Communicating with Warmth in Distributive Negotiations Is Surprisingly Counterproductive

Abstract

When entering into a negotiation, individuals have the choice to enact a variety of communication styles. We test the differential impact of being "warm and friendly" versus "tough and firm" in a distributive negotiation when first offers are held constant and concession patterns are tracked. We train a natural language processing algorithm to precisely quantify the difference between how people enact warm and friendly versus tough and firm communication styles. We find that the two styles differ primarily in length and their expressions of politeness (Study 1). Negotiators with a tough and firm communication style achieved better economic outcomes than negotiators with a warm and friendly communication style in both a field experiment (Study 2) and a laboratory experiment (Study 3). This was driven by the fact that offers delivered in tough and firm language elicited more favorable counteroffers. We further find that the counterparts of warm and friendly versus tough and firm negotiators did not report different levels of satisfaction or enjoyment of their interactions (Study 3). Finally, we document that individuals' lay beliefs are in direct opposition to our findings: participants believe that authors of warmly worded negotiation offers will be better liked and will achieve better economic outcomes (Study 4).

In Generous Offers I Trust: The Effect of First-Offer Value on Economically Vulnerable Behaviors

“…We posed as a potentially interested buyer sending offer messages to participants and randomly varied the first-offer amount. We closely followed the design used in Jeong, Minson, Yeomans, and Gino (2019). We created a fictitious Gmail account with a gender-neutral name (“Riley Stone”), which allowed us to send all messages from the same source and to track responses.…”

Towards Understanding the Effect of Voice on Human-Agent Negotiation

“…In human-human e-negotiations, Belkin et al [7] showed that the linguistic expression of happiness was associated with submissiveness whereas the linguistic expression of anger with dominance. A behavior being perceived as more dominant achieved higher individual negotiation gains [7] and behavior taking on a tough and firm communication style resulted in higher economic outcomes and more beneficial counteroffers [25]. In line with this are findings in a multi-modal setting, where in human-agent negotiations virtual agents expressing dominant hand gestures and body postures convinced elderly more often to follow their suggestions than submissive agents [35].…”

The politeness Package: Detecting Politeness in Natural Language

“…This is useful as a robustness check when there is wide variance in document length. For example take the following two texts (this data, borrowed from (Jeong et al, 2018) is included in the package):…”

“…In addition to the phone_offers dataset, we have included a smaller bowl_offers dataset (also from (Jeong et al, 2018)). Participants in this study were given similar instructions (i.e., communicate in a warm or tough style) but for a different negotiation exercise.…”