Deception in Negotiations: The Role of Emotions

This article presents insight into the link between deception and emotions, identifying the role of emotions in the intention to deceive in a negotiation. Negative emotions have commonly been found to increase deception and positive emotions have commonly been found to reduce it. It also outlines two potentially fruitful venues for future research: the study of the mechanisms linking emotions to deception in negotiation and the study of specific categories of emotions that may have counterintuitive effects on negotiators' use of deception at the bargaining table. The two facets of pride, namely authentic and hubris pride, offer an opportunity for future research to investigate the counterintuitive effect of positive emotions on deception in negotiations. It is proposed that guilt decreases a negotiator's willingness to use deception by increasing her likelihood of taking her counterpart's perspective.