So You Want Me to Believe You’re Happy or Angry? How Negotiators Perceive and Respond to Emotion Deception

Past work suggests that emotion deception in negotiations – communicating a different emotion than experienced – is perceived negatively. We, however, argue that this depends on the type of emotion deception. We compared two emotion deception types – communicating anger while actually being happy, and communicating happiness while being angry – to genuine communications of happiness and anger.

In three preregistered experiments (N=500), participants played the role of employee or supervisor and negotiated with an opponent about salary raises. After their initial offer, participants learned their opponent’s experienced (happiness vs. anger) and communicated emotion (happiness vs. anger). Then, participants made their final demand and reported perceptions of their opponent’s limits and sacrifice.

Results showed that participants perceived opponents who communicated genuine anger as having stricter limits and conceded more to them than to opponents using the other emotion communication types. Moreover, opponents who communicated happiness but experienced anger were perceived as making more of a sacrifice than opponents who communicated anger but experienced happiness. In Experiment 3, we also examined effects of emotion deception on non-negotiated outcomes, by assessing the likelihood to hand the opponent a year-end bonus.

Participants were most likely to allocate the bonus to opponents that truthfully communicated happiness. Moreover, participants were more likely to allocate the bonus to opponents who communicated happiness but experienced anger than to opponents who communicated anger but experienced happiness. These findings extend social functional accounts of emotion communication, by showing that effects of emotion deception depend on the type of experienced and/or communicated emotions.