Arbitration in its Psychological Context

This concluding chapter presents a program for a more ‘contextual’ approach to the application of psychology to arbitration than has been adopted within arbitration scholarship thus far. It specifically examines the area of Contextual Behavioral Science (CBS), which focuses on the ‘act in context’, treating behaviour as inseparable from the circumstances that surround it. Such a context-sensitive approach allows new light to be shed on the psychology of arbitration, while also unifying the existing literature within a new epistemic framework that offers the advantage of not only predicting but also of potentially influencing the behaviour of interest in arbitration. While psychology can be applied to arbitration in many ways, the chapter focuses on arbitrator reasoning. It addresses the professional context of arbitration, scrutinizing how individual conceptions of the role of the arbitrator can influence reasoning. The chapter also considers the social context of arbitration, analysing the relations between the hierarchical character of the arbitration community and the existence of cognitive biases.