The Effect of Negotiators’ Own Social Motives and Their Counterparts’ Social Motives on Trust

Abstract

Although much is known about the effect of negotiators’ social motives on trust, little is known about how negotiators’ own social motives interact with their counterparts’ social motives. Based on false consensus effect, expectancy disconfirmation and negativity bias, we propose and test two sets of alternative hypotheses on the effects of negotiators’ own social motives and their counterpart’s social motives in a negotiation experiment. We predict that negotiating with an individualistic counterpart leads to lower trust than negotiating with a cooperative counterpart (H1a), especially for cooperators (H2a). Results of our study (N= 76) provided stronger support for H2a: Cooperative negotiators had lower trust when they negotiated with individualistic counterparts than when they negotiated with cooperative counterparts whereas individualistic negotiators were not influenced by their counterparts’ social motivation. Our mediation analysis showed that this happened because cooperators expected more coopera...