The Influence of Different Phrasings on Negotiators’ Competitiveness

It is common that one word has different translations and phrasings in another language. In this research, we focused on two Chinese translations (tanpan and xieshang) of the English word negotiation and investigated how the use of two Chinese words influences negotiators’ cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Drawing on the theory of representational mind, we hypothesized that these two words associated with varying levels of competitiveness assumption and hence might lead to different negotiation outcomes. We conducted four experiments based on MBA and executive MBA participants to test our hypothesis, and found that labeling the negotiation as tanpan rather than xieshang would cause a higher level of competitiveness in Chinese negotiators’ cognitive activation (Study 1), self-reported negotiation strategy (Study 2), actual negotiation behavior (Study 3), and cognitive association (Study 4). More importantly, we showed that both translations are essentially different from the original English one regarding its metaphorical associations (Study 4). These findings suggest that even nuanced translation variation would result in significantly distinct cognitive processes and behavioral outcomes in negotiations, and these new insights help us contribute to the literature of negotiation, cognitive bias, and cross-cultural studies.