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Negotiation is a useful skill in life. It can help you get a better deal for yourself—whether at work, in the used car lot, or when you’re buying that guitar from the sketchy guy on Craigslist. But Americans, it turns out, may not really enjoy negotiating.
Negotiation expert David Hunsaker says he was strolling through a market in Tel-Aviv, Israel, recently while attending a conference, when he noticed that neither he nor any of his colleagues tried to haggle for a better price. Hunsaker, a professor of management at the Kelley School of Business in Indiana, started to wonder: If even negotiation scholars are reluctant to try to cut a deal, what about the average person? That curiosity inspired a research project.
Hunsaker and his colleagues were not outliers. In a series of five studies with a total of 5,881 American participants, the team found that most people avoided negotiating most of the time—even when that avoidance came with a price. Their findings also suggest that aversion to negotiation among Americans has more to do with fear of conflict or social stigma than with bad money math or laziness.
“Our work focuses on how much individuals are willing to sacrifice, or even pay, to avoid negotiating altogether,” Hunsaker said in a statement. Hunsaker and his co-authors published their results in the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research.
In the first study, the researchers asked participants if they had ever passed up a chance to negotiate, and how often they thought they would tend to skip it. On average, people said they failed to negotiate about half the time when they had the opportunity to do so, and women were more likely to avoid negotiating than men.
Read more: “Why Your Brain Hates Other People”
In a second study, the researchers wanted to learn whether a certain threshold of savings would spur people to negotiate. Participants were asked to imagine buying electronics at different prices: $20, $200, $2,000 and $20,000. Then they were told to calculate how much they would have to save before negotiating seemed worth it. In general, people did not think about this trade-off in fixed dollar amounts, but in percentages: for most people, negotiating was only something they would consider if they could get a discount of roughly 21 to 36 percent.
In a third study, the scientists sought to figure out whether people would pay extra just to avoid negotiating. About half of the respondents said they would pay some amount. When asked more specifically about a $20,000 car purchase, people said they would pay on average around $1,000 extra to avoid negotiating. For a $2,000 car, they would pay closer to $230.
To see if little nudges could change the calculus, the researchers tried two tactics: First, they asked participants to think about their hourly wage, which had no effect. In a separate experiment, they asked participants to consider buying a couch on Craigslist. Half of the participants also were told that negotiating was the norm: That 80 percent of Americans negotiate when purchasing an item on Craigslist. This did have a moderate positive effect on the participants’ reported willingness to haggle.
The study had some limitations. For one, all the participants were from the United States. The researchers chose this country as their point of focus because of its prevailing culture of individualism and self-advocacy, but follow-up work could test whether similar patterns hold in cultures with “different norms around confrontation, hierarchy, and relationship maintenance,” they write.
All the studies were also conducted online, which could have introduced certain biases. And the studies measured only intent to negotiate, as opposed to actual negotiating behavior.
Still, Hunsaker and his colleagues hope the project can serve as a starting point for improved understanding of negotiation and its benefits, including empowering individuals and organizations to “realize more value, equity, and agency in their interactions,” they write in the paper.
Hunsaker also offered some tips for low-conflict negotiation. First, do your research so you know your options ahead of time. Second, leave room for concessions. If you want to pay a certain amount for something, offer a little bit less at first. And finally, focus on relationships, not on victory.
“People that go into negotiation with a winning mindset end up burning bridges or hurting feelings,” said Hunsaker. “The people you most often negotiate with will be repeat customers or longtime clients. If you burn those bridges, you will miss out on deals later,” he said. So listen, and build trust while you haggle. 
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Lead image: Foxy Fox / Shutterstock
