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Changing Minds: The Work Of Mediators And Empirical Studies Of Persuasion, James H. Stark, Douglas N. Frenkel

All Faculty Scholarship

The use of mediation has grown exponentially in recent years in courts, agencies, and community settings. Yet the field of mediation still operates to a considerable extent on folklore and opinion, rather than reliable knowledge. Mediator attempts at persuasion are pervasive in a wide variety of mediation contexts, yet “persuasion” is, for some, a pejorative word and a contested norm in the field. Perhaps as a result, there has been little, if any, evidence-based writing about what kinds of persuasive appeals might be effective in mediation, how they might operate, and how they might be experienced by disputants. In an …