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Behavior Announcement in Negotiations
Extended Abstract
In the present research, we study the effect of announcing behaviors, such as “Let me ask you a question…”, followed by the announced question, in negotiations. Building on information processing theories, we argue that behavior announcements facilitate value creation by shifting listeners’ attention to the speech act and providing contextual knowledge. Moreover, extending speech act theory, we propose that behavior announcements are positively related to rapport between negotiators as they increase transparency in the interaction. Results of our preregistered study (N = 282) show that behavior announcements positively affect negotiator rapport which is partially explained by the higher perceived transparency of the negotiator using behavior announcements. However, behavior announcements did not affect information processing nor value creation. This study provides an initial indication of the effect of behavior announcements in negotiation settings and highlights the importance of transparency in building rapport.
Keywords: negotiation, behavior announcement, interaction patterns
Introduction
Communication research has long discussed utilities of announcing behaviors (e.g., “Let me ask you a question…” before posing the question). These behavior announcements structure conversations and prepare the listener for the next (speech) act (Schegloff, 2007). So far, research on behavior announcement has mainly focused on natural talk and therapeutic interactions (e.g., Reed, 2016; Weatherall & Gibson, 2014). However, it is unclear how they affect competitive interactions, such as negotiations. An initial indication is given by Rackham and Carlisle (1978), demonstrating that skilled negotiators, compared to average negotiators, use more behavior announcements. In the present research, we thus want to investigate whether and how behavior announcements affect negotiated outcomes. With this line of research, we intend to contribute to communication theories, by expanding their application to the negotiation context. Moreover, we aim to derive specific and readily applicable advice from our findings for negotiation practitioners.
Building on information processing theories (e.g., Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968, Bransford & Johnson, 1972), we argue that behavior announcements facilitate value creation. They shift listeners’ attention to the announced speech act (Reed, 2016), which facilitates information processing (e.g., Atkins & Shiffrin, 1968). Moreover, they provide contextual knowledge (i.e., what type of behavior will follow), facilitating the recall of exchanged information during the negotiation (Bransford & Johnson, 1972). In turn, information processing is, of course, a prerequisite for value creation in integrative negotiations (Pruitt & Lewis, 1975; Thompson & Hastie, 1990). We thus propose:
Hypothesis 1: Behavior announcements are positively related to joint gains. Hypothesis 2: The positive effect of behavior announcements on value creation are mediated by better information processing of the listener.
Building on speech act theory (Schegloff, 1988), we also predict a positive effect on negotiator rapport (Curhan et al., 2006). Inviting the listener to grant permission for the BEHAVIOR ANNOUNCEMENT IN NEGOTIATION subsequent action (Schegloff, 1988) may promote a respectful negotiation atmosphere, resulting in higher negotiator rapport (i.e., satisfaction with the process and the relationship between negotiators; Curhan et al., 2006). Moreover, behavior announcements reduce ambiguity about the speaker’s intention regarding his subsequent actions in the negotiation (Rackham & Carlisle, 1978), resulting in the listener’s perception that the speaker behaves transparently and in turn, facilitating negotiator rapport (Curhan et al., 2006). We thus propose: Hypothesis 3: Behavior announcements are positively related to rapport. Hypothesis 4: The positive effect of behavior announcements on rapport between negotiators is mediated by a higher perceived of the speaker (by the listener).
Method
Hypotheses and respective experimental design were preregistered (see https://osf.io/aw4s3?view_only=f153cdf8c8a14c0d9962ef3efd340480). The total sample consisted of 282 students participating in pairs of two negotiators for course credit at a major Dutch university. Participants were randomly assigned to the roles of buyer and seller and were given 15 minutes to prepare. Half of the sellers were instructed to announce their subsequent behavior when a) asking a question, b) making an offer, or c) provide information by announcing it by first saying ‘Let me…’. For instance, sellers in the experimental condition read: Instead of asking “Which option do you prefer for issue x?”, try saying: “Let me ask you a question about your preferences. Which option do you prefer for issue x”?. Participants in the buyer roles were instructed to focus on their confidential instructions. After preparing, participants had 25 minutes to reach an agreement. Finally, all participants filled out a self-report measures survey including information processing (Graf et al., 2018, Thompson & Hastie, 1990), transparency (Dapko, 2012), and rapport (Curhan et al., 2006) measures.
Results
Three independent coders, blind to the experimental conditions, watched the videotaped negotiations and coded how often behavior announcements were used. An independent-samples t-test was run to determine whether there were differences in the frequencies of using behavior announcements between the experimental and the control group. Sellers in the experimental group indeed announced their behavior more often (MEG = 3.00, SDEG = 3.33) than sellers in the control group (MCG = 0.09, SDCG = .28); t(139) = -7.24, p < .001. To test Hypothesis 1 and 3, we conducted independent-samples t-tests. Concerning Hypothesis 1 there were no significant differences in joint gains between both groups (MEG = 12000.00, SDEG = 935.83; MCG = 11826.09, SDCG = 2249.23); t(139) = .273, p = .79. Concerning Hypothesis 3, we found a significant difference between negotiator rapport for both groups (MEG = 5.46, SDEG = 0.59; MCG = 5.26, SDCG = 0.80); t(138) = -1.69, p = .047, supporting our prediction. As we did not find an effect for behavior announcement on joint gains, we consequently did not find a mediating effect of information processing – neither for a) listener judgement accuracy (b = -10.52, [-111.41, 73.95]) nor b) perceived listener fluency (b = 1.67, [-62.84, 77.85]). Hypothesis 4, however, indicated that the positive effect of behavior announcement on rapport is fully mediated by higher perceived transparency of the seller (b = 0.09, [0.004, 0.19]). This is particularly interesting, considering we predicted that the effect is mediated by the buyer’s (and not the seller’s) perceived transparency. In other words, the speaker’s perceived own transparency rather than the conversation partner’s perceived transparency was decisive.
Conclusion
Results of this initial study show that behavior announcement positively affects negotiator rapport, which can be partly explained by a higher perceived transparency of the negotiator using behavior announcements. This is in line with findings in other settings, such BEHAVIOR ANNOUNCEMENT IN NEGOTIATION as therapy interactions, where relationship building is essential (Reed, 2016). In contrast, we did not find evidence for an effect of behavior announcements on information processing and joint economic outcomes. However, improved rapport could potentially facilitate value creation in subsequent negotiations (with the same negotiation partner; Curhan et al., 2010). As the manipulation of behavior announcements in this study was not targeting specific behaviors, future research should study more specific behavior announcements (e.g., only focused on affective statements) to see whether their effect on rapport is even stronger.
References
Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 2, pp. 89-195). Academic press.
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 717-726. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(72)80006-9
Curhan, J. R., Elfenbein, H. A., & Xu, H. (2006). What do people value when they negotiate? Mapping the domain of subjective value in negotiation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(3), 493–512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.3.493
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The Voice of the Negotiator
Understanding paralinguistic effects in negotiations
Extended Abstract
Often what matters is not what we say, but how we say it. The human voice affects perceptions about the speaker in various ways from physical strength, to competence, or leadership qualities. Despite the crucial role that both communication and perception management play in the negotiation process, research about these paralinguistic effects is scarce in the negotiation literature. In the present research, we examine how two properties of the voice – pitch and perturbation – affect economic outcomes in negotiation. In 78 recorded negotiation sessions, we focus on these voice properties during the formulation of the first offer as a predictor for the speaker’s individual and the dyad’s joint gain. We thereby further extend the understanding of paralinguistic effects in competitive settings.
Keywords: Voice properties, paralinguistics, negotiations
Imagine overhearing a conversation between two people without seeing them. Even without a visual impression, the human voice provides cues beyond the purely semantic meaning. Without seeing someone, we infer information about approximate age, gender, and we attribute personality traits to the speaker (Mohammandi, 2010; Oh et al., 2019).
Research has found that the spoken word is complemented with paralinguistic communication (Sikorski, 2012). Extra-verbal aspects such as properties of the voice can affect how a speaker is perceived. One property of voice which has been researched in various domains is pitch1, the perceived highness or lowness of a sound. Although pitch is widely seen as a subjective, perceptual property, it is approximated with the objective physical property of sound wave frequency; thereby higher frequencies correspond with higher pitch and vice versa (Hansen, 2001.) For instance, speakers with lower average (mean) pitches seem to be perceived as more dominant as opposed to higher average pitch speakers (Schild et al., 2020). Dominance can empower people in various settings and a study by Pruitt (2013) showed that negotiators concede more to a dominant counterpart. Moreover, dominance has been shown to foster information exchange, leading to higher joint gains (Wiltermuth et al., 2018). If lower average voice pitch increases perceived dominance, which is beneficial for individual as well as joint outcomes in negotiations, lower average pitch may influence economic outcomes in negotiations.
Additionally, research about voting decisions has indicated that although candidates with deeper voices are more likely to win an election, a smaller pitch range (i.e., higher pitch minimum and lower pitch maximum) also influence candidate success. This finding is explained with lower minimum pitch being perceived as a lack of enthusiasm or being linked to negative emotions. Lower maximum pitch, however, may signal the absence of negative emotions, such as fear (Banai et al., 2015). Negotiators who are perceived as less fearful are known to take higher risks and to make less generous offers (e.g., Nelissen et al., 2011). When the counterpart is perceived as non-fearful, negotiators may lower their demands in anticipation of the counterpart’s willingness to take higher risks and less generous offers. We can therefore assume that negotiators with lower pitch ranges (i.e., higher minimum pitch and lower maximum pitch values) achieve better overall economic negotiation outcomes. Michalsky et al. (2019) have shown that males and females with higher minimum pitch and lower maximum pitch and men with lower average pitches elicit higher concessions. We formulate our first research question as follows:
RQ1: What are the effects of voice pitch (mean, minimum and maximum pitch) on speaker economic outcome in negotiations?
Speech does not follow a fully regular pattern. This irregularity describes a second property of the voice called perturbation. Perturbation is measured in jitter and shimmer. Voices high in jitter and shimmer are best described as rough or hoarse sounding (Farrus et al., 2007). Perturbation is significantly higher in older speakers (Dehqan et al., 2012; Wilcox & Horii, 1980). Literature has demonstrated that jitter and shimmer are cues to listeners when making age judgements, with rougher (jittery/shimmery) voices being correlated with increased perceived age (Prakup, 2012). Older people have generally been found to be more trustworthy (Bailey at al., 2015; Johansson-Stenman, 2008). Trust in negotiations is a predictor for value claiming because trustworthy negotiators are perceived as reliable and predictable (Olekalns et al., 2007). We argue that voices with higher perturbation levels are perceived as older and therefore more trustworthy, which predicts higher outcomes in negotiations.
RQ2: What are the effects of jitter and shimmer on speaker economic outcome in negotiations?
Our study extends prior research by further exploring the effects of voice properties on economic negotiation outcomes. Specifically, we extend previous literature about the effects of voice pitch in competitive settings. Moreover, our study also explores the effects of voice perturbation by including jitter and shimmer. By including these parameters, our study sheds further light on how additional voice properties can predict negotiation outcomes.
For this exploratory study we used a subset of a larger negotiation dataset from Hüffmeier et al. (2019). We randomly selected 78 fully videotaped solo-on-solo same sex dyads. We extracted one utterance from each audio recording, namely the first offer, and determined the speaker’s respective voice properties (mean pitch, minimum pitch, maximum pitch, jitter, and shimmer) while making the first offer. Negotiation outcomes were measured on the dyadic level (joint gain) as well as the speaker’s individual outcome.
To address our research questions, we regressed joint gains on mean, minimum and maximum pitch, as well as jitter, and shimmer, controlling for gender. We found that voice properties during the first offer indeed predicted joint gains in negotiations. We found a significant negative effect of mean pitch levels (b = -989.50, SE = 302.78, p < .01), thus an overall higher voice while making the first offer was associated with lower dyadic joint gains as compared to a deeper voice. We also found a significant positive effect of minimum pitch on joint gains (b = 448.99, SE = 229.23, p = .05) which is interesting considering that lower minimum pitches have been associated with “livelier voices” (Michalsky et al., 2019), suggesting that pitch range is equally as important as average pitch levels.
Moreover, we found a significant positive effect of jitter (b= 526.3, SE = 227.64, p = .02), indicating that rougher sounding voices when making first offers correlate with higher joint gains. A second linear model was used to regress the individual outcome of the speaker on mean, minimum and maximum pitch, as well as jitter, and shimmer, again controlling for gender. We found a similar pattern as in model 1 (see Table 2). We found a significant negative effect of mean pitch levels on individual outcome (b = -1028.78, SE = 286.56, p <.01), indicating that negotiators with lower voices achieve higher individual gain. We also see a significant effect of minimum pitch on individual gain (b = 529.58, SE = 216.65, p = .02).
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