Personality predictors of negotiation performance: Evidence from repeated bargaining and expert forecasts
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Negotiation is one of the most relevant processes within and across organizations to create joint surplus, bargain over allocating resources, and solve conflicts. Yet evidence on whether stable individual differences predict negotiation performance is dispersed across isolated traits, outcomes, and settings, leaving unclear which characteristics support individual versus joint outcomes. In a preregistered study, 238 experienced working professionals across 54 countries completed five rounds of multi-issue bargaining with randomly assigned counterparts and completed a battery of 29 validated individual-difference measures. Agentic, self-focused characteristics robustly increased individual surplus, whereas some affiliation- and vigilance-related tendencies were associated with lower individual surplus. In contrast, joint surplus and Pareto efficiency benefitted from honesty–humility and negotiation self-efficacy and were reduced by dark-triad and exploitation-focused tendencies. In a separate forecasting study, 37 personality researchers forecast trait–outcome effects, substantially overestimating effect sizes and often misjudging their direction. Finally, we derived a compact four-factor model—Confidence, Other-Focus, Self-Regulation, Exploitation-Focus—that predicted negotiation outcomes more accurately than expert forecasts. Together, these findings map a parsimonious personality architecture of negotiation performance, reveal systematic gaps between expert forecasts and observed effects, and inform organizational selection, assignment, and training for negotiations where both individual and joint outcomes matter.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Institutions: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162667020