Functional theories of reputation imply that individuals' reputations are tied to their history of behavior. However, indirect evidence suggests that the relation between reputation and behavior might be tenuous at best. In 3 studies, the authors tracked the development of reputations among individuals who engaged in multiple negotiation tasks across several weeks. The authors found that on average, individuals' reputations were only mildly related to their history of behavior. However, the link between reputation and behavior was stronger for some individuals than others--specifically, for individuals who were more well-known and received more social attention in the community. In contrast, for less well-known individuals, their behavior had little impact on their reputation. The findings have implications for psychologists' understanding of reputations, person perceptions in larger groups, and the costs and benefits of social visibility.

The current research is the first investigation of how the effects of expressing discrete emotions in negotiations vary across cultures. In a hypothetical negotiation scenario (Study 1) and a computer-mediated negotiation simulation (Study 2), expressing anger (relative to not expressing anger) elicited larger concessions from European American negotiators, but smaller concessions from Asian and Asian American negotiators. A third study provided evidence that this effect is due to different cultural norms about the appropriateness of anger expressions in negotiations: When we explicitly manipulated anger expressions to be appropriate, Asian and Asian American negotiators made larger concessions to the angry opponent, and their concessions were as large as was typical for European American negotiators; when we explicitly manipulated anger expressions to be inappropriate, European American negotiators made smaller concessions to the angry opponent, and their concessions were as small as was typical for Asian and Asian American negotiators. Implications for current understanding of culture, emotions, and negotiations are discussed.

The authors address the long-standing mystery of stable individual differences in negotiation performance, on which intuition and conventional wisdom have clashed with inconsistent empirical findings. The present study used the Social Relations Model to examine individual differences directly via consistency in performance across multiple negotiations and to disentangle the roles of both parties within these inherently dyadic interactions. Individual differences explained a substantial 46% of objective performance and 19% of subjective performance in a mixed-motive bargaining exercise. Previous work may have understated the influence of individual differences because conventional research designs require specific traits to be identified and measured. Exploratory analyses of a battery of traits revealed few reliable associations with consistent individual differences in objective performance-except for positive beliefs about negotiation, positive affect, and concern for one's outcome, each of which predicted better performance. Findings suggest that the field has large untapped potential to explain substantial individual differences. Limitations, areas for future research, and practical implications are discussed. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Keywords NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptA long-standing mystery within the field of negotiation-a mutual decision-making process to allocate scarce resources (Pruitt, 1983)-is the influence of individual differences on performance. Conventional wisdom suggests that some people seem more adept, natural, comfortable, and successful at negotiating. Differences in skill seem so vast that students often question whether they are innate or acquired (Kray & Haselhuhn, 2007). Indeed, the strong intuition that some negotiators are better than others resonates with theoretical perspectives in psychology on the pervasive influence of enduring personal dispositions on interpersonal behavior (Sternberg & Dobson, 1987;Thompson, 1990b).However, empirical research has been less than compelling in validating this common wisdom. Large-scale reviews have long concluded that individual differences are unreliable predictors of negotiation outcomes, resulting in a preponderance of null and inconsistent results (Lewicki, Litterer, Minton, & Saunders, 1994;Terhune, 1970;Thompson, 1990b). Previous authors have gone so far as to conclude that "personality and individual differences appear to play a minimal role in determining bargaining behavior" (Thompson, 1990b, p. 515). Given these conclusions, negotiation researchers...

The influence of culture on the social effects of emotions in negotiations has recently gained the attention of researchers, but to date this research has focused exclusively on the cultural background of the perceiver of the emotion expression. The current research offers the first investigation of how the cultural background of the expresser influences negotiation outcomes. On the basis of the stereotype that East Asians are emotionally inexpressive and European Americans are emotionally expressive, we predicted that anger will have a stronger signaling value when East Asians rather than European American negotiators express it. Specifically, we predicted that angry East Asian negotiators will be perceived as tougher and more threatening and therefore elicit great cooperation from counterparts compared with angry European American negotiators. Results from 4 negotiation studies supported our predictions. In Study 1, angry East Asian negotiators elicited greater cooperation than angry European American and Hispanic negotiators. In Study 2, angry East Asian negotiators elicited greater cooperation than angry European American ones, but emotionally neutral East Asian and European American negotiators elicited the same level of cooperation. Study 3 showed that this effect holds for both East Asian and European American perceivers and that it is mediated by angry East Asian negotiators being perceived as tougher and more threatening than angry European American negotiators. Finally, Study 4 demonstrated that the effect emerges only when negotiators hold the stereotype of East Asians being emotionally inexpressive and European Americans being emotionally expressive. We discuss implications for our understanding of culture, emotions, and negotiations.

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