You might assume that deceptive tactics in negotiation always originate from unscrupulous actors. But in fact, our own unwarranted suspicions could lead us to behavior unethically.
Business negotiators often worry about deceptive tactics in negotiation and understandably so. The potential for being lied to or swindled can be high in business negotiations, given that our counterparts often have access to information that we lack, such as a product’s (lack of) quality or a looming price hike.
Claim your FREE copy: Teaching Negotiation
Discover the insights you need to deliver the most effective role-play simulations in this free special report, Teaching Negotiation: Understanding The Impact Of Role-Play Simulations, from Harvard Law School.
Interestingly, research by Columbia Business School professor Malia F. Mason and her colleagues suggests we may be able to reduce our odds of being deceived in negotiation by:
- Demonstrating our trustworthiness and emphasizing the importance of ethical behavior
- Recognizing that our expectations of our counterparts’ ethics may be unnecessarily cynical
How Pessimism Sets the Stage for Deceptive Tactics in Negotiation
Mason and her team identify two main reasons why people might expect to encounter deceptive tactics in negotiation:
- Expectations of deceit. They could believe that lying is appropriate in the negotiation contexts in which they find themselves. If they do, they would become more likely to be opportunistic—to lie in the hope of gaining an advantage.
- Pessimistic views. Negotiators could believe that deception is unethical and wrong, but that their counterparts are likely to try to cheat them anyway—that is, they could have pessimistic beliefs about other people’s ethicality.
The researchers then tested which theory is more accurate by surveying diverse groups of people: American MBA students, a broader sample of American adults, senior managers at nonprofits, Chinese undergraduate students, and Turkish executives. The results showed that only a small percentage of each group (7.69%, on average) believed deceptive tactics in negotiation to be appropriate behavior. At the same time, survey respondents pessimistically expected that a much larger percentage of their peers—22.77%, on average—would view deception as appropriate. In other words, they had overly pessimistic expectations of being deceived.
If we enter a negotiation believing there’s a good chance we’ll be deceived, we might decide to deploy unethical tactics as a defensive tactic, Mason and colleagues theorized. Indeed, that is what they found in three other experiments.
In one of the experiments, some participants first were told that a recent survey had found that most people view deception as acceptable in negotiation; other participants were told that most people view deception as unacceptable. Next, all participants played the role of the seller of a used car in an online negotiation simulation. During the simulation, participants had an opportunity to deceive their counterpart about the condition of the car to try to get a higher sale price.
The results showed that participants who had been led to believe that deception is a commonly accepted tactic were more likely to lie as compared to participants who were led to believe that most people view deception as unacceptable.
Beyond Paranoia
Overall, the results of this and the other experiments by Mason and colleagues suggest that people are significantly more likely to approach negotiation with pessimism about being deceived than they are to approach it opportunistically. The authors call this tendency “paranoid pessimism,” as it’s not rooted in reality: In fact, other people are less tolerant of unethical behavior and deceptive tactics in negotiation than we believe them to be.
Ironically, however, paranoid pessimism can lead us to adopt unethical negotiation tactics as a defensive measure against behavior that doesn’t actually exist, which suggests that unethical behavior can become a vicious cycle.
This phenomenon points to a possible remedy for reducing unethical behavior: Encourage people to believe, as is the case, that most negotiators believe dishonesty is wrong. When norms for honesty are made salient, people should become less pessimistic about their counterpart’s ethicality and, consequently, more honest themselves. Such a strategy doesn’t account for the fact that people often justify and overlook their own dishonesty, but it could be a helpful first step toward curbing lies and misrepresentation.
What are your own expectations of the likelihood that your counterparts will engage in deceptive tactics in negotiation?
Claim your FREE copy: Teaching Negotiation
Discover the insights you need to deliver the most effective role-play simulations in this free special report, Teaching Negotiation: Understanding The Impact Of Role-Play Simulations, from Harvard Law School.
