How Do Mediator Actions Affect Mediation Outcomes? The Report of the Section’s Task Force on Research on Mediator Techniques Offers a Few Clues

In 2013, the ABA Dispute Resolution Section created a Task Force on Research on Mediator Techniques and asked it to review the empirical research and try to determine which mediator actions are beneficial, which are detrimental, and which have no effect on mediation outcomes. This article describes the Task Force’s work and summarizes its analysis of the research findings for seven categories of mediator actions and three sets of mediation outcomes. The analysis of the studies found that none of the categories of mediator actions was found to have consistent effects on any of the three sets of mediation outcomes, some actions had different effects on different mediation outcomes, and a considerable proportion of studies reported no effects. Accordingly, the Task Force concluded that until there is more and better empirical research on this subject, mediators should be careful in making broad claims about “best” techniques