Negotiation is a decisionmaking process in which people jointly make decisions to resolve conflicting interests. There are a number of systematic biases that appear in negotiators' judgments of one another and the structure of the negotiation task. Errors in judgment are a major cause of suboptimal, inefficient negotiations. The following provides a summary of some of the key implications of this research: (1) negotiators enter negotiation with zero-sum, win-lose perception; (2) during negotiation, successful negotiators' perceptions of the amount of potential joint gain increase and they view the task as a variable-sum task; and (3) negotiators who view the negotiation as having integrative potential earn greater individual and joint profits than those who view the negotiation as a distributive task. The relationship between negotiator bias and outcome is not present at the outset of negotiations, but becomes effective within the first 5 minutes of interaction. Biased negotiators tend to weigh negatively framed issues involving probable loss too highly compared to positively framed issues. Approximately 90 references.