Negotiation has been a topic that has received considerable attention over the years as people have sought to get better at it. One of the more peculiar tactics is to feign anger in the belief that this will coerce the other party into conceding to your terms.
The futility of such a strategy is underlined by a recent study from Washington University in St. Louis, reveals that feigned anger harms both parties.
The research saw participants paid to express anger during a negotiation scenario. Interestingly, despite initially feigning anger, this eventually turned into bona fide anger, due in large part to the way the other parties reacted to their behavior. This then typically contributed to a failed negotiation.
The initial experiment revealed that those feigning anger often felt guilty about their deceit, which prompted the researchers to conduct some follow-up experiments to explore how these feelings of guilt emerge, and what impact they had on the negotiations.
Guilty negotiations
Across a number of experiments, several hundred participants were asked to implement deals they had negotiated the previous day. After 24 hours to cool off, the anger from the previous day had largely gone, but it was replaced by a sense of guilt around their behavior during the negotiation.
This feeling of guilt prompted many participants to try and atone for their actions, with those who had previously expressed anger subsequently awarding 20% more of their allotment to their counterpart than those who did not.
These surprising results suggest that displaying anger during negotiations can often lead to feelings of guilt, which in turn leads to sub-optimal outcomes in the negotiations.
“Implementing the agreement is key in negotiations,” the authors explain. “If you’ve behaved this way with anger, you’ve destroyed a lot of trust. On your end, you realize this isn’t good for the long run. So if you feel guilt, you may try to correct the damage.”
What’s more, when anger was used in negotiations, it also helped to undermine the strength of the contract itself, with the other party reneging on the agreement up to 30% of the time.
Suffice to say, the authors openly admit that they were only examining feigned anger, such that it was deliberately introduced as a tactic to manipulate the negotiation. When anger emerged naturally is a different matter entirely, and not one they explored. They wish to dispel the myth that deliberately trying to manipulate matters via the introduction of feigned anger may come back to bite you however.
“We don’t say: stop being angry,” they conclude. “What we are saying is: It’s not a useful tool to pull out as a means to coerce somebody to do something they weren’t going to do otherwise.”
