Noise in negotiation – towards a typology

Negotiations are polyvalent processes, in which communication plays a nodal role. Out of the main communication components (participants, message, transmission channel, coding, decoding, feed-back, etc.), one has been almost neglected, although its impact is significant, and that is noise. Attempting to fill in this blank, in order to outline negative influences and to examine possibilities of avoiding them, my approach here refers to classifying noise. Noise can be natural, or artificial, intentional or non-intentional, intrinsic or extrinsic to the negotiation environment. In addition, I complement the most commonly held perception of noise, that of an auditory disturbance, with other categories of noises, visual, olfactory, cognitive, psychical.