Long Story Short: An Empirical Analysis of Storytelling Effects in Negotiations

Storytelling has become an omnipresent part of today’s society and business. Many studies from diverse research disciplines have focused on this vivid, narrative communication technique’s impact. However, these studies have yielded conflicting findings, which can be explained by two opposing theoretical views. Surprisingly, very little research has been conducted on storytelling in negotiations, even though communication is the key component of every negotiation’s interactive decision-making process. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to examine the effect of storytelling on the negotiation outcome. Our experiment proves that storytelling has a positive impact on the contract conclusion and on the purchase price buyers are willing to pay. As a result of analyzing the negotiators’ communication behaviors by means of content analysis, we are able to provide explanations for these effects. We conclude that negotiators should amplify their arguments by sharing their experiences and telling anecdotes instead of concentrating on the hard facts.