Negotiation experts have long confirmed the intuition that being warm and friendly pays off at the bargaining table, leading us to gain concessions and capture a larger chunk of value. Similarly, in our own research, we’ve found that people tend to believe niceness will buy them better deals. But when put to the test, this prediction turns out to be wrong.
Across four experiments with more than 1,500 participants, we tested the economic and interpersonal implications of being warm and friendly in a negotiation. One of our studies was a field experiment conducted via Craigslist.com. We had a research assistant using a genderneutral name (“Riley Johnson”) send messages from a fictitious Gmail account to actual sellers of smartphones on the platform.
We randomly varied Riley’s communication style in the initial message, but Riley always asked for an 80% discount from the sellers’ original price. We tracked whether sellers were willing to make a counteroffer lower than their original price and, if they did, we measured that discount. “Riley” emailed 775 sellers, sending warm messages to half of them and tough messages to the other half.
We found that warm and friendly messages were just as likely to elicit a counteroffer as tough and firm messages (around a 31% probability in either case). But whereas firm messages got more active rejections, or outright noes (24%), than warm messages (14%), warm messages were more likely to be completely ignored (54%) than firm messages (45%). And in this kind of online context, it’s arguably better to get an active rejection than to simply be ghosted, because with a rejection you at least get a response that you can then try to negotiate on.
When sellers did offer a discount, it was larger when Riley’s message was tough and firm. Sellers were more willing to accept the 80% discount offer when it came from a tough buyer (about 13%) than from a friendly buyer (less than 9%). The results suggest that being firm can sometimes lead to better deals, at least in a distributive negotiation, than being warm.
We subsequently conducted a laboratory study to observe the entire negotiation process. We brought in 140 participants and paired them up to negotiate together anonymously online. They were randomly assigned to play the role of either a buyer or seller, and they were given incentive to reach the best deal for a bowl. Buyers were told to make the same first offers and to use different communication styles.
Warm and friendly negotiators ended up paying 15% more for the same item as compared with tough and firm negotiators. This is because sellers made more aggressive initial counteroffers and won more concessions from friendly buyers over the course of the 10-minute negotiation.
Although our findings highlight the clear economic costs of being “warm and friendly,” they do not imply that everyone should become a jerk.
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
