Washington: Negotiating salary for a new job? Angry facial expressions might help!
Angry expressions seem to boost the effectiveness of threats making them seem more credible, according to a new research.
The findings show that angry expressions lend additional weight to a negotiator’s threat to walk away from the table if his or her demands aren’t met, leading the other party in the negotiation to offer more money than they otherwise would have, researchers said.
“Our facial expressions are relatively more difficult to control than our words,” said psychological scientist Lawrence Ian Reed, first author on the research.
Because they are harder to control, these expressions serve as a believable outward indication of a person’s motivations.
“In this way, facial expressions can carry the weight of our words,” said Reed.
Reed and colleagues Peter DeScioli of Stony Brook University and Steven Pinker of Harvard University hypothesised that angry expressions may back up negotiators’ threats to walk away from the table if they don’t receive what they want.
In a study conducted online, 870 participants were told they would be playing a negotiation game in which some participants, acting as the “proposer,” would decide how to split a sum of $1 with another participant, the “responder.”
Each person would receive the specified sum if the responder accepted the split that was offered, but neither person would receive any money if the responder rejected the split.
The responder was played by the same female actor, who was instructed to create specific facial expressions in the video clips.
The research was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the association for psychological science.
