way to prevent them.

For a crash course on internet etiquette, view “How To Behave On An Internet Forum“, created in old-school-style, 8-bit animation.

(Spotted on Boing Boing.)

Conflict and persecution produce tragedy unimaginable to those of us who reside far from lands where gunfire sounds or where human rights are threatened.

To raise awareness of the plight of the world’s refugees — the thousands who have fled their homes to seek asylum — the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has created Against All Odds, an online game that seeks to build understanding of the grim realities that face the 1 out of every 300 people world-wide who are refugees today.

The Against All Odds web site includes a teacher’s guide and a fact sheet.

This is of course not the only use of online games to teach social messages. You can read more at the following posts: “War games: digital technology provides medium for educating and influencing” and “USC students develop virtual game to bring real-world attention to Darfur crisis“.

Thanks to Thinking Ethics for the link.

Negonation, a Spanish start-up, has launched Tractis, a web-based platform to revolutionize the negotiation, management, and execution of contracts in e-commerce.

But it’s not just about helping business get done. Negonation’s goal for Tractis is far more ambitious:

Our goal is to provide a way to make online borderless justice possible. Yeah, you heard us right. We want to develop a new legal system that overcomes the inefficiencies, complexities, injustices and sluggishness of traditional legal systems. We want justice for, from and by the Internet nation. Tractis is only the beginning.

Tractis is designed to manage what Negonation’s founders call “the whole life cycle of contracts”. Users can select from a library of templates to create a contract, invite others to participate, and develop a single text to produce contracts guaranteed to be legally binding. Prior versions of contracts, comments, and attachments are archived and readily accessible. Negonation plans to add an online dispute resolution mechanism for addressing the inevitable disagreements that can arise from contract negotiations.

You can take an online tour of Tractis to gain a sense of its interface or review its FAQs.

O brave new world…

(Hat tip to Law.com Inside Opinions.)

As a trainer, I’m keenly aware that adult learners all have different learning styles. The trick is to find ways to engage them all.

Interested in finding out what your own learning style is? You can find out at the Vark Guide to Learning Styles by taking this online questionnaire.

In an effort to raise public awareness of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has partnered with Google as part of an extraordinary project using Google Earth technology to map the atrocities in Darfur. From the USHMM web site:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

You can download Google Earth along with the Crisis in Darfur layers at USHMM.

Geographic literacy is critical to our ability to understand the world we inhabit. Those who enjoyed last week’s post on the Upside Down Map which depicts the world from a whole new perspective will enjoy challenging yourselves with a game that tests your knowledge of world geography.

How geographically literate are you?

Digital technology has proven itself a powerful tool in the hands of educators. Virtual worlds like Second Life provide space for online learning, for everything from peer mediation training to experimental law school classes.

Computer games also serve as a medium for transmitting ideas, influencing minds, and building public awareness of critical social and political issues.

By way of example, consider two very different games:

A Christian video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, based on the popular series of novels, pits the Lord’s faithful in an apocalyptic battle against the Antichrist’s Global Community Peacekeepers. According to a review in today’s Boston Globe, the game offers up both Scripture and moral choices to players, allowing them to wage either physical or spiritual warfare, using prayer as a weapon:

[Y]ou can create a band of soldiers who’ll protect Tribulation Force territory from Carpathian incursions. But they’re supposed to use minimal force. Every time they kill, even if it’s justified, it weakens their moral fiber. Force them to kill too often, and they’ll fall away from the faith and move to the Dark Side.

According to the Eternal Forces web site, “unnecessary killing will result in lower Spirit points which are essential to winning”.

Meanwhile, a very different kind of action unfolds at Prisoners of War, an educational game and a joint project between Nobelprize.org and the Nobel Peace Center. Its purpose is to teach players about the work of three-time Nobel Peace Prize winner the International Committee of the Red Cross and the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions to prisoners during wartime.

Visit Nobelprize.org to learn more about its other educational peace games. (With a hat tip to ICT for Peacebuilding for the link.)

Digital negotiation systems and tools abound, from the sophisticated logarithms of Smart Settle, which is designed to enable users to “achieve fair and efficient solutions that are truly Beyond Win-Win®” to the Fair Division Calculator which promises “envy-free divisions of goods, burdens, or rent” (and costs nothing to use).

The latest to join their ranks is Parley Negotiation Software, created by the Berlin-based Theory. Parley allows for brainstorming, analysis of preferences, and evaluation of all possible agreements, together with tracking of negotiation history.

A free 30-day trial is available for downloading (a good thing since Parley costs $460 for the complete version with one year of support and updates). Parley’s tutorial provides a walk-through demonstration of a simple employment negotiation.

The Federation of American Scientists has created a Nuclear Weapon Effects Calculator to bring home to Americans the devastating effects of a nuclear blast. Select your nearest U.S. city from the dropdown menu, choose the weapon yield (kilotons or megatons), and designate the delivery method–automobile or aircraft–to reveal in a chilling and deeply disturbing way the area of impact and the degree of destruction.

A quietly compelling case for nonproliferation if there ever was one.

(Thanks to Collision Detection.)

Those of you on the lookout for innovation tools and trends will want to pay a visit to the Innovation Weblog.

This blog, in a post titled “New tool for innovation team design: Innovation Styles Online“, links to a free Innovation Styles Profiler (available through 10/31/06) at Innovation Styles Online which allows you to discover your own personal innovation style.

I’m an explorer. What are you?

(Hat tip to Dennis Kennedy for the link.)

Riverhouse ePress, founded by Ron Kraybill, a trainer and advisor in conflict transformation and peacebuilding since 1979 and an Associate Professor of Conflict Studies at Eastern Mennonite University, announces the release of free review copies of Style Matters: The Kraybill Conflict Style Inventory.

The inventory is a recently developed five-styles-of-conflict inventory used by business managers, organizational consultants, and conflict resolution trainers worldwide to teach personal conflict management skills. What makes this inventory unique is its ability to recognize cultural diversity among its users.

The 22-page instrument sells for $3.95 per copy in quantities of one hundred or more. A free trainer’s guide is available on the publisher’s website. Trainers and consultants may request a free review copy in PDF form, by sending an email indicating their organizational affiliation to StyleMattersOffer@RiverhouseEpress.com. A PDF file will immediately be forwarded.

For more information, you can visit the Riverhouse ePress web site.

Riverhouse ePress’s founder also publishes the latest addition to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, Paxblog: Alternative Perspectives on Security and Peace, which reflects blogger Ron Kraybill’s 25 years of experience in international peacebuilding efforts.

(Fans of personality tests should visit these earlier posts from Online Guide to Mediation: “Test of character: using instruments to probe conflict styles and moral intuition“, “Hidden agenda: online test reveals conscious and subconscious bias“, “Let’s face it: testing your understanding of facial expressions“, and “New world order: new web site promotes ‘culturosity’“.)