Men often express more willingness than women do to engage in unethical negotiating behavior, research shows. This could be because girls are raised to be more communal, or concerned about others, while boys are raised to be more agentic, or concerned about their own needs and outcomes.
In a study, University of North Carolina professor Jason R. Pierce and Northwestern University professor Leigh Thompson looked in greater depth at the overall tendency of men to be more willing than women to resort to deceptive tactics in negotiation.
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Competitiveness vs. Empathy
In their first experiment, the researchers asked 172 Chilean undergraduate students questions designed to assess their competitiveness, their level of empathy, and their attitudes toward using unethical and deceptive tactics in negotiation. The men surveyed were more likely to condone unethical tactics in negotiation, a result explained by their greater competitiveness; the men and women surveyed were similarly empathic.
In a second experiment, 129 students at a U.S. university were asked to imagine themselves in a negotiation scenario where they had an opportunity to lie to earn more money without the fear of being caught. About 50% of male participants said they would lie in such a situation, as compared to only about 29% of female participants.
Men also ranked as more competitive and less empathic than women, differences that contributed to their greater willingness to deceive. Similar results were reached in an online experiment conducted on 252 adult U.S. residents. (About 44% of men and 37% of women lied when given the chance.)
Taken together, the results suggest that men’s greater competitiveness and lower empathy relative to that of women plays a role in their greater willingness to use deceptive tactics in negotiation.
However, it’s noteworthy that many female participants in the experiments also were willing to behave unethically overall. Indeed, Pierce and Thompson caution that “whereas men behave less ethically when money is on the line, women may behave less or equally unethically in more relationally focused negotiations, as some evidence suggests.”
The researchers caution that it’s more important to pay attention to your negotiating counterpart’s disposition—namely, how competitive and empathetic the other side seems— than to their sex when trying to predict whether they will behave unethically.
Do Men Use More Deceptive Tactics in Negotiation?
In this study, Pierce and Thompson looked at negotiators’ expressed likelihood of engaging in unethically rather than at their actual negotiation behavior. In another study, the researchers tested whether men and women’s different comfort level with the prospect of behaving unethically actually translates into gender differences in negotiating behavior.
In two experiments, they found that situational cues that prompt a sense of either competition or empathy mitigate sex differences in the propensity to lie to one’s negotiating counterpart. Specifically, they found that “inducing competitive or empathic feelings toward a counterpart eliminated sex differences in lying by leading women to lie more and men to lie less, respectively.”
These results led them to conclude that “ethical climates themselves may depend more on whether organizational cultures encourage competition or compassion.” Based on these findings, they suggest that negotiators who want to encourage their counterparts to eschew deceptive tactics in negotiation would do wise to “promote empathy by taking and sharing perspective instead of pressuring them to get the best instrumental outcome,” as they write.
In particular, you may be able to ward off deceptive tactics in negotiation, regardless of a counterpart’s gender, by modeling a collaborative approach and highlighting opportunities for value creation. In doing so, you may be able to defuse a negotiating counterpart’s competitive attitude and consequently prompt them to behave more ethically.
What techniques have you used to defuse deceptive tactics in negotiation?
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Discover step-by-step techniques for avoiding common business negotiation pitfalls when you download a copy of the FREE special report, Business Negotiation Strategies: How to Negotiate Better Business Deals, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
This type of research, common in the social sciences, is seriously flawed because, firstly, it is conducted in artificial situations (laboratory/online); secondly, because it assumes respondents give honest answers. Take the experiment with 129 Chilean students: “About 50% of male participants said they would lie in such a [negotiation] situation, as compared to only about 29% of female participants.” This finding cannot contribute to the research conclusion that males are more likely to deceive in negotiations. The data are invalid because we do not know how many respondents were telling the truth in this artificial experiment (and others cited in the article). Maybe males are more likely than females to admit they lie. Maybe.