Affectionately known as the Clown Prince of Denmark, Victor Borge, the much-loved Danish-American humorist, entertainer, and pianist, was reputed to have said that “laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”
Laughter connects people, builds relationships, and, according to research conducted by a team of persuasion scientists, can even be a profitable business tool when it comes to negotiating with others online.
In our increasingly global economy, an estimated 850 million corporate email accounts now send and receive an average of 110 emails per day, and not just for routine messaging. Many businesses now use these exchanges as a primary means of working through quite complex interactions. Take negotiations for example. When negotiations occur between parties who are remote from each other, email becomes an attractive and efficient means of communication, allowing vendors to reach greater numbers of potential clients and customers to connect with a multitude of suppliers.
In many instances email exchanges can act as a useful and cost-effective filter prior to formal negotiations. For example, a potential purchaser may reach out by email to a short list of suppliers, with the parties exchanging messages before a decision is made to progress to phone calls, video conferencing, or perhaps Skype or FaceTime communication. Finally (and by this point it is by no means guaranteed) a face-to-face meeting might be agreed to in order to conclude the negotiations.
So given their ubiquitous nature, how can you use emails to influence the development of the trust that is so important to successful business transactions?
In a wonderful series of studies, Terri Kurtzberg and her colleagues Charles E. Naquin and Liuba Belkin wanted to study the role that humor plays during the initial stages of a series of email exchanges in business and negotiation settings. The studies looked at whether the use of humor had any resulting impact on the levels of trust that were developed between negotiating parties, as well as any impact on the commercial outcomes gained by the parties concerned.
In one of their studies Kurtzberg and her colleagues arranged for teams of business professionals to negotiate a specific and reasonably complex contract via email. Half the study participants were paired up with their negotiation opponents and simply told to get down to business. The other half were instructed to first email their opponent a cartoon in which Scott Adams’s Dilbert ruins a negotiation: first by trying to accept an offer before it’s been made and then—also before any offer has been made—by alluding to an alternative and “better” offer from another party. To check that the cartoon was both effective at inducing laughter and also inoffensive, the researchers conducted a pre-test with a different group of businesspeople in advance. (It was found to be both.)
The researchers hypothesized that offering the cartoon before the negotiation began would create increased levels of trust between the negotiators, eventually leading to higher gains. And they were exactly right. The group who initiated the negotiation by sending the cartoon generated high levels of trust which, in turn, led to a 15 percent greater commercial outcome. That’s a pretty impressive difference for such a small change.
So far, so good. But what about situations where the flexibility of the negotiations is limited? Many organizations, in an attempt to mitigate the variability of their negotiation outcomes, will set out pricing structures or limit the items on which negotiations can be conducted, such as credit terms and delivery schedules. In such situations, would opening the exchange with a humorous cartoon still influence outcomes?
When the researchers tested this, the negotiators who were sent the cartoon first were more than twice as likely to send a first offer that was within the boundaries of an acceptable bargaining arena compared to those that weren’t sent the cartoon. In short, this single, simple, small change resulted in much more efficient negotiating and increased levels of trust between the parties.
The immediate implications seem obvious. In a time-constrained context it’s easy to rattle off a curt and pithy email to others, if only in an attempt to cross another item off your burgeoning to-do list. But this study suggests that doing so, especially at the early stages of a negotiation, could turn out to be an expensive mistake.
Accordingly, an investment of even just one extra minute to humanize your initial exchanges can be important. As the researchers suggest, “Having some sense of ‘the other side’ as a real person and not just an email address seems to help negotiators build trust and rapport, and thus create better agreements with each other.” In fact, additional studies conducted by Kurtzberg and several other researchers found that volunteering personal information in the opening exchanges of an online negotiation in an attempt to uncover a connection with the “other side” not only reduced deadlocks in those subsequent negotiations but also increased commercial outcomes for both parties concerned.
Clearly we are not suggesting that in an attempt to increase the engagement and response rates of your email messages you divulge information so personal that it puts you at a potential risk (or simply scares the wits out of the recipient). But a snippet of information about your previous work experiences or perhaps an interest you have that is likely to be shared with the recipient of your email could be a small change that might make for a notable difference when relationship building online.
Note also that it may not be enough to simply send a funny cartoon. The specific cartoon employed in these studies was one chosen not only because of its ability to raise a chuckle. It was also entirely consistent with the task that the parties were about to undergo—namely, a negotiation. As a result, when employing laughter as an engagement strategy, consider not just the likelihood that your attempt will raise a smile, but to what extent your communication is aligned to the subject or matter you are about to discuss. And remember that sometimes it might be just as effective to discard the idea of an email completely and engage in a little friendly face-to-face chitchat or make a call instead.
In a competitive market where businesses are looking for any small changes they can make to increase their response rates and engagement without costing the earth, Victor Borge’s point is a poignant one. When communicating with disparate groups, sometimes the closest point between two people is laughter—not just online but in face-to-face negotiations as well. For example, research conducted by Karen O’Quinn and Joel Aronoff found that negotiators who received a demand along with a joke (“Well, my final offer is $____, and I’ll throw in my pet frog”) conceded more financially than those who received the demand alone. But for those of you who are unwilling to part ways with your favorite amphibian just to close a deal, perhaps you could offer to throw in your favorite Dilbert cartoon instead.