Disagreement With A Smile: Multimodal Communication In Negotiation

Authors:

Abstract: Do non-verbal expressions surpass verbal content in negotiations? Are facial expressions on par with communication through the voice? The present research leverages a unique dataset of job offer negotiations to examine the impact of verbal and non-verbal modalities—facial, prosodic, and verbal expressions—on negotiation outcomes. We analyzed 20 measures of facial action units, 6 measures of prosodic features, and 2 measures of verbal sentiment from 158 negotiation recordings. Results from the actor-partner interdependence models and random forest models show that facial expressions independently influence both objective and subjective negotiation outcomes more than prosodic features and verbal content. Collectively, the combination of all three modalities explains up to 30% of the variance in negotiation outcomes. Furthermore, we identify specific factors within each modality that shape objective and subjective negotiation outcomes.

Track: NEG

Keywords: negotiation, multimodal communication, non-verbal behavior