Should You Meditate Before a Negotiation?

Meditation could help or hurt your negotiation performance, depending on where you’re from.

Many people turn to meditation when they feel stressed or apprehensive, such as before taking the stage to deliver a speech or prior to a performance review. Another situation that often makes individuals feel anxious is when they need to negotiate. To shake off the pre-negotiation jitters and regulate their emotions, some people practice mindfulness meditation – a means of cultivating awareness of the present moment and clearing one’s mind of other thoughts.
How does mindfulness meditation influence how people conduct themselves during negotiations, and can it help them achieve better outcomes? Prior research on the effects of mindfulness meditation on negotiation performance has found certain benefits, such as reducing anxiety and increasing cooperation.

However, this research was done almost exclusively in Singapore (aside from one experiment conducted with participants from the United Kingdom). To widen the map, our paper, written together with Sigal Barsade of The Wharton School and Zoe Kinias of Ivey Business School, explores these questions with participants in the United States. The results were somewhat surprising.

Mapping mindfulness meditation
Our hypothesis was that meditating before a negotiation would lead to increased value creation (expanding the total benefits in a negotiation through collaboration) and value claiming (securing the best possible outcome for oneself from the available resources).
We conducted 10 lab-based experiments in the US to investigate the effect of a brief mindfulness meditation session on negotiation outcomes. Participants in the treatment group were led through a focused-breathing meditation exercise that instructed them to bring their awareness to the physical sensation of breath entering and leaving their body and repeatedly reminded to focus on their experience of breathing. Those in the control group were instructed to think of whatever came to mind, as this replicates a waking baseline mental state.
Participants were then put into pairs to engage in a negotiation exercise, with scenarios including hammering out the terms of a hiring contract, a potential acquisition and the purchase of a used car. We varied the compositions of the duos to include situations in which both or neither participant meditated, or where only one participant meditated beforehand.
Overall, we found that participants who meditated claimed slightly less value in the negotiations compared to participants in the control condition. In other words, there was no effect of mindfulness on value creation or improving negotiation performance. Indeed, in the single experiment that showed a strong statistically significant effect of mindfulness on value claiming, the directionality of the effect was such that mindfulness harmed negotiation performance, which went in the opposite direction of our initial hypothesis.
Taking together our results and that of previous research conducted in different countries, it seems that there are disparities in the effect of mindfulness on negotiation across national cultures.

The cultural effect
Our best guess for why this occurs has to do with how expressions of anger are interpreted in different cultures. Mindfulness generally helps reduce negative emotions such as anger. Prior research has found that negative moods can be functional in negotiations, and that negotiators tend to use their counterpart’s emotional displays as information to determine that person’s limit and adjust demands accordingly.
Much of the research on how anger expressions help negotiators claim value was conducted in the US and the Netherlands. However, that effect has failed to replicate in research done in Asian cultures, meaning that displaying anger does not help negotiators claim more value in Asia. Asian cultures generally place greater importance on maintaining social harmony relative to signalling one’s own sense of power or uniqueness.
Reactions to leaders’ disruptive behaviours depend on cultural tightness (how strong of an expectation there is to follow norms) and collectivism (how much people identify as being connected to others), both of which are higher in Singapore and the UK relative to the US and the Netherlands. This may suggest that an emotion regulation practice such as mindfulness would be more helpful for negotiators in Asia and the UK than in the US and the Netherlands.
While it’s perhaps easier to understand why the US differs from Asia in terms of anger’s effect on negotiation, it’s less obvious why the US differs from the UK. A pattern emerges when we compare the US and the UK on the culture map conceived by INSEAD’s Erin Meyer, which shows how cultures vary from one extreme to its opposite on factors such as communicating, leading and deciding.
The US is almost always to the “left” (i.e. more direct or disruptive in style) of the UK. For example, the US is lower context than the UK when communicating, more egalitarian when leading, more task-based (as opposed to relationship-based) when trusting, and more confrontational when disagreeing.
This means that American negotiators may have a lower level of comfort disclosing emotions in negotiations, particularly negative ones, than negotiators from the UK. Displaying anger in a negotiation could therefore be seen as a normal indicator that a person cares about the outcome or is near their limit in the US, but an offensive signal or a social faux pas in Singapore and the UK.

Other possible factors
Beyond the plausible role of anger, there are a couple of other possible interpretations. One is that our results may have been due to increased helpfulness among participants who meditated prior to the negotiation simulation. Dozens of studies have found that mindfulness leads people to behave in a more prosocial or generous manner towards others because it facilitates feeling others’ emotions and attempting to see the world through their eyes. Making a concession in a negotiation can reflect a desire to help the other person, after all.
Another possible interpretation may be that meditating beforehand lowered participants’ motivation to engage in the negotiation activity. Mindfulness reduces one’s inclination to partake in meaningless, unpleasant tasks, which participants may have interpreted the negotiation simulation to be.
We encourage researchers, organisations and employees to think critically about the mechanisms of mindfulness – especially increased present-moment focus, increased calmness, reduced focus on the past and future and reduced negative emotions. This can help them better predict and investigate the situations and cultural contexts in which mindfulness both potentially helps and harms negotiation performance and other outcomes.
People can ask themselves: Is this a situation in which my negative emotions are telling me something important? Or are they pushing me to do something that would be perceived as disruptive in this context? This type of balanced inquiry into the positive and negative effects of mindfulness and the circumstances surrounding an emotion is critical to understand when mindfulness should or should not be used as an on-the-spot intervention in the workplace.