title: Power, propensity to negotiate, and moving first in competitive interactions.
abstract: Five experiments investigated how the possession and experience of power affects the initiation of competitive interaction. In Experiments 1a and 1b, high-power individuals displayed a greater propensity to initiate a negotiation than did low-power individuals. Three additional experiments showed that power increased the likelihood of making the first move in a variety of competitive interactions. In Experiment 2, participants who were semantically primed with power were nearly 4 times as likely as participants in a control condition to choose to make the opening arguments in a debate competition scenario. In Experiment 3, negotiators with strong alternatives to a negotiation were more than 3 times as likely to spontaneously express an intention to make the first offer compared to participants who lacked any alternatives. Experiment 4 showed that high-power negotiators were more likely than low-power negotiators to actually make the first offer and that making the first offer produced a bargaining advantage.
authors.affiliation: New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA. joe.magee@nyu.edu
authors.forename: Joe C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Magee
authors.forename: Adam D
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Galinsky
authors.forename: Deborah H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Gruenfeld
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D017008:Negotiating; D011209:Power, Psychological; D012919:Social Behavior; D012933:Social Identification