The bartering mindset

Decades of research have documented the existence and persistence of the fixed pie bias in negotiations, along with negotiators’ associated tendency to engage in distributive behavior. Building from research on the psychology of money, the current research investigates one potential source of fixed pie bias and distributive behavior: our daily reliance on monetary transactions, which represent a competitive way of solving problems. I contrast the effects of monetary transactions with the effects of bartering transactions, which anthropological research portrays as a more cooperative mode of problem-solving. Accordingly, I predict that exposure to bartering transactions will prime more expandable (versus fixed) pie beliefs and integrative (versus distributive) behavior in negotiations than monetary transactions. Three studies support these predictions, suggesting that our daily reliance on money may exacerbate our distributive tendencies in negotiation, but thinking about bartering may help to overcome these tendencies.