Strategic Display of Anger and Happiness in Negotiation: The Moderating Role of Perceived Authenticity

Conflict is common in social interactions, and negotiation is one of the most effective ways of resolving conflict (Pruitt and Carnevale 1993). Negotiations are often emotion‐laden, and individuals may express a variety of emotions when negotiating (Barry, Fulmer, and Van Kleef 2004). Recently, increasing research attention has centered on the strategic use of emotion to achieve one's desired negotiation outcomes. Negotiators may be motivated to manipulate their displays of emotion to obtain a larger share of the pie (Andrade and Ho 2009) or to intimidate their counterpart to gain the upper hand (Sinaceur and Tiedens 2006). Anger is especially prevalent in negotiation and may be strategically displayed to signal greater power over one's counterpart in order to elicit concessions (Kopelman, Rosette, and Thompson 2006). Happiness (e.g., feeling content or pleased) is another common emotion in negotiation that emerges when one's core concerns in a negotiation, such as concerns for appreciation and for affiliation, are met (Fisher and Shapiro 2005). When happiness is strategically expressed by a negotiator, it indicates a willingness to cooperate, thereby helping to sustain a long‐term working relationship.

Acknowledging that emotions might be used strategically in negotiation, negotiators are often cautioned against being overly influenced by the emotions their counterparts display because these displays may be attempts to manipulate their behavior to their counterparts' benefit (e.g., Nierenberg 1968; Thompson, Nadler, and Kim 1999). Knowledge of how negotiators perceive their counterpart's emotional displays and how these perceptions influence negotiation outcomes remains scarce, however. Because negotiations are often fraught with uncertainty about the counterpart's intentions and strategies, this question, we argue, is worth examining (Neale and Fragale 2006). Ascertaining whether the emotions displayed by one's counterpart are genuine or manipulative can be challenging, and different negotiators may interpret the same emotion display differently (Forgas and East 2008).

To reduce uncertainty, negotiators may use contextual information (e.g., information about their counterpart's reputation) to make inferences about his or her intentions (Grandey 2000). Prudent negotiators will often ascertain their counterpart's reputation before negotiating to anticipate the tactics that he or she may use (Tinsley, O'Connor, and Sullivan 2002). Applied to the present study, we suggest that negotiators can use such information to inform their judgments about the authenticity of their counterparts' emotion displays by inferring their counterpart's intentions rather than interpreting their displays of emotion at face value.

Early research on emotions in negotiation focused on the intrapersonal effects of emotions, that is, how one's emotional state can affect one's own negotiating behavior. For instance, happy negotiators are more likely to adopt a cooperative stance to the negotiation, while unhappy negotiators are more likely to adopt a competitive stance (Carnevale and Isen 1986).

More recently, the interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiation have received increasing attention (Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2004; Van Kleef et al. 2006). According to the social functions perspective, emotions convey information about one's feelings, intentions, and orientation toward others that can influence others' behavior (Keltner and Haidt 1999). In the negotiation context, a counterpart's display of emotion can thus provide such strategic information as the value he or she attaches to different issues and his or her willingness to reach an agreement (Morris and Keltner 2000).

Displays of anger can signal status or actual power over one's counterpart (Averill 1982; Tiedens, Ellsworth, and Mesquitta 2000) and may be used to elicit concessions. On the other hand, displays of happiness can signal satisfaction with negotiation outcomes, which may make a negotiator seem less intimidating (Wall 1991). Thus, emotional transparency on the part of the satisfied or happy negotiator could be a liability, eliciting resistance to further concessions or halting them altogether, and indeed, several studies have found that negotiators tend to concede more to an angry counterpart than to a happy one (Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2004; Sinaceur and Tiedens 2006).

But findings on the interpersonal effects of emotions on negotiation behavior have been inconsistent. For example, some studies have found that negotiators become more competitive and seek to claim greater value when bargaining with angry counterparts than with emotionally neutral or happy counterparts (Friedman et al. 2004; Kopelman, Rosette, and Thompson 2006). These divergent findings suggest that other factors may moderate how negotiators respond to their counterparts' emotion displays. One possible moderating factor is the perceived authenticity of a counterpart's displayed emotions, the focus of investigation in this study.

To enhance current understanding of the interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiation, Gerben Van Kleef, Carsten De Dreu, and Anthony Manstead (2010) proposed the “emotions as social information” (EASI) model. In a nutshell, the model posits that interpersonal emotional influence can occur via two processes: inferential processes and/or affective reactions. When it occurs via affective reactions, negotiators themselves “catch” and then feel the emotions of their counterparts, which influences their ensuing decisions. In contrast, when this occurs via inferential processes, negotiators use their counterparts' emotion displays to gather information, which in turn influences their own behaviors.

The authors further suggest that which process takes precedence in decision making depends on two crucial moderators: the cooperative versus competitive nature of the situation, and the negotiators' underlying motivations to process information (see Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2010 for a detailed discussion). Similar to the notion stated in the EASI model, Daniel Druckman and Mara Olekalns (2008) suggested that intervening variables such as the justifiability of a counterpart's anger may determine when that anger is reciprocated (emotional route) and when it elicits concessions from the other party (strategic route). The research thus suggests that the perceived authenticity of a negotiator's emotion displays may influence how his or her counterpart reacts to the display.

Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead (2004) found that negotiators tend to concede more to an angry counterpart than to a happy one — in their experiment, they revealed information to negotiators about their counterparts' emotions without their counterparts' knowledge, so their methodology made the negotiators believe that their counterpart's emotion was genuine. When participants believe that the counterpart's emotion is authentic, they are likely to perceive the counterpart's emotion as justified through inferences as specified in the EASI model. As a result, the counterparts' emotional influence is likely to occur via inferential processes in which negotiators distill information from the counterparts' emotion display and use it to inform their own behavior. When faced with an authentically angry counterpart, the negotiator infers that a counterpart seller, for example, has a high reservation price and consequently the negotiator is more likely to make greater concessions to avoid an impasse.

In contrast, Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead (2004) also found that when faced with an authentically happy counterpart, the negotiator is likely to infer that she or he is satisfied with the progress of the negotiation, and, as a result, the negotiator will then display more competitive behavior toward the counterpart by making fewer concessions. Building on these findings, we hypothesize that when the counterpart's displayed emotion is perceived as authentic, participants would concede more to an angry counterpart than to a happy one.

Prior studies have demonstrated that negotiators tend to match their counterpart's display of anger with equal or greater angry displays (Schroth 2008), especially when the counterpart's anger appears unjustified (Shapiro 1991). In addition, negotiators who feel deceived by their counterpart often feel unjustly treated and as a result experience anger toward the counterpart (Allred et al. 1997). Following the EASI model, when faced with a counterpart's displays of inauthentic anger, we would expect negotiators to view the counterpart's anger as unjustified and consequently be more likely to engage in “anger‐driven retaliation” to get even and to prevent future injustices (Bies and Tripp 2002; Van Dijk et al. 2008).

We hypothesize that inauthentically angry counterparts will make the negotiator angrier than will inauthentically happy counterparts. In addition, we further predict that if the negotiator is provoked to retaliate, the counterpart's initial display of anger display will backfire, halting concessions altogether (Lewicki 1983; Van Kleef and Côté 2007).

Negotiators whose counterpart displays inauthentic happiness may also react aggressively to such deception, perceiving it as manipulation, but, on the other hand, they may see it as a legitimate attempt to be cooperative. When the negotiation is generally more cooperative, the counterpart's display of happiness may be seen as less strategic, and the negotiator may “catch” his or her counterpart's happiness via infusion of positive affect (Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2010). In turn, these negotiators, we suggest, will be more likely to cooperate with the counterpart, less likely to retaliate, and more likely to make relatively greater concessions than will negotiators whose counterpart displays inauthentic anger. We further hypothesize that the counterpart's displays of inauthentic anger will backfire, and negotiators in this scenario will make fewer concessions than negotiators faced with an inauthentically happy counterpart.

To examine how the perceived authenticity of displays of emotion affects negotiators, we conducted two experiments. Our study differs from the one undertaken by Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead (2004) in the ways in which information about their counterparts' emotions were provided to participants. In their studies, the experimenter indirectly provided information about their counterparts' emotions to participants, telling them that this information was provided without the counterparts' knowledge. Real‐life negotiations, however, involve direct exchanges of emotion cues (Barry, Fulmer, and Van Kleef 2004). To enhance the external validity of the present research, counterparts provided information about their emotions directly to the participant during the negotiation.

In addition, the earlier study did not consider the role of perceived authenticity as a factor that potentially moderated the interpersonal effects of emotion in negotiation. To investigate this possibility, we manipulated the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's display of emotion by providing participants with information about the counterpart's personality and varying the degree of trustworthiness of his or her emotion displays. In Experiment One, we investigated the effect of the perceived authenticity of a counterpart's anger (authentic versus inauthentic). In Experiment Two, we explored the effects of perceived authenticity of displayed emotion (this time with three conditions: authentic versus ambiguous versus inauthentic) but also considered displays of happiness as well as anger.

Experiment One was a preliminary study to test whether the negotiator's perception of his or her counterpart's emotions as authentic or not would affect the number of concessions the negotiator made. We chose to explore anger because, of the range of emotions that arise in conflict, it is one of the most prominent and pervasive (Allred 1999). Our first hypothesis was:

Fifty undergraduate students at a university in Singapore participated in Experiment One for course credit. Of these students, two were omitted from the analysis because they expressed suspicion about the scenario described in the experiment, leaving forty‐eight participants (twenty‐four women, twenty‐four men; mean age = 19.98 years; age range = 18–23 years) to be included in the study data.

We manipulated the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's anger as a between‐subjects factor. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two experimental conditions. Twenty‐four participants were assigned to the authentic anger condition, and the remaining participants were assigned to the inauthentic anger condition.

Participants completed a bogus personality questionnaire online prior to the actual experiment as part of the perceived authenticity manipulation to be described below. On the day of the experiment, two naïve participants forming a same‐sex dyad were scheduled at a time. Each session lasted approximately thirty minutes. Upon arrival, participants were seated in separate cubicles. To enhance their awareness of the presence of another participant, they were told that the experimenter would inform them as soon as the other participant had arrived.

Once both participants were present, the PowerPoint presentation containing instructions for the negotiation began. Participants read that they would negotiate with the other participant, whose behavior was in fact staged by the experimenter. They also read that the higher the value they claimed in the negotiation, the higher the proportion of the extra reimbursement of up to $10 (Singapore, equivalent to roughly $8 American) they would receive, which was to be shared between each participant and his or her counterpart (details of the reimbursement are discussed below).

Participants believed that they were negotiating with another participant seated in a separate cubicle by exchanging offer slips in each round, while in actuality they received the preset offer slips prepared by the experimenter. To facilitate the manipulation of the counterpart's emotion and its perceived authenticity, we led participants to believe that the objective of the study was to find out how having information about a counterpart's personality would affect the interpersonal dynamics of a negotiation in which parties were not allowed to interact face to face.

After participants read the instructions, the experimenter entered the cubicles with two slips of paper (both labeled “A”) and asked the participants to choose one of them. After participants chose one of the paper slips, they were told that they had been randomly assigned to condition A, for which they would receive information about their counterpart's personality to study for two minutes. After participants had read the information, the negotiation task began. Following the completion of the negotiation, participants were fully debriefed, thanked, and reimbursed by splitting the $10 extra payment as mentioned equally.

The negotiation task we used is an adapted version of the one used by Van Kleef and his colleagues (2006). In that task, participants were led to believe that they had received information about their counterpart's emotions and intentions without their counterpart's knowledge. The informational asymmetry in our study was different, however; participants received information about their counterpart's personality and were told that the counterpart would not receive such information about them. Similar to the earlier study (Van Kleef et al. 2006), the task in our study shared some key features of real‐life negotiations (i.e., the scenario featured various issues of different values to the negotiators and a standard offer–counteroffer procedure).

Prior to the start of the negotiation, participants read that they would be assigned the role of either the buyer or the seller of a batch of mobile phones, and that their aim was to negotiate the price, the warranty period, and the duration of the service contract of the phones. In fact, all participants were assigned the role of seller, with experimenters playing the role of buyer. After the experimenter informed the participants that they had been randomly assigned the role of seller, they each received a payoff chart (see Table One) that showed which outcomes would produce the highest payoff and were reminded that their task was to earn as many points as possible.

The payoff was described as follows: “You can see that the best deal for you is 1‐1‐1, for a total of 760 points (400 + 120 + 240).” Participants were not shown the payoff chart for the buyer and were told that it differed from their own. The instructions also stated that the buyer would make the first offer on an offer sheet, which would be passed to him or her by the experimenter, and the entire negotiation was to be carried out using written offer sheets.

For each round, participants were given one minute to write their offers and additional remarks to the buyer on an offer sheet, and after one minute the experimenter entered the cubicle to collect the sheet. We told them that the negotiation was comprised of twelve rounds, when in fact only six rounds were carried out — we did this to prevent negotiators from conceding drastically in the last rounds, which we feared would have been a risk if they thought the negotiation was about to end (see Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2004).

The negotiation began with the buyer — played by the experimenter — making the first offer. Over the course of the negotiation rounds, the buyer made offers at the following levels (as shown in Table One) for price‐warranty‐service: 8‐7‐8 (round one), 8‐7‐7 (round two), 8‐6‐7 (round three), 7‐6‐7 (round four), 7‐6‐6 (round five), and 6‐6‐6 (round six). Past research has demonstrated that this negotiating pattern by the buyer has face validity (i.e., the gradual increase in concessions by the buyer appears to reflect actual negotiating behavior) and is perceived by negotiators as halfway between cooperativeness and competitiveness (De Dreu and Van Lange 1995; Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2004). The buyer (experimenter) accepted the participant's offer if it was equal to or better than the offer that the buyer was planning to make in the next round. For example, if the participant offered 6‐6‐6 in round five, this offer was accepted because the buyer's next offer (in round six) would have been 6‐6‐6.

For each round, participants received an offer sheet presumably completed by the buyer, which was handwritten by the experimenter and contained some writing errors to enhance experimental realism. Participants waited for about a minute and a half before the experimenter entered the cubicle with an offer sheet indicating the buyer's offer for that round.

In the second, fourth, and sixth rounds, information about the buyer's emotional state (which contained the manipulation of the counterpart's emotion) was also included on the buyer's offer sheet (see further explanation below.) After round six, the experimenter informed participants that the negotiation would be temporarily interrupted so the experimenter could ask questions of participants. The experimenter then asked participants to complete a questionnaire that contained questions about the negotiation. It took approximately three minutes to complete. The negotiation task ended following the completion of the questionnaire.

We manipulated the participants' perceptions of the authenticity of their counterparts' displays of emotion by providing them with information about their counterparts' personality and trustworthiness, which we led them to believe was calculated from the personality questionnaire completed prior to the experiment.

Participants in the authentic displayed emotion condition read the following information on the offer sheet:

Participants in the inauthentic displayed emotion condition read the following information:

We used the emotional statements by Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead (2004). These statements have been successfully pretested and have yielded consistent findings in computer‐mediated and face‐to‐face negotiations (Sinaceur and Tiedens 2006), which supports the external validity of results obtained using this manipulation. After the second, fourth, and sixth rounds, participants received an offer statement and an emotional statement. Table Two displays the angry statements used in both Experiment One and Experiment Two. (The statements in parentheses are the happy statements used in Experiment Two, which are explained later in this report.)

The main dependent variable is the number of points conceded by each participant from rounds one to round six. We added up the values of the offers made by each participant in each round to determine the total number of points conceded for the three issues of price, warranty, and service.

Participants also completed a postnegotiation questionnaire to determine their responses to their counterparts' displays of emotion and perceived authenticity manipulations. We asked participants to agree or disagree on seven‐point scales (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree), with three statements about how angry, irritated, and aggravated their counterparts had seemed to them during the negotiation (e.g., “The buyer appeared angry/irritated/aggravated during the negotiation.”). We averaged the scores for these three emotional statements into a single index of appearance of counterpart's anger for each participant with satisfactory scale reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.89). A scale reliability coefficient of alpha close to or above 0.70 is seen as acceptable, which suggests that the three scores can be averaged to form a single scale score.

To assess the manipulation effects of the perceived authenticity of the counterparts' displayed emotion, we asked participants to indicate the extent to which they agreed with the following two statements: “The emotion displayed by the buyer was sincere” and “The emotion displayed by the negotiation counterpart is likely to be an honest reflection of what he or she was feeling,” on a seven‐point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). We combined these items into a single index of perceived authenticity of displayed emotion (Cronbach's alpha = 0.66).

We used a one‐sample t‐test to check the finding for manipulation of the counterpart's expressed anger. Participants' ratings of their counterparts' anger were significantly above the scale midpoint with a mean (M) of 5.41 and a standard deviation (SD) of 1.04,¹ suggesting that the participants perceived that the counterpart was actually expressing anger. We also used independent sample t‐tests to determine the manipulation effect of the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's displayed emotion. Participants in the authentic counterpart emotion condition perceived significantly greater authenticity (M = 4.32, SD = 0.88) than did participants in the inauthentic counterpart emotion condition (M = 3.60, SD = 0.85),² which suggests that we were able to successfully manipulate the participants' perceptions of the authenticity of their counterparts' displays of emotions.

We conducted an independent sample t‐test to determine the differences between the concessions made by participants in the authentic and inauthentic conditions. We found that participants in the authentic anger condition made significantly greater concessions (M = 140.23, SD = 71.89) than did participants in the inauthentic anger condition (M = 92.50, SD = 73.64).³ Thus, our first hypothesis, that negotiators who perceived their counterpart's anger to be authentic would make larger concessions than would negotiators who perceived their counterpart's anger to be inauthentic, was supported.

Experiment One extends previous research on the interpersonal effects of emotion in negotiation by indicating that the perceived authenticity of a counterpart's displayed anger moderates the effects of displays of anger on negotiation behavior. Participants who perceived their counterpart's anger as inauthentic made fewer concessions than did participants who perceived their counterpart's anger as authentic.

Although our results support our hypothesis, the contrived nature of the negotiation task that we used limits the generalizability of our findings. The exchange of offer sheets between the buyer and the seller permitted greater experimental control, but the interpersonal interaction between the parties was much more minimal than it would be likely to be in any real‐life negotiation — it is difficult to conceive of a real‐life negotiation scenario in which parties would use an intermediary to exchange notes. In Experiment Two, in contrast, the negotiation was carried out using instant messaging to allow greater interactivity and synchrony in the task. We also chose to use instant messaging because it is becoming increasingly popular as one of the media through which negotiation takes place (Thompson 2001), which we believed would yield greater external validity.

In Experiment One, we found that negotiators conceded more to a counterpart who displayed anger that seemed authentic rather than inauthentic. In Experiment Two, we hypothesized that perceived authenticity would moderate the interpersonal effects of both anger and happiness on negotiation outcomes. Our second hypothesis was:

As a control, we also included a condition in which negotiators were led to perceive their counterparts' emotions as ambiguous in authenticity. In addition, we also measured the degree of anger and desire for retaliation that negotiators experienced. Thus, our third and fourth hypotheses were:

One hundred and forty‐nine undergraduate students at a university in Singapore participated in the study for course credit. Of these students, five were omitted from the analysis because they expressed suspicion about the cover story of the experiment. Consequently, we included data from 144 participants (86 women, 58 men, mean age = 20.67 years, age range = 18–25 years) for analysis. A two (counterpart's emotion: anger versus happiness) by three (perceived authenticity of counterpart's displayed emotion: authentic versus ambiguous versus inauthentic) between‐subjects design was used. Participants were randomly assigned to the six conditions, with twenty‐four participants in each condition.

The procedure was the same as in Experiment One, except that the negotiation was carried out via an instant messaging medium. Within each session, after giving the two participants instructions and assigning them to the role of seller, each was given instructions for logging on to an instant messaging program, Windows Live Messenger. Each participant logged on as the seller, and the experimenter logged on as both the experimenter and the buyer in the control room using Windows Live Messenger extension software.

Once the participants had signed in to the program, the experimenter created a group conversation with him or her and the buyer, who was played by the experimenter. In other words, the experimenter maintained two sets of group conversation with each of the two participants simultaneously. Each participant was led to believe that he or she was involved in a three‐person instant messaging conversation, with the other participant being the negotiation counterpart.

In the group conversation, the experimenter welcomed the buyer and the seller to the negotiation and reminded them that each party had one minute to make his or her offer in each round. They were also told that an extra reimbursement of $10 (Singapore) would be divided based on their dyad's performance in the negotiation. The buyer (i.e., the experimenter) was always assigned to make the first offer. After these instructions, the experimenter announced the start of the negotiation.

Two negotiations were carried out simultaneously with two participants in separate group conversations, with the experimenter monitoring both conversations simultaneously. As in Experiment One, the participant's offer was accepted if it was equal to or better than the offer that the buyer planned to make in the next round.

The procedure for Experiment Two was similar to the procedure in Experiment One. In each round, participants received typed information regarding the buyer's offers. For the second, fourth, and sixth rounds, participants also received information regarding the buyer's emotions. A minute elapsed before the buyer sent this information (which contained some typing errors to enhance experimental realism).

At the end of round six, the experimenter informed the participants via the group conversations that the negotiation would be temporarily interrupted so participants could answer written questions and that it would resume later. The experimenter then entered the cubicles and presented participants with a postnegotiation questionnaire that took approximately five minutes to complete. Upon completion of the questionnaire, the study ended. Participants were fully debriefed, thanked, and reimbursed $5 (Singapore).

Participants in both the authentic and inauthentic conditions read the same information that was presented in Experiment One. Participants in the ambiguous authenticity condition read that:

We used the same emotional statements for the angry counterpart condition that we used in Experiment One and emotional statements used previously by Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead (2004) for the happy counterpart condition. (See Table Two for both angry and happy statements.) Like the anger statements, these statements have been successfully pretested and have yielded consistent findings in computer‐mediated and face‐to‐face negotiations (Sinaceur and Tiedens 2006).

As in Experiment One, the offers made by participants in each round were transformed into an index revealing the total number of points conceded in the negotiation.

Participants indicated on three seven‐point scales (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree) the degree to which they experienced anger, frustration, and irritation toward their counterparts during the negotiation (e.g., “I felt anger/frustration/irritation toward the buyer during the negotiation.”). These items were combined into one index (Cronbach's alpha = 0.73).

Desire for retaliation was measured with two statements: “In the remaining negotiation rounds with the buyer, I will send false information regarding my intentions if given the chance to do so” and “I would like to get even with the buyer for what he or she did to me during the negotiation” (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). These items were combined into a single index (Cronbach's alpha = 0.75).

As in Experiment One, participants completed items that measured the extent to which their counterpart appeared angry during the negotiation (Cronbach's alpha = 0.83) and the perceived authenticity of their counterpart's displayed emotion (Cronbach's alpha = 0.78). Participants also rated on a seven‐point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree) how happy, satisfied, and joyful they thought their counterpart had been during the negotiation (“The buyer appeared happy/satisfied/joyful during the negotiation.”). We combined these three items into an index of appearance of counterpart's happiness (Cronbach's alpha = 0.84).

In addition, we used six items adapted from Van Kleef and his colleagues (2006) to check the manipulation of the ambiguous authenticity condition. Of these items, three measured the extent to which participants experienced suspicion about their counterpart's intentions: “During the negotiation I felt suspicious about the intentions of the buyer,” “I distrusted the information I received from the buyer,” and “The information I received from the buyer made me suspicious” (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). These items were averaged into a single index (Cronbach's alpha = 0.78).

The remaining three items measured the extent to which participants discounted information about their counterpart's emotion. These statements were: “During the negotiation I did not take the information about the buyer's emotions into account,” “During the negotiation, I paid serious attention to the information I received about the buyer's emotions” (this statement was reverse scored), and “I ignored the information I received about the buyer's emotions” (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). These were also combined into a single index (Cronbach's alpha = 0.78).

We conducted independent‐sample t‐tests to check the manipulation of the counterpart's emotion. Participants who faced an angry counterpart rated the counterpart as significantly angrier (M = 3.81, SD = 0.72) than did participants who faced a happy counterpart (M = 3.44, SD = 0.56).⁴ Participants who faced a happy counterpart rated the counterpart as significantly happier (M = 4.04, SD = 0.85) than did participants who faced an angry counterpart (M = 3.41, SD = 0.51).⁵ Taken together, these results indicate that the emotion manipulation was successful.

We checked the manipulation of perceived authenticity using the index of perceived authenticity of displayed emotion. A one‐way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that the effect of the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's emotion displays was significant.⁶ Planned comparisons revealed that participants in the authentic condition reported significantly greater perceived authenticity (M = 4.33, SD = 0.59) than did participants in the inauthentic condition (M = 3.74, SD = 0.93)⁷ or in the ambiguous condition (M = 3.99, SD = 0.63),⁸ and the difference between participants in the ambiguous and inauthentic conditions was not statistically significant.⁹ Together, these results support the strength of the manipulation.

To further check the manipulation of the ambiguous authenticity condition, we carried out one‐way ANOVA analyses on participants' reported suspicion and discounting of the counterpart's information. For the suspicion measure, we found that perceived authenticity had a significant effect.¹⁰ Planned comparisons revealed that participants in the ambiguous condition reported significantly greater suspicion (M = 3.51, SD = 1.03) than did participants in the authentic condition (M = 3.08, SD = 0.81)¹¹ but did not differ significantly from participants in the inauthentic condition (M = 3.50, SD = 0.72).¹²

For the discounting measure, we found similar results. We found that perceived authenticity had a significant effect.¹³ Planned comparisons showed that participants in the ambiguous condition reported significantly greater discounting of counterpart information (M = 3.91, SD = 0.77) than did participants in the authentic condition (M = 3.38, SD = 0.57).¹⁴ Participants in the ambiguous condition also reported greater discounting of counterpart information than did participants in the inauthentic condition (M = 3.76, SD = 0.70), but this effect was insignificant.¹⁵ Together, these results provide support for the validity of the manipulation of the ambiguous authenticity condition.

Descriptive data for concessions made, anger felt toward the counterpart, and desire for retaliation across the experimental conditions are presented in Table Three.

To test whether the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's emotion display moderated the effects of that display on concession making, we conducted a two (counterpart's emotion: anger versus happiness) by three (perceived authenticity of counterpart's displayed emotion: authentic versus ambiguous versus inauthentic) between‐subjects ANOVA test. First, we found that the overall effect of perceived authenticity (i.e., by considering the two counterpart's emotion conditions together) on concession making was statistically significant.¹⁶ Follow‐up t‐tests showed that participants in the authentic condition made significantly greater concessions (M = 99.27, SD = 59.08) than did participants in the inauthentic condition (M = 60.83, SD = 52.81)¹⁷ and that participants in both the authentic and inauthentic condition made more concessions than participants in the ambiguous condition (M = 41.67, SD = 28.85).¹⁸

We found the overall effect of counterpart's emotion (i.e., by considering the three perceived authenticity conditions together) to be statistically insignificant.¹⁹ But more important, the predicted interaction between perceived authenticity and the counterpart's emotion display was statistically significant.²⁰ It indicated that the effect of counterpart's emotions depended on the perceived authenticity condition. The interaction effect is illustrated through the pattern of means listed in Table Three.

As the means listed in Table Three indicate, participants in the authentic condition conceded more to an angry counterpart than to a happy one.²¹ As we predicted, we found that in the inauthentic condition this pattern was reversed, with participants conceding more to a happy counterpart than to an angry one.²² In the ambiguous condition, participants' concessions made to a happy or to an angry counterpart did not differ.²³ Together, these results support Hypothesis Two and suggest that whether or not the negotiator perceived the counterpart's emotional displays to be authentic had an effect on how he or she responded to those emotions. Specifically, participants in the authentic condition were more likely to make concessions in the face of an angry counterpart while participants in the inauthentic condition were far less likely to make concessions to an angry as compared to a happy counterpart. Concessions made to a happy counterpart did not differ between the authentic and inauthentic condition.

To test whether the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's displays of anger affected the negotiator's own emotional response to that anger, we conducted the same two by three between‐subjects ANOVA test. Participants reported significantly greater anger toward an angry counterpart (M = 4.19, SD = 0.74) than toward a happy one (M = 3.53, SD = 0.81).²⁴ The overall effect of perceived authenticity was statistically significant.²⁵ Follow‐up independent t‐tests revealed only nonsignificant differences in the anger experienced by participants in the authentic condition (M = 3.69, SD = 0.76) and the ambiguous condition (M = 3.78, SD = 0.91),²⁶ but participants in the inauthentic condition (M = 4.10, SD = 0.80) experienced significantly greater anger toward their counterparts than did participants in the authentic condition²⁷ and also than did participants in the ambiguous condition.²⁸

As revealed in Table Three, felt anger was significantly higher toward an angry than a happy counterpart across all the three perceived authenticity conditions. This indicates that there was no interaction effect between counterpart's emotion and perceived authenticity. Taken together, our third hypothesis, that negotiators who perceive their counterparts' emotions as inauthentic will become angrier at an angry counterpart than at a happy one, was supported.

We also conducted a two‐way ANOVA to test the desire for retaliation variable. Participants reported a significantly greater desire to retaliate against an angry counterpart (M = 4.17, SD = 0.81) than against a happy one (M = 3.92, SD = 0.55),²⁹ and the perceived authenticity of the counterpart's emotion had a significant effect.³⁰ Follow‐up t‐tests indicated that participants in the inauthentic (M = 4.32, SD = 0.78) and ambiguous conditions (M = 4.15, SD = 0.54) did not differ significantly in their reported desire to retaliate,³¹ but both had a significantly greater desire to retaliate than did participants in the authentic condition (M = 3.68, SD = 0.62).³²

We did, however, find that these effects were qualified by a significant interaction between counterpart's emotion and perceived authenticity.³³ As shown in Table Three, participants in the authentic condition who faced an angry counterpart reported less desire to retaliate than did participants who faced a happy counterpart.³⁴ We found the reverse pattern in the inauthentic and in the ambiguous conditions, in which participants reported greater desire to retaliate against an angry counterpart than against a happy one.³⁵ Thus, our fourth hypothesis, that negotiators who perceive their counterparts' emotions as inauthentic would report a stronger desire to retaliate against an angry counterpart than against a happy one, was supported.

To further examine the mechanisms underlying the effects we found for the variables of felt anger and desire to retaliate, we developed a follow‐up questionnaire study. We constructed a negotiation scenario that simplified the procedures of Experiment Two.

A convenience sample of seventy‐two female undergraduate students completed the questionnaire after participating in an unrelated study. The questionnaire took less than ten minutes to complete. Participants were given one of two scenarios: the negotiation counterpart was described before the negotiation as either authentic (n = 36) or inauthentic (n = 36) using information provided by acquaintances in the industry. In the actual negotiation, the counterpart was always described as displaying anger. After reading the scenario, participants rated their felt anger (“I would feel angry toward the buyer during the negotiation”) and desire for retaliation toward the counterpart (“I would like to get even with the buyer for how I was treated during the negotiation”) on the same seven‐point scale used in Experiment Two. They also described the reasons for each of their responses in writing, which we hoped would give us greater insight into the underlying mechanisms of their reactions and of the participants in Experiment Two. Specifically, after the questions on felt anger and desire for retaliation toward the counterpart, participants were asked to explain their responses (“Please elaborate on your response to the above question”).

For felt anger, one result replicated Experiment Two but another did not. Like Experiment Two, participants in the inauthentic condition reported greater anger (M = 5.19, SD = 1.09) toward their counterparts than did participants in the authentic counterpart condition (M = 4.11, SD = 1.33 and M = 2.94, SD = 1.67).³⁶ Participants in the inauthentic condition also reported greater desire for retaliation (M = 3.39, SD = 1.48) than did those in the authentic counterpart condition (M = 2.94, SD = 1.67), but unlike Experiment Two, these results failed to reach statistical significance.³⁷

Participants' explanations for the ratings in the questionnaire were coded by two research assistants who knew neither the hypotheses nor the conditions of the experiment. Specifically, they coded whether the participants perceived the counterpart as showing manipulative intent from their responses to the question about felt anger and whether the participants felt exploited in their responses to the question about their desire for retaliation.

Overall, the two raters agreed 93 percent of the time, and any discrepancies in their determinations were resolved by the second author. For the responses on felt anger, participants in the inauthentic counterpart condition reported that the counterpart displayed manipulative intent (nine out of thirty‐six) more frequently than did those in the authentic counterpart condition (one out of thirty‐six).³⁸

In response to the question about their desire for retaliation, more participants in the inauthentic counterpart condition reported feeling exploited by the counterpart (four out of thirty‐six) than did those in the authentic counterpart condition (none out of thirty‐six),³⁹ but the statistical test (chi‐squared) result is not reliable because the observed frequency is zero in one of the conditions. In addition, a majority of the participants (fifty‐five out of seventy‐two, with no statistically significant difference between the two conditions) expressed the opinion that retaliation would serve no purpose in dealing with the counterpart's anger.⁴⁰

The results of Experiment Two largely support our central proposition that the perceived authenticity of displays of anger and happiness in negotiations is likely to moderate the impact of such displays on negotiation outcomes. Consistent with previous findings (Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2004), when negotiators were led to believe that the emotions displayed by their counterpart were authentic, they were more likely to concede more to an angry counterpart than to a happy one. In this study, however, we observed the reverse pattern among negotiators who perceived their counterpart's emotions as inauthentic, and the pattern was driven by a significant drop in concessions in the condition when the counterpart's anger was perceived to be inauthentic.

This pattern of findings supports the idea that perceived authenticity moderates the interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiation. In an exploratory vein, we also found that negotiators who perceived their counterpart's emotions as ambiguous in authenticity did not differ in the amount of concessions they made whether the counterpart displayed anger or happiness. In this context, suspicion about the counterpart's intentions could have led these negotiators to be particularly intransigent to the counterpart's attempts to use emotions as a tactical gambit, such that the counterpart's displayed emotions did not exert a differential influence on their concession behavior (Burgoon et al. 1995; Fein 1996).

We also found that negotiators who perceived the counterpart's emotions as inauthentic were more likely to feel anger toward and to desire to retaliate against an angry counterpart than toward a happy one. The greater anger felt by negotiators whose counterparts displayed inauthentic anger seemed to have generated a stronger desire to engage in “anger‐driven retaliation” compared with negotiators whose counterpart displayed inauthentic happiness (Van Dijk et al. 2008). The effect of perceived authenticity on felt anger was only significant when the counterpart displayed anger but not happiness. This may be because the negotiator perceives that displayed anger reflects a manipulative intent to induce concessions. Negotiators are less likely to perceive displayed happiness as indicative of manipulative intent even when it is seen as inauthentic.

Interestingly, although participants whose counterparts displayed authentic anger conceded the most among the six experimental conditions, they also reported the lowest level of desire for retaliation. One possible explanation is that because they viewed the anger as authentic, they also viewed it as justified, which may have resulted in a reduced desire to retaliate against the counterpart (Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2010). The justification process may involve perceiving the anger display as real and not as an attempt to manipulate one's negotiation behavior. As a result, participants felt little need to address, manage, or retaliate against their counterpart's anger in the negotiation processes. Our results strongly suggest that using anger inauthentically as a negotiation tactic can backfire: once the negotiator perceives manipulative intent behind a counterpart's anger display, she no longer takes it at face value and is more likely to become angry herself.

The pattern of findings obtained from the follow‐up questionnaire complements the main results obtained from Experiment Two. Specifically, participants cited manipulated intent and feelings of exploitation as reasons for their ratings on felt anger and on desire for retaliation, respectively. These reasons were cited more frequently when the counterpart's anger was perceived as inauthentic.

In the follow‐up questionnaire, however, participants' written explanations about their desire for retaliation also reveal an unexpected pattern: for most of our participants, retaliation is seen as undesirable and not as an effective means to deal with the negotiation situation. These findings contradict those obtained in Experiment Two. We speculate that the difference may be due to the nature of the scenario study. In previous research on behavioral forecasting in negotiation, researchers found evidence that what negotiators think they will do often turns out to be different from what they actually do (Diekmann, Tenbrunsel, and Galinsky 2003).

Participants were asked to imagine their reactions to a negotiation scenario (unlike the participants in the actual experiments who believed they were interacting with their opponent), but they did not actually experience the anger displayed by the counterpart in the scenario. Consequently, it seems likely that they did not actually feel the anger that otherwise might have been triggered by the counterpart's anger display. As a result, the impact of perceived authenticity as indicated in the questionnaires may mostly reflect rational cognitive processes. On the other hand, in the two experiments conducted in this study in which participants were led to believe they were negotiating in pairs, the effects may reflect both cognitive and emotional processes.

This study focused on the impact of emotion displays in negotiation not from the perspective of the person expressing the emotion, but from the perspective of the person that he or she was negotiating with. Such an investigation has several theoretical implications. Previous research has focused exclusively on the interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiation when these emotions were perceived as genuine, but negotiators have been found to strategically alter or feign emotions to influence others (Johnson, Cooper, and Chin 2009). Moreover, in social interactions, people do not take information about others' emotions at face value but instead make active inferences regarding the intentions that underlie such displays (Grandey 2000). As such, how negotiators react when they perceive manipulative intent behind their counterpart's emotion displays can be critical. Our findings provide insight into the extent to which perceptions of authenticity enhance or diminish the interpersonal effects of displays of emotion in negotiation.

A few practical implications arise from our investigation of how the perceived authenticity of a counterpart's displayed anger and happiness can moderate the impact of these emotions on the negotiator. Our findings regarding the impact of ambiguous authenticity in Experiment Two are only exploratory. Nonetheless, they have some pertinence to real‐life negotiation situations, in which it can be challenging to ascertain the underlying motivation of a counterpart's behavior. According to the EASI model, the causal linkages between inferences and affective reactions can be broken when the emotions displayed by the counterpart are not signaling anything clearly. We speculate that when the counterpart's underlying motive is unclear, negotiators may experience suspicion and more likely resist the counterpart's attempts at influence. Such an ambiguity on authenticity may also be heightened in the case of computer‐mediated communication in which salient social cues such as facial expressions are absent (Thompson 2001). In the absence of face‐to‐face interaction, such information as the reputation of the negotiating parties may take on added significance (Van Kleef, De Dreu, and Manstead 2004). Reputation clearly influences trustworthiness and may also influence how negotiators determine their counterpart's emotional authenticity. It follows that individuals with reputations for inconsistency will have a more difficult time convincing their counterparts of their authenticity.

This study highlights the importance of the perceived authenticity of the emotions displayed by counterparts and their effects on negotiation outcomes. When deceptive intent is perceived to underlie a counterpart's displayed emotions, negotiators are likely to claim more value for themselves than when they are unsuspecting of the counterpart's motives. This is especially so when the counterpart displays anger.

Thus, negotiators who use emotional displays as a strategic tool should be cautious when expressing anger tactically. The other party may view such displays as inauthentic and this may result in a backlash, making it even more difficult to elicit concessions from the other party. Based on the same findings, it also follows that when they encounter displays of anger, negotiators should not automatically view them as evidence of either justification or power. Interpreting angry displays as authentic comes with a price — negotiators will give way and make concessions more readily as a result.

Extending the above recommendation, negotiators should also be cautious when expressing excessive happiness tactically. This is because one cannot control whether the emotional displays will be interpreted as authentic, inauthentic, or ambiguous. As a result, the tactical value of expressing happiness, if any, also becomes uncertain.

This study has a few important limitations. First, we told participants that they would receive information about their counterpart's personality but that their counterpart would not receive such information about them. This perception of informational asymmetry may have led participants to believe they had more power in the negotiation than their counterparts. Prior research has established that high‐power negotiators are less likely to be influenced by their counterparts' emotions than are low‐power negotiators (Sinaceur and Tiedens 2006), so this perceived inequality might have diminished participants' reactions to their counterparts' emotion displays. Future research should explore whether the distribution of information between negotiating parties yields differences in responses to a counterpart's displayed emotions.

The use of scripted counterpart responses is an additional limitation. We sought to preserve as much experimental control as possible so that causal inferences could be made with greater confidence, but this experimental control was achieved at the expense of mundane realism. The counterparts' simulated emotions were expressed in extremely limited ways. Real people expressing either authentic or inauthentic anger and happiness would have done so in much more varied and idiosyncratic ways. Research conducted in real‐life negotiation settings — or in more realistic simulated settings — might better capture interactive dynamics.

Although the present research focuses on the perceived authenticity of emotional displays, the provision of information about the counterpart's personality poses another limitation. We manipulated the authenticity of the negotiation counterpart in an experimental setting by providing bogus feedback about the counterpart's personality, but information about one's counterpart's personality will be much harder to obtain in real‐life negotiations. Providing information about the counterpart's reputation in the field (as we did in the follow‐up questionnaire adhering to Experiment Two) may help to circumvent this limitation.

The interpersonal effects of emotions in negotiation have received growing empirical attention in recent years. This study extends this line of inquiry by demonstrating that the perceptions of authenticity regarding a counterpart's displayed emotions can have a significant impact on how a negotiator reacts to those emotional displays. It also represents a preliminary effort to address the need to better understand whether negotiators can differentiate between genuine and strategic emotional expressions, and whether this matters (Druckman and Olekalns 2008). This study seems to suggest that negotiators who rely on emotions as a tactical gambit (especially anger displays) may pay a price. Negotiators may benefit more from adopting a “poker face strategy” by minimalizing emotional strategies, for example, limiting expressions of explicit anger and hostility as well as excessive enthusiasm and happiness. In addition, negotiators should interpret their counterparts' emotions with informed skepticism, noting the consequences of that interpretation on their own negotiation behaviors.