Part II: Individual differences, with Dr. Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Welcome to the Negotiation and Conflict Management Podcast series. I'm glad I know that now. This series is brought to you by the NAC team. NAC stands for Negotiation and Conflict. NAC is made up of a team of scholars who are passionate about the teaching, research, and practice of negotiation and conflict management and all related topics. We offer you this podcast series to highlight the work of global academic thought leaders who have a NAC for negotiating and managing conflict. We hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome back to part two of our conversation with Dr. Hillary Anger Elfenbine from the Olden School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis on the topic of individual differences and negotiations. If you haven't yet listened to part one, you may find it helpful to start there and come back to part two. We hope you enjoy part two of our conversation with Dr. Elfenbine. Taking a step back from the paper actually, I'm really curious more in general what finding from your own research do you find most interesting and why could you tell us about it? Sure. On the individual differences friend, the thing I've enjoyed the most is the forensic nature of the work. So, you know, we all have these ideas of what we would have done if we hadn't done academia or what I would do with this whole academic career thing doesn't work out. What would I do instead? I think you're from the other than stand-up comedy. The other idea I've had is to be a forensic scientist. Like, I love the idea of like walking into a room and asking how did all the objects get placed this way? What happened in this room? And so, I love the forensic element of this area of research where you have 50 years worth of people finding nothing and some people finding things, but then other people not replicating the things that they found. So, you've got this 50-year stretch of work that did not create accumulative body of findings. And just saying, "What happened here? You know, how did this come to be?" And so, for example, Sudip Sharma, Bill Bottom, and I have a meta-analysis of personality and intelligence and negotiation. And so, on the intelligence front, you do see results on the personality front. What do we call the big five personality traits? You see nothing. Actually, what my grandma, my Jewish grandmother, would call "buckus." You see nothing like a big zero. And these five traits for the listeners who aren't familiar with them, neuroticism, extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness. And you would expect that these matter tremendously in negotiation. But the existing research just didn't show it. Just didn't show it. And you ask yourself why? That's what my colleagues are now trying to do now is to pick apart the why. We have, for example, a colleague Deseng Zhang, who as part of his dissertation focused on conscientiousness. Conscientiousness should matter tremendously. You know, who are the people who prepare? And you look at our syllabus and we have readings like, "I have a reading that's called literally prepare, prepare, prepare." And what are we teaching our students to do? Analyze your alternatives, analyze the comparables in the marketplace, find all the information you can about the situation you're in, read, focus. Like so, we're literally teaching our students to do the things that a conscientious person would naturally do. Prepare. Do the hard work because the estimate is 75% of the outcome is determined before you even sit down at the table based on the objective situation and how you've prepared for it. But then how in these research studies does conscientious show nothing? In this forensic way, we've tried to pick apart the methods that other people have used. And the challenge for conscientiousness to show its value is that most studies involve simulations of bargaining and your hand to a set of instructions. And you're told, "These are your instructions, you cannot go outside of this information. You can't do additional research." And you have a specific amount of time. By the way, here's your score sheet and it's really obvious for any given outcome what the value of that outcome is. If you actually unpack each of these, you end up with research studies like Dave Sung has led where conscientious matters a lot. There's a complicated exercise simulation called moms.com. And if you give people a lot of time to prepare in advance, low and behold, some prepare a lot and some don't prepare a lot and who's preparing a lot does a lot better in this exercise than who's not preparing very much. And what we find in that too is actually that people who've partners prepare a lot report that they had a more efficient degree with that they felt better about the process of working with somebody who actually is prepared. Because imagine you're showing up and somebody's not prepared for what they're working on with you. And so conscientiousness matters. It matters a lot. But you have to deconstruct our research methods in the negotiations field come largely handed down from a social psychological and economic experimental approach. And they aren't really designed to answer the kinds of questions that my collaborators and I have gotten interested in. So that's conscientiousness. But then if you also pick apart, you can say, "Well, what about agreeableness? What about extroversion?" And you have to ask yourself, "Where do these effects live?" If I cared about conscientiousness, where would I find that effect? In preparation. Okay, let's find a place for people to actually vary from each other and preparing. And this is what psychologists call the difference between strong and weak situations. A strong situation is like a traffic light, right? Whoever you are, you stop at a red light. Whoever you are, you start moving in with a green light. It doesn't matter if you're an extroverted introvert upside down, whatever, whoever you are, anything you may be a traffic light is going to stop you. A weak situation is one where it's not obvious what you should be doing next. And that's where our personality is blossom. That's where the person who's more neurotic is going to be more nervous. That's where the person who's more agreeable is going to be more friendly, more kindhearted, right? Because the situation is flexible enough for each person to live their natural personality. And so you have to do that to find these kinds of effects. And so I feel like field research matters and experimental research that frees up some of the kinds of constraints that are placed on participants. Field research matters. So Sudeep and Bill and I have a paper where we actually had archival data from Hogan Associates, which does a lot of personality testing. And they have supervisors rate people's negotiation performance. That had never been done before. How are we in a field where job performance is rated by supervisors as the gold standard for job performance and yet negotiation performance to our knowledge had never been measured by supervisors before as the outcome variable of the study. And guess what we found that people who are more I'm forgetting what the Hogan inventory calls this variable, but basically agreeableness. People do better in negotiations. They're rated as a stronger negotiators. People who are agreeable. They build relationships. They work effectively with others. And then the other part was assertiveness. People who are assertive did better in negotiations. This is not rocket science. This is the intuition that most of us have, but it had never been shown before because it was invisible in the kinds of designs people were using. Well, it's such a good reminder of what we teach our own students even if don't take anything for granted, ask why unpack what's happening and the reasoning why and that can actually show you a lot of additional potential value. Saying these studies that you're you're on and the others that you've mentioned are really highlighting the benefit of saying password may have shown that individual differences don't matter, but let's ask why and then there could be something behind that, which is really valuable. I'm curious if you ever found a really surprising finding in your work, one that just totally took you off guard. That is a great question. I think that we were surprised by just how big the effects were in the twin study. I thought it was going to work, but I didn't think it was going to work quite with the drama. In the world of twins research, social skills have not been tested before. So the areas that you see twin studies are areas like personality, psychopathology, cognitive skills, medical diagnoses, these kinds of areas, but social skills, you don't see occasionally you'll see you'll see some emotional disorder type of construct studies, so things like emotion regulation, which is associated with personality disorders and psychopathology. So you'll see some of that, but you don't see the range of healthy social skills being tested. So I've got an interested in emotional intelligence in behavioral genetics. That has not been tested. Hopefully anyone listening to this, if you take an interest in it, go for it and just tell me what you find. You don't see this. So actually negotiation performance was to our knowledge, the first study out there of a social skill, if you want to call negotiations a social skill. I mean, you see things about genetically informed studies of attitudes, of job performance, of entrepreneurship, all that's been done, but not this personal social skill. So we didn't know what we would find, because there was really no precedent in the literature for what kinds of effects and effect sizes, but it was a whopping effect size. It was row. So the correlation that is what we call dis attenuated for measurement errors. So the correlation after you correct for the reliability of your measurements was in the point sixes. I mean, it was up there with the things that we feel like as a society, we know and believe are genetic. We know that intelligence is genetic. We know that personality is genetic, and this effect size for negotiations was just as large as those. When your students come to you, you've talked a little bit about encouraging them to take a negotiations course, even if they feel that they weren't born to be a good negotiator. How do you advise your students in terms of how they can leverage their own individual differences to help a negotiation? Are there particular pieces of advice that you would give them? We talk a lot about division of labor. So we talk about how there are so many dimensions of individual differences, but a lot of students, and I think intuitively, we tend to place people on it continuum from relationship oriented to task oriented and more colloquially soft to hard. We talk about how every personality profile can succeed at negotiating. Every personality profile can succeed wildly, but you've got to put yourself in the situations where those are the negotiations where you'll succeed. So in St. Louis, it's an old economy. We have manufacturing. You know, that paid back when people used to make stuff. People still make stuff here in St. Louis. And there are some companies where I'll have professional students from there who are involved with companies that have 10-year-long buyer-supplier contracts. The people who succeed in working with those relationships, those people are what would be on the soft end of the continuum. If you're a high-fly and salesperson who can really convince people to buy things they don't maybe even need, that person does not succeed in a 10-year-long buyer-supplier relationship that requires continual re-negotiation due to unforeseen circumstances, right? You're just constantly updating this negotiation. There's a certain person who succeeds there and I say, figure out who you are, develop self-awareness, and figure out, is that the situation you want to put yourself in? Because some people the answer is yes. Some people the answer is no. Some people are cut out for sales. And I admire them and that's great. And they need to know who they are. But whatever traits you have, you need to think about the rough edges and the downsides because everything's a trade-off. There's no one style that works best. If you're a very assertive negotiator, you will succeed in many situations, but there are situations where people will never want to work with you again. And so we emphasize a lot in our class the kind of feedback that you get, not only about your performance, right? You see that on the whiteboard in class. You know how well you did in terms of the points you scored or the fictional dollars you earned. But people also get feedback confidentially averaged out across their partners about how they made them feel. And so there are a lot of people come into the class saying, I'm a lousy negotiator. And then they get this feedback report saying the average of the people across everyone you worked with said that you are an exceptional working relationship partner. That you were prepared, that you were ethical, that you were a good listener, that you treated them fairly. You know, they get this feedback and they realize, wait a second, I'm a great negotiator. I've just been trying to buy cars with people I'll never see again, the stereotype of what it means to negotiate. But in fact, we're negotiating every day for all kinds of things. There are people who think of themselves as great negotiators in the class fewer because they don't always think why to take an elective at something they're already very good at. But there are people who think of themselves as great and they get this feedback report from people saying, yeah, I would never work with you again. And then they realize that they need to soften their approach as well. So there's no one style that works best. But every personality has a set of negotiation scenarios where their particular traits are the winning traits for that scenario. Such fantastic advice. More just about recognizing the situation and figuring out how to match yourself best to the situations that you find yourself in. And I always say, there's no shame in bringing a friend. Right. When you buy that car, bring your partner, bring who I, who never bring your parents. Maybe not your twin. Well, you told us a lot about individual differences negotiation is such a fascinating area. I'm so excited to see where the field goes in the future. But I want to know if you thought if there's one particular just really important thing that we still need to know about individual differences in negotiation and why it's so important to know that thing. I think we need to continue the forensic exercise of taking every trade that intuitively may matter and documenting where it matters and how it matters. The piece I think that's been really missing for most research in the area is what happens after you reach a deal. We tend in our own research to put people in a position where when they're done with the study, they hand in a sheet of paper with a bunch of circled outcomes and a number on the back and then they wave their hands and it magically, that is the outcome. But in real life, your settlement doesn't matter until it's actually implemented as written, right? The actual value that you extract from a negotiation is realized over time. It's very rare. I mean, maybe when you're if you're buying a new car that's going to be under a manufacturer's warranty and you're paying cash and then you walk out with your new car, that is a deal that does not require implementation because it's guaranteed by a third party. But most deals are not like that. Most deals require people to stand by their word to deliver the product that was intended on time. Employment negotiations depend on the person actually showing up to work and working their hardest and living up to their potential. On the other side of the employment negotiation, the person showing up to work is expecting that the job is as it was described to them. Think about all the jobs you've had that you show up and it's not quite what you thought it was going to be like. For you much every job I've ever had. So implementation matters and I think it's missing from most of our research and personally matters hugely there, right? You know, Dayson and Bill and I believe the conscientious negotiator is more likely to come through on the promises made, right? The agreeable negotiator is more likely to put in positive effort to maintain a good working relationship even after the deal. The extroverted person we don't know. You could almost take our whole field and say what would happen if you kept studying this question after the so-called deal is made. Dayson and Bill and I have a paper a few years ago in which we talked about the phases of negotiation and we documented how little research there is in the negotiations field as a whole. Forget about individual differences but every topic in the whole field. Almost all of it was about the bargaining stage. So once you sit down to work out your deal and then when it ends when you've reached a settlement, very little about planning, about deal structuring, right? And very little about implementing what happens after the deal is struck. And I think that's just a huge frontier. And I hope that anyone listening to this please, almost anything about preparation is a contribution. Almost anything about implementation is a contribution. Blue ocean areas for research. Your energy is just so contagious about these topics that it's just so fascinating. I really want to ask you given how energetic you are and how passionate you are about these ideas. Is there any particular line of research or study or even a particular article that really influenced you a lot in your own work? I would have to say David Kenny's work in general and the social relations model even though you could say this is some kind of obscure statistical model. It's a bunch of formulas. I think it's profound because what the social relations approach to research says is if you want to understand the individual person, you need to understand them in the context of their relationships. Who am I if I'm not with another person? And I'm not the same person with you that I am with the next person on my left and the next person on my right and that we are at some level socially constructed by our interaction partners. And I just thought that was almost existential. I don't know that Dave meant it that way. Dave's a close friend and mentor. I don't know if I've ever said there's just almost existential nature of this idea that to understand a person you need to understand them in the context of. And I think actually this part he meant he meant quite explicitly that so much of what we care about in psychology is a diatic process. And for us to understand diatic processes we need to put individuals into multiple diets. That all was meant and I think you can make it a bit existential and say I'm no one until I'm interacting with someone else and who is that someone else? And I'm someone else with the next person. So that was a big influence on my work. Almost anything I do involves one single person in a room. And this is maybe just to caveat how the field to some extent you see it in the physical architecture of buildings that are being built that most research labs are primarily locations where one human can interact with one computer in a carol in a cubicle that's separated from the next cubicle. And there is very little architectural infrastructure for humans to interact with each other. So rooms big enough to hold two people with a door that shuts rooms big enough to hold six people with a door that shuts you don't see a lot of that. And it's because we have become as a field so intricate versus inter-personal. And there's nothing I'm interested in in research that doesn't require a second person in the room. Fantastic. Well thanks so much Dr. Elfenbine for talking with us today for being here and sharing your energy and passion. It's such a fascinating area. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time talking to Dr. Reese. What we learned today from our podcast guest Dr. Hilary Enger Elfenbine is that our personality and other traits influence how we negotiate and our tendencies are deeply reinforced and may even be partly genetic. However, luckily for us there's no right answer and every personality type has its pluses and minuses in the negotiation space. As our series name states I'm glad I know that now. Once more I'm Laura Reese and on behalf of all of us we thank our guest Dr. Hilary Enger Elfenbine from the Olens School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. On behalf of our NAC team, Deborah Sy, Michael Gross, Jennifer Parlamis, Laura Reese and Ming-Hon Sy, thank you for listening. For more information about this and every episode you can check out the podcast notes on the NAC website. There you can find additional sources and links to material cited in each episode. Please tell a friend about our podcast and we hope you will join us next time for another fascinating discussion about a topic you'll be glad to know about.