Getting (More of) What You Want

Emotions such as anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, and fear can play an important role in negotiations. However, the consequences to the parties displaying the emotion are mixed, sometimes enhancing and sometimes reducing their outcomes. Both the expression and experience of emotions can influence how you think and interpret information in the negotiation; they can also influence how your counterpart behaves, and ultimately can help or hinder your ability to get more of what you want.

As a negotiator, you can express your real feelings, or you can chose to display emotions you do not actually experience. Thus, emotions can be uncontrolled reflections of a negotiator’s true feelings, or they can reflect a strategic choice to express a true feeling or to act as if you are experiencing a particular emotion when, in fact, you are not.

For example, you may be angry and express that anger, either because you choose to do so or because you simply cannot control your anger. Alternatively, you may be angry but express warmth or sympathy—emotions you don’t actually feel. You could also be angry but suppress your emotions and appear neutral. Finally, you may not have an emotional response to the situation but act as if you were angry in an attempt to influence your counterpart.

For most people, it is not difficult to recall a negotiation when your emotions or those of your counterpart got in the way of getting what you wanted. Perhaps the expression of emotions was so extreme that your counterpart walked away because of words spoken in the heat of the moment or perhaps you blurted out information that should have been left unshared; or because—again at that moment—winning that particular point or getting back at your counterpart was the only thing you cared about. This experience is often associated with conflict spirals. If emotions, especially negative emotions get out of hand, the ensuing damage to the relationship and escalation of conflict that results can have long-lasting, negative effects on your relationships as well as the outcomes you achieve in your negotiations.

CONFLICT SPIRALS

Some readers will undoubtedly be old enough to remember the student demonstrations in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often demonstrations would start with a few students staging a protest or a sit-in around some issue. The campus administration would call in security to disperse the student scofflaws, resulting in arrests, increased resistance, and media attention. As a result, other students would join into the melee, which led administrators to bring in more security or outside police or even, in some extreme cases, the National Guard. This action would then result in the involvement of even more students, provoked by the aggressive response of the administration rather than by the issue that originally generated the demonstration.

While the most common form of spiral in negotiation is such a conflict spiral, these spirals may be positive (generative spirals) or negative (degenerative spirals). They are typically a function of responding to others’ behavior in kind or an intensifying of the counterpart’s response. So responses may vary from relatively benign strategies such as ingratiation or implied threats to more aggressive strategies such as emotional outbursts, explicit threats, or irrevocable commitments—all of which could lead to impasses that are emotional rather than calculative.

Thomas has experienced firsthand how emotions can actually destroy value. When Thomas was six years old, his family was preparing to emigrate from their native Poland to Israel. In preparation, they were selling most of their possessions, particularly those that were of little value in the Middle East. Thomas’s father had a pair of high-quality winter boots—a prized possession in wintery Poland, but of no use in the Middle East. In 1957, boots of such high quality were very expensive in Poland, and few people could afford them. A few days before their scheduled departure, a prospective buyer showed up, offering half of his father’s (considerable) asking price. Enraged by what he perceived to be a low-ball offer, his father, a typically rational nuclear engineer, took a heavy kitchen knife and cut the boots in half, exclaiming: “for half the money you can have half the boots!” Now obviously the offer exceeded his father’s reservation price since the boots were useless in the Middle East (his father had made them useless anyway by cutting them in half). So unless he valued the satisfaction of destroying his prized boots by more than half of his asking price, this emotional outburst clearly got him less of what he wanted.

Emotions can also limit your ability to think and act strategically, and, especially when these emotions are negative, your emotional outbursts can be contagious, creating a cascade of emotional responses from your counterpart.1 Because of the cognitive downside of these negative emotions, negotiators often attempt to suppress or hide their emotions—particularly negative ones such as anger. For instance, the prescriptive advice of Howard Raiffa in The Art and Science of Negotiation touts the importance of self-control, especially of emotions and their visibility. Similarly, Gerald Nierenberg in The Art of Negotiating states that “people in an emotional state do not want to think, and they are particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion from a clever opponent.”2

There are different methods that you might employ to avoid strong emotions. First, you might avoid a situation that is likely to generate a strong emotional response. For example, you may avoid a colleague because you have information that might make her angry at you. Second, you might modify the situation to reduce the likelihood of a strong emotional response. You might avoid the topic that is likely to generate the negative emotion or sugar-coat provocative information. Third, if you find yourself getting angry with your counterpart, you might count to ten before responding or mentally go to your “happy place.” Finally, you might simply suppress the expression of the emotion you are experiencing—that is, keep a poker face. These options are all ways to avoid or minimize your emotional response.

In contrast, you might reframe the outcome or reorient the personal meaning you ascribe to the situation. For example, the anger that your counterpart is expressing may be completely reasonable given the situation from her perspective. That is, the information is the stimulus for the anger and not you. Regulating your emotion before it is experienced is a reappraisal strategy. The reappraisal occurs early in a process that is expected to generate the emotion, and it involves cognitive efforts designed specifically to neutralize or reframe the experience. Reappraisal strategies change the experience of the emotions, reframing how you interpret the experience. This is a strategy that requires you to think carefully about your counterparts and their likely behavior—an aspect of negotiation preparation that presents a continual challenge for most negotiators.3

However, these prescriptions, while intuitive, all have some systematic disadvantages, because ignoring or suppressing your emotions in a negotiation can sometimes make you worse off. After all, inhibiting the expression of the emotion takes a lot of mental effort—effort that cannot be applied to the difficult thinking that is necessary for successful negotiations. Therefore, suppressing the expression of emotions may actually hinder your ability to think, specifically your ability to process and recall information.4 In addition, suppression efforts have physiological implications—both for you (your blood pressure increases when you attempt to suppress emotions) and surprisingly, for your counterpart in the negotiation. Even when you are successful in suppressing your emotional response, not only does your blood pressure rise but the blood pressure of your counterpart rises as well, and he perceives you as less likable because you end up suppressing more than just your negative emotions!5 What’s more, maintaining a poker face can reduce your ability to reach creative, negotiated outcomes because emotions provide unique information to both you and your counterpart.

THE RELATION BETWEEN THINKING AND FEELING

Humans have a limited amount of cognitive resources. Although there is a connection between how you feel and how you think, the resources that are allocated to your emotional experience are not simply deducted from those that are allocated to thinking. In some situations, emotions can enhance your thought processes, and at other times, they can make clear thinking difficult.

Although emotional and cognitive functions are under the control of separate and partially independent brain systems, your emotions can affect the choices you make by providing a form of information that can help you make decisions.6 To demonstrate this, researchers asked people to rate how humorous they found a set of cartoons.7 Before they rated the cartoons, half the participants in the study were asked to hold a pencil in their teeth such that the pencil stuck out like a straw. The other half of the participants were asked to hold a pencil in their mouth such that the pencil was horizontal with the point close to one ear and the eraser close to the other ear. You might be skeptical about believing that how you hold a pencil in your mouth would affect how funny you thought a set of cartoons were. But it did. Those who held the pencil like a straw were using muscles that are typically associated with a frown, while those holding the pencil horizontally were using muscles typically associated with a smile. Indeed, those in the horizontal condition rated the cartoon as funnier than did those in the straw condition. It was as if the participants were thinking, “This feels like frowning [first group] so these cartoons cannot be that funny.” Or, “this feels like smiling [second group] so these cartoons must be funny.”

Clearly, the participants were not aware of the effect of stimulating various muscles to mimic the expression of emotions had on their assessments of the cartoons. But just because you are not aware of a particular effect does not mean that it cannot influence your perceptions. While admittedly this research was done in the controlled environment of the laboratory, it shed light on just how interconnected our emotions and perceptions are.

For a real-world example of the interplay between emotions and perception, consider the powerful effect of audiences in influencing how you interpret your experience at a play or at a concert. And it doesn’t even have to be a live audience: Hollywood, for instance, has long known the power of laugh tracks.

Emotions also affect your choices. Low or moderate levels of emotions can prepare you to respond to challenges and opportunities by providing information about what is important and how you are faring with respect to your goals. Recent research has explored another avenue by which emotions influence your thinking. In the past, it was generally accepted that positive moods were associated with increased creativity, breadth of thought, and flexibility while negative mood generated disagreement and conflict.8 Now, there is a growing consensus that different emotions are associated with heuristic processing of information while others, with systematic processing of information.

What most people expect is that more thoughtful assessments or systematic processing occurs with positive emotions and this short-cut or heuristic type of thinking occurs with negative emotions. But as it turns out, this is not true! It is not the valence (positive or negative) that determines how deep or how superficial is your thinking. It turns out that both angry and happy people tend to engage in heuristic thinking. Happy people have been found to increase their reliance on stereotypes as did angry people.9 In both these emotional states, individuals paid more attention to the visible characteristics of speakers than they did to the persuasive nature of their arguments.10 In contrast, individuals experiencing sadness (often viewed as a negative emotion) or surprise (either a positive or a negative emotion, depending on the nature of the surprise) were likely to consider more alternatives and process information in a more careful and thoughtful way.11

As it turns out, happiness and anger influence our thinking differently from emotions such as surprise or sadness. These latter emotions produce a more systematic processing of information. The type of thinking in which negotiators engage is critical because heuristic thinking is associated with compromise and a focus on who gets what, while systematic thinking is associated with increased value creation.

But what is it about these emotions that change how you think? The more emotions are associated with feelings of certainty, the more experiencing these emotions encourages negotiators to think heuristically; In contrast, the more emotions are associated with feelings of uncertainty, the more systematically negotiators process information.12 But emotions such as happiness and anger—while polar opposites—have more in common than just being associated with certainty and heuristic processing. Probably the most surprising similarity is that both happiness and anger are optimistic emotions.13

Now, most negotiators would not typically think of anger as being an optimistic emotion. However, it turns out that anger is optimistic if you consider the angry person’s thinking and planning for future actions. When thinking about the future, angry people often feel as if they can change the future, influence the source of their anger, or find a way around the barriers that are thwarting them.14

In addition, anger can energize us to action, and many of us can relate to the exhilaration felt when wreaking revenge on a tormentor or watching with suppressed amusement as unfortunate events conspire against your enemies. Further, those who study anger have discovered that there is also a large difference between how anger is experienced in the moment and the memory of anger. In the moment, the experience of anger is positive; in memory, the experience of anger is negative!15

So if anger were an optimistic emotion, then you would expect there to be some real benefits to being angry in a negotiation—not the least of which is that your optimism might be reflected in higher aspirations. Happiness is also an optimistic emotion. So, from a perspective of your own outcomes in a negotiation, are you better off when you are angry or when you are happy in the negotiation? That is, do angry or happy negotiators create more value, let alone claim more of that value?

IS IT BETTER TO BE ANGRY OR HAPPY IN A NEGOTIATION?

Historically, research on the impact of emotions on negotiation has indicated that happier negotiators—or at least those in a positive mood—are more likely to create value, while angry negotiators have typically dominated value claiming.16 But consider the difference you could make with optimistic, angry (i.e., certain and heuristically inclined) negotiators if you could invoke in them a sense that the negotiation was not a routine experience. Could you create angry, but uncertain negotiators who experienced both the optimism of their anger coupled with the systematic thinking that accompanies uncertainty?

In a first study, researchers induced one member of a negotiating dyad to feel angry. Further, half of these angry negotiators were certain that their counterparts behaved unreasonably and became angry while the other half, while angry at the behavior, were not certain that this unfortunate outcome was the result of their specific counterpart’s behavior.17

In a second study, researchers suggested to half the participants that the negotiation process was a predictable and routine interaction instead of being unpredictable and uncertain.18 The results of both of these studies showed that anger—when accompanied by feelings of uncertainty—led to greater value creation in negotiations. In fact, angry but uncertain negotiators created more value than emotionally neutral negotiators, who in turn did better than angry, but certain, negotiators.19 However, angry negotiators, in general, were able to claim a larger percentage of the resource than their counterparts. And as you would suspect, the reason that uncertain, angry negotiators did so much better was because they engaged in more systematic strategic thinking about the negotiation than did angry but certain negotiators.

But all of this occurred with a counterpart who was not angry. What if both parties were experiencing anger or happiness and either thought that their counterpart was responsible for behaviors that led to these emotions or was uncertain? It turns out that success in value claiming is enhanced by emotion, while success in value creating is enhanced by uncertainty.20

Let’s first take the effect of value claiming or the decision of how to divide up the resources. Angry negotiators were able to claim more value than were their happy counterparts. However, whether you were happy or angry made little difference to the amount of value you and your counterpart were able to create. What mattered was how certain or uncertain you were about the situation, the interaction, or the event. In the study, the more the negotiators were uncertain about how the negotiation would unfold and the more negotiators who were uncertain (no negotiators uncertain < one negotiator uncertain < two negotiators uncertain), the more value those dyads created.

But there was another interesting finding regarding the value-creating capacity of angry/certain and angry/uncertain negotiators. It turns out that the greatest amount of value created of all possible combinations was when one negotiator was angry and uncertain; and the least amount of value created occurred in negotiations with a counterpart who was angry and certain! The value created by happy negotiators fell between the values created by the two types of angry negotiators.

Thus, anger can be a useful emotion for value claiming, and it can also facilitate value creation, especially when the situation is uncertain. In addition, there is a difference in the effects between the optimism that anger produces and the optimism that happiness produces. Although there were no differences in how angry or happy negotiators rated their optimism in the negotiated outcome and their confidence that they could achieve that outcome, the initial offers that the angry negotiators presented were significantly more extreme than those of the happy negotiators. This lack of aggressive action on the part of happy negotiators is consistent with their not wanting to “kill the buzz.” Individuals who are happy tend to avoid actions or situations that they believe would dampen their good feelings—and so often fail to get more of what they actually entered the negotiation to get.

EXPERIENCED VERSUS EXPRESSED EMOTIONS

Expressions of emotions communicate important social information such as danger (fear expressions) or opportunity (happiness expressions). When you experience such expressions during a negotiation, they can convey information about your likely actions and behaviors to your counterpart.21 Of course, this assumes that your expressed emotions are truthful representations of your experienced emotions. You can express emotions that you do not feel—or feel emotions that you do not express.

What is the impact of each of these types of expressions on your ability to negotiate? To answer that question, let’s consider two aspects of emotions: what function they serve for you (the intrapersonal aspect of emotions) and what function they serve for your counterpart (the interpersonal aspect of emotions).

First, emotions can be intrapersonal, impacting your assessment of your environment and your counterpart. For example, anger is associated with blaming others, experiencing a violation or offense, and feeling certain. Anger influences the angry individual’s perceptions, the decision he makes, and the behaviors he implements. That is, anger motivates you to change the situation, remove barriers, and re-establish a previous status quo.22 A negotiator experiencing anger is likely to become more aggressive and more optimistic—perhaps by expressing an increased resistance to making concessions or escalating the concessions demanded from the counterparts.23

However, negotiators who become angry may get distracted by their anger, and their thinking may become impaired.24 At that point, negotiators tend to focus on issues related to the anger rather than issues related to the negotiation, losing sight of their primary goals—to get more of what they want!25 If experiencing anger diffuses your focus, even if it makes you optimistic, the likelihood of reaching value-creating integrative agreements is reduced. You are more likely to reach an impasse, especially when your anger reduces your motivation and, indeed, your capacity to process complex information and thereby to find an outcome that makes you better off.

Happiness, on the other hand, is associated with the expectation of positive future states as well as a sense of certainty or predictability. You assess the situation as moving toward a positive outcome—and conclude that you simply need to stay the course and are not particularly motivated to extract further value from your counterpart.26 Specifically, negotiators in a positive mood were found to be more cooperative and less competitive, while increasing their reliance on simple heuristics that, in the context of negotiation, could lead to quick and cooperative, but inefficient, agreements.27

Now consider the other impact that the expression of emotion has—not just on you, but also on those around you. Expressions of emotions such as anger can have interpersonal effects far different from the subjective experience of anger to the angry person, just as expressions of happiness may have different effects from feelings of happiness.

First and foremost, the simple expression of an emotion is likely to have little impact on how you think. Acting happy is unlikely to encourage heuristic thinking just as acting sad or surprised is unlikely to encourage systematic thinking. You must feel these emotions for them to have their effect. But what expressing emotions can do is change the way those around you respond to you. Negotiators are more willing to concede when facing counterparts who expressed anger.28 Thus, expressing anger benefited the expressers by allowing them to claim more value, but it had no effect on their ability to create value. This suggests that the mechanisms that effect emotional expressions may differ from those of emotional experience. In line with this, negotiators conceded less to counterparts who expressed happiness than they did to those who expressed anger.29

Clearly, expressing emotions can have different effects from experiencing those emotions. For example, expressing surprise may be a very different cognitive experience from experiencing surprise. Expressing surprise that you do not feel actually changes how your counterpart responds to you.30 The emotions that you express seem to have a much greater impact on your counterpart than on yourself; hence, the expression of emotions is an interpersonal phenomenon.

Expressing anger in a negotiation has worked to Thomas’s benefit on one occasion. In 2013, he decided to sell his home in a suburb of Chicago. The real estate market was strong, and Thomas received two offers within the first week of listing his house. He informed both bidders that there was competition, and both submitted revised bids that exceeded the original listing price.

Naturally, Thomas picked the higher of the second round offers and signed a sales contract with the couple making the winning bid. The sales contract stipulated that the price would be adjusted if an inspection revealed undisclosed problems. Following the inspections, the buyers demanded a price adjustment of $32,000, producing a list of items that, they claimed, needed to be remedied. For example, the inspection revealed that the furnace was old and likely needed replacement soon. However, the age of the furnace had been disclosed to the buyers, and, from Thomas’s perspective it could not be legitimately characterized as undisclosed. After an initial negotiation through his real estate agent produced no agreement, Thomas expressed anger (again through his real estate agent) and threatened to put the house back on the market. At first, the buyers did not respond, so Thomas reactivated the listing and annulled the sales contract. Within a few days, the prospective buyers conceded, and the house was sold for the contracted price minus a small adjustment for one item that was, indeed, unknown to Thomas and, therefore, undisclosed.

Not only does the expression of emotion have more impact on your counterparts but also there is an impact on you. Expressing emotions that you don’t experience requires consistent cognitive effort. Remember that earlier we noted that suppressing emotion requires cognitive energy that is then unavailable for meeting the informational demands of the negotiation. As such, the more the expressed emotion is at odds with your experienced emotional state, the more cognitive effort it will require to maintain the ruse required to express that emotion. The more cognitive effort it will require, the fewer cognitive resources will be left for solving the negotiating challenges you face. Thus, to the extent that expressed and experienced emotions are the same, there is both an interpersonal and an intrapersonal component to that emotion—and the cognitive effort is less. If on the other hand expressed and experienced emotions are different—that is, one does not express the emotion one feels—then the expression and the experience can activate two different effects, but the cognitive demands of this situation may result in significantly diminished success in creating value.

In the next section, we consider a third problem with expressing emotions that you do not experience—you actually begin to experience the emotions that you express strategically; they often become real.

EMOTIONAL CONTAGION

It may be in your best interest, particularly for value claiming, for your counterpart to experience positive emotions, independent of your emotional state. This is because happy people come to agreement more quickly and, in general, see the world as more friendly and more positive—and so they demand less. Thus, putting your counterpart in a happy state of mind may be very useful. Just how can you get your counterpart to be more positive?

Emotions are contagious, as negotiator Joe Girard knows all too well. Girard is probably one of the best negotiators on the planet: he is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest car salesman. Part of this surely has to do with the emotional signals he sends to clients. He is reported to have sent out thirteen thousand greeting cards each month to past and potential customers. Although the greetings on each of these cards differed, the message was clear: “I like you.” While there are likely many additional reasons why Joe Girard was so successful, it is likely that he conveyed a positive, friendly face to his customers, and there is ample research to show that such positive emotions spread to the people who observe them.31

Emotions may be transmitted from one person to another, typically through subconscious mimicry of facial expressions, body language, speech patterns, and vocal tones of others. If the expression of positive emotion can make an individual more attractive and influence subsequent performance, then the success of people like Joe Girard may be in large measure the result of their ability to infect those in their environment with a positive, friendly attitude—and to do so at a level that is often unconscious to even the most cynical of counterparts. Thus, by expressing positive emotions, you may infect others with that positivism. Of course, the inverse is true. If you express anger, those around you may also experience anger.

Surprisingly, this contagion works on you as well. If you strategically express anger, you will—over time—become angrier. That is, you can escalate yourself into an angry state of mind. So thinking back to the earlier discussion of the cognitive effort required to maintain an emotional expression you do not experience, that effort is likely to be less effective over time because of the increasing consistency of your expressed and experienced emotional states. To maintain such a discrepant state requires constant vigilance and, as such, creates huge demands of self-control.

So while expressing emotions, particularly negative ones can influence both you and your counterpart, are there better alternatives? For example, is it better to express anger or to issue a threat? It turns out that, from a psychological perspective (as opposed to the economic perspective discussed in Chapter 9), when the impact of threats and the impact of anger are directly compared, threats are more effective than anger. So while the implementation of threats can be problematic and expressing anger does have advantages, expressing either of them has differential costs and benefits that you should carefully consider.

SUMMARY

When it comes to judging the impact of emotions on negotiator performance, much of the common anecdotal advice does not hold up under scientific scrutiny. So rather than going with your gut—and being guided by your emotions—during a negotiation, keep the following tips in mind:

• Research shows that, rather than suppressing emotion and trying to maintain a poker face, a better strategy is to engage in emotional reappraisal. In other words, if you believe that you may be subject to strong emotional experiences, a good strategy is to reappraise the situation prior to experiencing the emotion. Because suppression occurs after the emotional experience is present, it is a much less effective negotiation strategy—both because of how it affects your ability to problem-solve and because of the affective response it generates in your counterpart—than is reappraisal. Unlike suppression, reappraisal occurs prior to the initiation of the emotion and focuses on the meaning of the situation and the information that may be obtained from your counterpart’s emotional reactions to that situation. For example, you can attempt to suppress your emotional choice to escalate in response to your counterpart’s threats during the negotiation; alternatively, you can proactively view threats as information about what your counterpart values in the negotiation—and use that information to adjust aspects of future proposals.

• Emotional responses or states can provide wise negotiators with another source of information about their own preferences and choices and the relative importance of various options. Further, emotions that give rise to or are associated with uncertainty can ultimately improve value creation. In addition, other emotional states such as anger can facilitate value claiming. The trick is to get the best of both worlds.

• Be sensitive to the emotional state of your counterpart and to ways in which it can influence the emotions that you experience. The contagion that may result from expressing positive emotions may increase the willingness of your counterpart to agree to your proposals and view you and the situation in much more positive and cooperative terms.

• Because positive emotions have been shown to enhance the creation of joint outcomes but is typically associated with less effective value claiming, you should consider expressing emotions strategically that you do not necessarily experience. For example, you may wish to encourage positive emotions in your counterpart early in the negotiation (when value creating is most likely to occur); in later stages of the negotiation, you may wish to express more negative emotions such as anger and the resulting perception of toughness to facilitate one’s own ability to claim value.

While you would be clearly worse off without the information available to you from your emotional responses, you should explicitly consider the influence those emotions (yours and your counterparts) have on your ability to create and to claim value. Your emotions can serve as a resource in your interaction or as a powerful magnet, drawing your attention and cognitive effort away from the demands of the negotiated interaction.