Emotion and the Art of Negotiation

Alison Wood  Brooks

Article | Harvard Business Review | December 2015

Emotion and the Art of Negotiation: How to Use Your Feelings to Your Advantage

Abstract

Negotiations can be fraught with emotion, but it's only recently that researchers have examined how particular feelings influence what happens during deal making. Here the author shares some key findings and advice. Anxiety leads to poor outcomes. You will be less nervous about negotiating, however, if you repeatedly practice and rehearse. You can also avoid anxiety by asking an outside expert to represent you at the bargaining table. Anger is a double-edged sword. In some cases, it intimidates the other parties and helps you strike a better deal, but in other situations, particularly those involving long-term relationships, it damages trust and goodwill and makes an impasse more likely. To avoid or defuse anger, take a break to cool off or try expressing sadness and a desire to compromise. Disappointment can be channeled to reach a more satisfactory outcome. Before disappointment becomes regret, ask plenty of questions to assure yourself that you've explored all options. And don't close the deal too early; you might find ways to sweeten it if you keep talking. Excitement isn't always a good thing. Getting excited too early can lead you to act rashly and gloating about the final terms can alienate your counterparts. But if feelings of excitement, like other emotions, are well managed, everyone can feel like a winner.

Keywords: Negotiation Style; Emotions;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Register to Read

Citation:

Brooks, Alison Wood. "Emotion and the Art of Negotiation: How to Use Your Feelings to Your Advantage." Harvard Business Review 93, no. 12 (December 2015): 56–64.

In a recent article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP; Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino, 2017), we reported the results of 2 experiments involving “getting acquainted” conversations among strangers and an observational field study of heterosexual speed daters. In all 3 studies, we found that asking more questions in conversation, especially follow-up questions (that indicate responsiveness to a partner), increases interpersonal liking of the question asker. Kluger and Malloy (2019) offer a critique of the analyses in Study 3 of our article. Though their response is a positive signal of engaged interest in our research, they made 3 core mistakes in their analyses that render their critique invalid. First, they tested the wrong variables, leading to conclusions that were erroneous. Second, even if they had analyzed the correct variables, some of their analytical choices were not valid for our speed-dating dataset, casting doubt on their conclusions. Third, they misrepresented our original findings, ignoring results in all 3 of our studies that disprove some of their central criticisms. In summary, the conclusions that Kluger and Malloy (2019) drew about Huang et al. (2017)’s findings are incorrect. The original results are reliable and robust: Asking more questions, especially follow-up questions, increases interpersonal liking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

Article | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General | April 2019

Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures

Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang and Brian Hall

People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of malicious envy in observers: revealing one’s failures. Despite a general reluctance to reveal one’s failures—as they are happening and after they have occurred—across four experiments, we find that revealing both successes and failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers’ malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of the discloser’s status and cannot be explained by a decrease in perceived status of the individual. Then, in a field experiment at an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers’ malicious envy while increasing their benign envy in addition to decreasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance) while increasing their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.

Keywords: Emotions; Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy;

Citation:

Brooks, Alison Wood, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang, and Brian Hall. "Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 148, no. 4 (April 2019): 667–687. View Details

Cite View Details Find at Harvard Read Now

Faculty & Research

Emotion and the Art of Negotiation: How to Use Your Feelings to Your Advantage

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author