The study Daily Negotiation and Its Effects on Short-term Pleasantness and Longer-term Well-being, led by Katherine Qianwen Sun of UCLA Anderson School of Management, alongside Martin Schweinsberg of ESMT Berlin, Matteo Di Stasi of CUNEF Universidad, and Jordi Quoidbach of ESADE Business School, was published in the peer-reviewed journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. Using an app-based experience-sampling method, the researchers followed 302 participants for one week, collecting 5,286 observations about their moods and whether their most recent social interactions involved negotiation.

The findings challenge several assumptions about how negotiation is understood, studied, and taught. Most notably, negotiation appears to be far more common in everyday life than previous research has suggested. More than 30 percent of participants’ social interactions involved at least one negotiation process, including reaching an agreement, making a joint decision, resolving a disagreement, persuading someone, bargaining, or mediating between others.

The study also shows that everyday negotiation looks quite different from its conventional portrayal. Classic bargaining—the exchange of offers and concessions most closely associated with negotiation—accounted for only 2.7 percent of interactions. By comparison, reaching an agreement was nearly four times as common, occurring in 10.4 percent of interactions.

These results suggest that everyday negotiation is less about competitive, zero-sum bargaining and more about agreement-seeking and joint decision-making. Negotiation is therefore not limited to formal situations involving contracts, salaries, or major purchases, but is embedded in the routine interactions through which people coordinate their needs, preferences, and decisions.

Negotiation was also not confined to the workplace. Although it was most prevalent among coworkers, occurring in 54 percent of those interactions, it was also common in personal relationships. Around 30 percent of interactions with friends, family members, and romantic partners involved some form of negotiation, demonstrating how broadly negotiation extends across social life.

The researchers also examined how negotiation relates to mood and well-being. Interactions involving negotiation were associated with a measurable decline in participants’ momentary mood. However, people who negotiated more frequently also reported higher levels of general well-being, suggesting a possible relationship between a greater willingness to negotiate and longer-term well-being.

The study found no significant differences in negotiation frequency by gender or age, challenging common stereotypes, including the assumption that women negotiate less frequently than men. “Negotiation has a reputation as something confined to boardrooms and big-ticket purchases,” says Martin Schweinsberg, professor at ESMT. “But our data shows that people are negotiating constantly. Negotiation is woven into the ordinary give-and-take of daily life.”

The authors emphasise that the relationship between negotiation frequency and well-being is correlational rather than causal. People with higher baseline well-being may be more inclined to negotiate. They therefore call for longitudinal and intervention-based research to determine whether negotiation contributes directly to well-being, as well as further studies examining what people negotiate about and the outcomes they achieve.

More information: Katherine Qianwen Sun et al, Daily Negotiation and Its Effects on Short-term Pleasantness and Longer-term Well-being, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. DOI: 10.34891/nsmm-y845

Journal information: Negotiation and Conflict Management Research Provided by ESMT Berlin