the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School(www.pon.harvard.edu)
Negotiation experts typically advise us to meet with our counterparts in person whenever possible rather than relying on the telephone or Internet. As convenient as electronic media may be, they lack the visual cues that help convey valuable information and forge connections in face-to-face talks. Without access to gestures and facial expressions, those who negotiate at a distance have trouble accurately reading each other's tone and building rapport.
But what, exactly, do negotiators learn from nonverbal behavior? Do we read each other's gestures and expressions accurately or not? Can we increase our negotiation success by deliberately modifying our own nonverbal behavior? Here we analyze three scenarios to help you understand how nonverbal behavior may be affecting your negotiations.
1. To mimic or not to mimic?
A corporate headhunter welcomes you into a conference room, and the two of you settle across from each other at a table. Twenty minutes later, the interview seems to be going very well. You happen to notice that you and the recruiter are sitting in the same position, leaning back with your legs crossed. Feeling self-conscious, you wonder if you should shift position.
After two or more people have been in each other's presence for just a few minutes, their behavior begins to subtly converge, writes Harvard Business School professor Michael Wheeler. Their breathing patterns and heart rates sync up, and they also tend to mimic each other's posture and hand gestures.
Rather than feeling embarrassed or silly when you and a counterpart copy each other's behavior, you should congratulate yourself. Mimicry is a sign that you're both striving to build rapport, connect, and find common ground, even if you don't know how or when the mimicry started. Mimicry seems to make us feel comfortable with others and encourage us to trust them. In fact, Professor Tanya Chartrand of Duke University has found that we tend to view those who mimic our movements when they talk to us as more persuasive and honest than those who do not mimic us.
Note that negotiators who are already aware of the benefits of mimicry may attempt to use it strategically, copying your gestures deliberately to build rapport -- something to look out for.
2. Should you trust or not?
In a real-life example of the power of image, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German, successfully passed himself off as a member of the Rockefeller family for many years while living in the United States. Armed with little more than an aloof personality and a preppy wardrobe, Gerhartsreiter conned his way into marriages and high-level jobs in investment firms, writes the Boston Globe, despite an obvious lack of experience and credentials, before being arrested in August for allegedly kidnapping his daughter.
Research shows that most of us tend to automatically trust those we meet -- and adjust our perceptions only in the face of overwhelming evidence. The story of Gerhartsreiter is just one vivid example of the power of visual cues in guiding our behavior.
When you're evaluating a negotiator's trustworthiness, it pays to remember that some nonverbal signs are more important than others. Professor Maurice E. Schweitzer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania notes that liars sometimes have trouble matching their facial expressions to the emotion they're communicating. A liar might have difficulty coordinating her behavior -- saying no while nodding yes, for example. Liars also sometimes forget to add the gestures, pitch variations, raised eyebrows, and widened eyes that we make naturally when telling the truth.
But don't count on nonverbal signs exclusively when assessing someone's trustworthiness. To smoke out a lie, ask lots of specific, clear questions about his claims, recommends Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman. In particular, try asking different versions of the same question at several points in your conversation and compare the consistency of the responses.
3. Can they read your mind? An attorney is looking forward to representing his client's strong case in court. The client is a nice but anxious person, and his questions about the case sometimes irritate the attorney. Though the attorney has been polite, she's worried the client will pick up on her underlying impatience through her nonverbal behavior.
Most negotiators have faced the challenge of smiling through gritted teeth at a counterpart they find aggravating. We all understand the value of being friendly and patient while focusing on our goals, but it's sometimes difficult to keep our true feelings under wraps.
How skilled are we at communicating emotions that don't quite match our true feelings? Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California Medical School, San Francisco, has identified "micro-expressions" -- fleeting, involuntary signs of one's genuine emotions, such as a blush or a grimace -- that might tip others off to our thoughts. But such micro-expressions can be all but impossible for anyone but a trained researcher to detect.
In a recent experiment, Stephen Porter and Leanne ten Brinke of Dalhousie University asked participants to respond to a series of emotionally charged or neutral images. The participants were asked in advance to respond to the images either genuinely or to respond with false emotions. Those asked to be deceptive displayed inconsistent facial expressions and increased blinking more often than those who reacted genuinely. Participants had more trouble falsifying negative emotions than positive ones; it seems happiness may be easier to fake than sadness or fear. Yet untrained observers detected the deception at a rate only slightly better than chance.
In other words, you may have trouble hiding your feelings, but others may be even worse at detecting them. Rest assured that most people will take your social niceties at face value. At the same time, you should practice expressing difficult sentiments in a constructive, sensitive manner. In negotiation, sometimes words do speak louder than actions.
