Professor Teck-Hua Hoâ’s wife loved a particular painting and wanted to buy it. Ho advised her not to appear excited â’“ to disguise her emotions â’“ in front of the salesperson. After an hour or so, Ho walked out of the store with the $380 painting â’“ for only $120. Negotiation, Ho knows, is an art, too. In new research conducted with Assistant Professor Eduardo Andrade, Ho finds deflating â’“ or inflating â’“ oneâ’s emotions can be a winning strategy.
Ho and Andrade are the co-authors of â’Gaming Emotions in Social Interactionsâ’ â’“ the lead article in the December 2009 issue of The Journal of Consumer Research. The paper reveals that people strategically â’gameâ’ emotions to achieve the desired outcome of a negotiation.
Ho is marketing group chair and Andrade is an assistant marketing professor at the University of California, Berkeleyâ’s Haas School of Business.
Ho and Andrade hypothesized, first, that people would strategically display anger when given the opportunity to do so, and second, that the strategy might actually increase the angry personâ’s payoff in the negotiation. â’To do so, we created a paradigm that allowed us to precisely measure the gap, if any, between real and expressed emotions, as well as to test the actual financial consequences of the â’˜emotion gamingâ’ strategy,â’ says Ho.
Study Findings
When receivers knew that their level of anger would be reported to proposers before the latter made a decision, receivers significantly inflated their current level of angerâ”that is, they â’gamedâ’ their emotions. Moreover, the strategy paid off. Angrier receivers extract a larger share of the pie from the paired proposers. One participant said, â’I did it on purpose in order to be treated more fairly.â’
Ho explains, this anger “equates to â’˜This is my final offer, take it or leave it.â’ The proposer knows he caused the receiver to be angry in the dictator game. Thatâ’s the key. Thatâ’s why the proposer is willing to make a better offer in the ultimatum game.â’
Repeating Anger Side Affect
- This faking anger in negotiation only works once. Faking oneâ’s emotion continuously may not produce the same favorable results. He compares the experiment to an eBay transaction between an occasional buyer and seller in which there is no concern for reputation because the transaction is anonymous.
- Just because you fake anger is might not work because the bluff will be called. A subsequent experiment provided further evidence that successful â’emotion gamingâ’ is contingent on the credibility of the inflated emotion. â’When proposers believed that the receiversâ’ report of anger was credible, they offered a higher share to angrier receivers. When proposers noticed that the receivers could be pretending to be angrier than she or he really was, they completely disregarded their partnerâ’s expressed feelings,â’ says Andrade.
Study Final Note
â’We are not suggesting people should always appear angry to get what they want, â’cautions Ho, â’People naturally move their emotional state in a calculated way to get what they want. It might not always be anger. Sometimes we must act happy to get something even when weâ’re not feeling happy.â’
As for Ho, he says his work has given him a new perspective on the art of bargaining. â’Now when I go to a negotiation and people become angry, I am personally more able to appreciate the personâ’s motive.â’
Face It!
In the Journal of Vision, anger may lie in our interpretation of facial expressions.
In two studies, researchers asked subjects to identify the sex of a series of faces. In the first study, androgynous faces with lowered eyebrows and tight lips (angry expressions) were more likely to be identified as male, and faces with smiles and raised eyebrows (expressions of happiness and fear) were often labeled feminine.
The second study used male and female faces wearing expressions of happiness, anger, sadness, fear or a neutral expression. Overall, subjects were able to identify male faces more quickly than female faces, and female faces that expressed anger took the longest to identify.
According to the study, the findings from this study as well as others lead to the idea that â’the face is a complex social signaling system in which signals for emotion, behavioral intentions and sex all overlap.â’
Women Appear Male or Men Appear like Women
When women are angry their face appear male with a high forehead, a square jaw and thicker eyebrows. This facial appearance are linked to perceptions of dominance. Likewise, features that make a face appear female with a rounded, baby face with large eyes â’“ have been linked to perceptions of the individual being approachable and warm.
â’This difference in how the emotions and social traits of the two sexes are perceived could have significant implications for social interactions in a number of settings. Our research demonstrates that equivalent levels of anger are perceived as more intense when shown by men rather than women, and happiness as more intense when shown by women rather than men. It also suggests that it is less likely for men to be perceived as warm and caring and for women to be perceived as dominant.â’
This research is part of a larger set of studies showing that men’s faces are perceived as angrier and women’s faces as happier. Hessâ’ team is also investigating other facial features that affect the way people perceive emotion, including the effect of signs of aging such as wrinkles and furrows on the perception of emotions in the faces of the elderly.
Final Thoughts
The bottom line, faking angry (at least once) works. The key? Make sure your face looks like a man and you only negotiate with the fake anger once per sales person. Start keeping track of an anger journal and be careful not to get a reputation.
Serious side effect – you will end up lonely with fish or cats being your only source of companionship.