Think Angering Someone is How to Negotiate? Think Again. You Listening, Trump?

Well, Donald Trump thinks it works for him but a new study says that it doesn't pay to play angry when you're trying to negotiate.

According to experts, “You’re likely going to pay a real price for the anger you express,” says Bill Bottom at newswise.com.  He's the Joyce and Howard Wood Distinguished Professor of Organizational Behavior at Olin and senior author on the paper published online March 18 by the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Bottom, who studies social and psychological aspects of negotiation,notes that accounts published in top-notch media outlets baldly made statements akin to, “it pays to be angry," at the website.

Not quite, he explains. “When you convince somebody to act like this, whether it’s with their boss or trying to buy a car or trying to sell a car, we’re doing a disservice if we’re making such grandiose claims,” Bottom states.

So why does Trump do it?  In some ways, it may work for him, when you look at some of the benefits that have -- for now -- come from his tough-on-trade stances.

Newswise points out that Button's interest in studying this tactic "goes way back to a recollection from a member of the late President Richard Nixon’s inner circle, H.R. Haldeman. Nixon boasted to Haldeman that he would end the Vietnam War by using his 'Madman Theory' — if the then-Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev and North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh believed the man with his finger on the nuclear button was capable of an emotional explosion, they would quickly concede to American terms. Some pundits have suggested that President Donald Trump, a Nixon fan, mimics the theory in international relations."

But “There actually isn’t much evidence that this is a successful stratagem,” Bottom asserts. “It certainly didn’t work for Nixon despite American military power.”

And we may have to wait a while to see how it works for Trump (and us).  My bet is that it won't, in the end.  

n that study, they paid some negotiators a bonus to express anger during their negotiations. They found that the anger that participants had initially faked eventually turned into genuine feelings of anger because of the way their counterparts reacted to them. When it came time to implement the deal, these counterparts more often shirked or reneged outright.

A few of the participants who feigned anger admitted to guilty feelings afterward, leading the researchers to design these new studies to examine how often these guilty feelings really emerge.

In one study, some negotiators were paid a bonus to express anger during their negotiations. "They found that the anger that participants had initially faked eventually turned into genuine feelings of anger because of the way their counterparts reacted to them. When it came time to implement the deal, these counterparts more often shirked or reneged outright," newswise reports.

Kind of what I was thinking.

A few of the participants who feigned anger admitted to guilty feelings afterward, leading the researchers to design new studies to examine how often these guilty feelings really emerge. 

In another study, which included more than 600 participants, researchers persuaded participants to come back the next day to implement the terms of the deal they had negotiated the previous day. "While anger had dissipated by the next day, it had frequently been replaced by feelings of guilt over the way these people had treated their counterpart during the negotiation," the web site reveals.

These feelings and the trust issues led the participants to find ways to atone for their actions when implementing the agreement. Given discretion over how to split up a new pool of money, negotiators who had expressed anger the previous day awarded nearly 20 percent more of their entire $50 allotment, or $9.92 more on average, to the anger-recipient counterpart ($27.70) than to the unaffected counterpart ($17.78), according to newswise.

The findings convinced the researchers that using anger as a negotiating tactic is a lot more likely to increase guilt and distrust than it is to work in coercing concessions from the counterpart. They learned that guilt in particular triggered post-negotiation compensations, atonement and efforts at repairing the damage.

“What we found is, negotiators are willing to compensate the people on the receiving end and wind up paying more than the negotiators who never expressed anger at all,” Bottom says.

In addition, "anger introduced into the negotiation process as a mechanism sometimes ended in the other party reneging on the contract or shirking agreed-upon responsibilities, as often as 30 percent of the time, Bottom said.

Are you listening, Trump?  ("Bully, bully, bully," is how one British official put it today in The New York Times.)

The study shows that "inorganic anger comes with later costs," say experts.

“We don’t say: stop being angry,” Bottom concludes. “What we are saying is: It’s not a useful tool to pull out as a means to coerce somebody to do something they weren’t going to do otherwise.”