Before the Covid-19 pandemic, mediators and other negotiation practitioners often insisted on meeting in person, convinced that online methods of dispute resolution lack “the human touch”—the warmth, energy, body language, and other subtle factors that build essential ingredients in conflict resolution, including trust, empathy, and rapport.
But when lockdowns and social-distancing restrictions took hold in the spring of 2020, “resistance to online practice of negotiation and mediation was swept away in a heartbeat, and the entire field shifted online,” writes Creighton University professor Noam Ebner in “The Human Touch in ODR: Trust, Empathy, and Social Intuition in Online Negotiation and Mediation,” a chapter in the forthcoming book Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice (Eleven International Publishing, 2021). That wholesale shift toward online conflict resolution has led many to recognize that, in fact, alternative dispute resolution processes can succeed and even thrive online.
