Anxiety is the most common emotion associated with negotiations. There are a lot of triggers of anxiety. In general, things that are uncertain, we're not sure what's going to happen. That's true to negotiation. I don't know exactly what someone's going to say or how they'll react when things are novel. I'm not experienced in negotiation. I don't negotiate a lot. Why I haven't negotiated this person before? That novelty can trigger anxiety when things are consequential. What's going to happen really matters to me when it's consequential. That also triggers anxiety. This uncertainty, the novelty, the consequential characteristics of a negotiation, are more likely to trigger anxiety. Notice that the more information we can gather to make it less uncertain, the more we can practice to make it less novel, the better off we'll be in dealing with anxiety. Time pressure can also add anxiety. One of the key themes we've talked about is, are there ways to time the negotiation to find a space so we feel more patient? We also react with people's emotions. If somebody is expressing anger toward us, that can make us anxious, particularly if you have low power. A high-power person, you'd think about a boss who's yelling, that's going to make us more anxious. Again, we're not quite sure what's going to happen to us and it can be consequential. We want to think about ways, in some cases, to diffuse other people's anger, other things that we can do to shift people's emotions or come back at a different time. If people are angry, negotiating later at a different point in time could be something that mollifies somebody's anger, particularly if what they're angry about is not directly related to you. The anxiety we feel negotiation, it's common for many novel consequential settings. You can think about going into a healthcare setting. You're getting lab tests, you're not sure what's going on, or there's a financial advisor who might be using terms and talking about a market crash that can trigger anxiety. Those things are really important because anxiety motivates flight. When we feel anxious, we want to get out of that situation as opposed to anger which causes us to go towards something. It's more of a fight response. Anxiety triggers this flight, causing us to try to get out. In negotiation, that's not good because we're likely to make concessions and try to get out more quickly. Anxiety also gives us more cognitive load, it puts more on our mind. We're now worried about things and hey, am I coming across the right way? Did I say that the right way? What's going to happen to me? That extra cognitive load is crowding out the mental space we need to navigate negotiation. It harms our self-confidence. We are worried that we're not going to come off well. That lower self-confidence, that self-efficacy, and negotiation can be harmful. Then it might cause us to look for more information. We're monitoring other people, hey, is my incoming house okay? How are people reacting to this? We're searching for more information in ways that may or may not be very productive. Now, in some cases, anxiety is productive. What is anxiety good for? Well, ahead of time, it's good. If I'm anxious about a presentation, I'm anxious about a negotiation, I'm going to prepare. That preparation that it triggers can be very useful. Anxiety can also make us more vigilance. We're more likely to monitor situation. We're looking around for information. We're seeking information. That increased vigilance can be helpful. Both in working harder and being more vigilant, it can guide us be more prepared for negotiation. But all that happens ahead of time, not in the moment. In the moment, when we're feeling anxious, it's not good. I mentioned when we're feeling anxious, we're eager to exit. In research that I've done with our Alison Wood Brooks, we found that anxious negotiators get worse outcomes. They expect lower outcomes, they make lower first offers, they respond more quickly because they're in a hurry, and they're eager to exit the negotiation. For all these reasons, they end up performing worse in a negotiation. What does anxiety do? I want to suggest that anxiety motivates flights, in contrast to anger that motivates fights. By flight, what I mean is when people feel anxious, they want to exit, they want to get out of the situation. When people feel anger, they want to go towards the situation, they want to go deal with that. This is why people, prior to negotiation, if they feel anxious they might want to up-regulate their feeling of anger. They're going to go talk to the landlord, talk to the manager, they're motivated by that anger to go approach something. Anxiety causes us to want to try to exit and is generally quite harmful when we feel it in the moment of a negotiation. It adds cognitive load, we have more on our minds, we're worried. We're worried about how we're coming across or what's going to happen. We are less self-confident. It drops our self-efficacy in a negotiation and that self-confidence causes us to make lower offers. We're constantly looking for reassurance and more information. We're looking at other people. Hey, am I coming across okay? Am I making sense? What's happening? Now, anxiety can have positive effects if it happens in advance. Before a negotiation, anxiety can cause us to prepare more. We're worried about how things will go, so I prepare or I'm more vigilant, I'm monitoring my environment, I'm anxious and I'm paying attention. This preparation and this heightened attention, that's what anxiety can do that's positive like preparing for an exam. If I'm anxious ahead of time, I'm going to study harder. That's functional. Now, in the moment, anxiety is always bad. While I'm performing a negotiation, while I'm taking a test, feeling anxious is going to harm performance. In research that I've done with Alison Wood Brooks, we studied anxiety in negotiations, and anxious negotiators get worse outcomes. They get worse outcomes because they're eager to exit the situation and they drop their self confidence, they expect to do worse. They make lower first offers. They respond more quickly to the offers that they get and they are so eager to get out of that situation, they're happy to get worse outcomes. Not happy, but they're anxious and they're eager just to get out and they're going to make those compromises. It's this hurry to leave and this lower self-efficacy, lower self-confidence in the negotiation that causes them to do worse. Now, in a negotiation and if people are giving us ideas, anxiety also makes us more receptive to what other people are saying. When we feel anxious, and you can think about that healthcare setting or that financial situation, if somebody has caused us to feel anxious, we're more likely to seek their advice, we're more receptive to their advice, and we also become less discerning between what's good and bad. In a neutral state, we can tell if we're getting bad advice or good advice far better than if we're feeling anxious where our discrimination goes out the window, we're very receptive to what we're getting. If we happen to be getting great advice, so the medical professionals giving us good advice, that's great, we're going to take it. If in a negotiation we're feeling very anxious and people are giving us good advice, that's helpful. But if the other side is giving us advice, we're less likely to notice a conflict of interest, we're less discerning, so we're less likely to reject terrible advice. When we feel anxious, we may end up making bad decisions. Self-confidence is a key part of this story. Anxiety harms our self-confidence. But if we have high self-confidence, if we've practiced, we've rehearsed, we feel confident in ourselves, we end up performing much better and we're buffeted from anxiety. That is, if we feel confidence, we're far less likely to feel anxiety.
