Narrator: When we think about negotiation, we tend to focus on preparation, leverage, and strategy. We assume outcomes depend on how persuasive we are, how much information we have, and how hard we are willing to push. But before any of that happens, something else may already be shaping the interaction: identity.
Erika Kirgios: When we started this project, we were interested in understanding the way people negotiate differently with people from different identity groups. And this question has been studied mostly in the context of looking at how people negotiate with women versus men. And we know a lot less about how people negotiate with people of different races and people of different sexualities.
Narrator: That’s Chicago Booth’s Erika Kirgios. Her and her coauthors tested four competing theories of intersectionality. The first theory, known as double jeopardy, argues that holding multiple marginalized identities leads to a compounded disadvantage.
Erika Kirgios: So if you are a Black man and you are gay, you face both the stereotypes of Black men and of gay men. And what we would predict then is that during negotiations, relative to straight White men and Black straight men, Black gay men would have the worst outcomes.
Narrator: The second theory, intersectional invisibility, suggests that people who don’t fit dominant stereotypes, such as a prototypical image of “Black” or “gay,” may sometimes escape certain biases because they’re less cognitively salient.
Erika Kirgios: So what we would predict in the context of negotiations is that if intersectional invisibility holds, Black gay men would have better outcomes than Black straight men. And East Asian gay men would have better outcomes than East Asian straight men. So you can kind of see already a totally opposite prediction than what double jeopardy would say.
Narrator: A third theory, sometimes described as the mosaic approach, focuses on stereotype content, whether the traits associated with different identities reinforce one another or conflict.
Erika Kirgios: And so there, what mosaic would predict is that because stereotypes of Blackness and gayness are in conflict, Black gay men would have better outcomes than Black straight men. And because stereotypes of East Asianness and gayness are concordant, East Asian gay men would have worse outcomes than East Asian straight men
Narrator: A fourth theory, the lens-based account, proposes that context determines which identity becomes most salient. In some situations, race may dominate perception; in others, sexuality may matter more.
Erika Kirgios: And so that’s really the only theoretical account that would allow for people to treat gay and straight Black and East Asian men the same way, not necessarily the same way as White men, but if a race-based lens is in focus, you would treat all Black men and all East Asian men the same way and perhaps differently than you would treat White men. And so we had these four existing theories of intersectionality. All have some evidence in the empirical literature. But no study has really pitted each of them against each other.
Narrator: To understand how race and sexuality shape negotiation outcomes, the researchers designed a field experiment in a real marketplace where participants didn’t know they were being studied and the financial stakes were genuine. They contacted 3,000 individual sellers advertising used cars across major metropolitan areas in the United States. Each seller received the same message expressing interest in asking about the flexibility on price. The one difference were the subtle signals of identity, both the buyer’s name and who the buyer said they were negotiating on behalf of.
Erika Kirgios: First we used the prospective buyer’s name to randomly vary their race. So they were always male names that we pretested to ensure that everybody who sees this name assumes the person as a man. But we also randomly varied whether the name signaled that they were White—think the name like Scott or Cody—whether the name signaled that they were East Asian, or whether the name signaled that they were Black. And then we varied whether the person said that they were negotiating on behalf of “myself and my wife” or “myself and my husband.” And because the name always signaled that they were a man, when they’re negotiating on behalf of themselves and their wife, it suggests they’re in a heterosexual marriage. When they say that they’re negotiating on behalf of myself and my husband, it suggests that they are in a homosexual marriage. And so we sent these emails and then we measured whether sellers responded at all, when they responded, whether they expressed willingness to negotiate, and the discount rate that they offered. And then we also looked at the content of their emails. We used a natural language processing algorithm to assess the politeness of the seller’s response.
Narrator: But what happened when identity was the only thing that changed?
Erika Kirgios: First, looking at response rate, we had a slight surprise, which was that the only significant difference was between straight and gay White men. So sellers responded almost 8 percentage points or about 22 percent less often to gay White men than they did to straight White men. So there does seem to be a penalty or some discrimination happening. But beyond that, we found no other differences in response rates. So we didn’t find any difference in how often sellers responded to Black versus White or East Asian versus White men. And no differences by sexuality within Black and East Asian buyer categories. Conditional on engaging, you responded the same way. The other place where we saw significant differences, though, was in how you communicated. So when we looked at the politeness of sellers’ responses, we found really large gaps based on race, where sellers were less polite in their responses to Black and East Asian prospective buyers regardless of sexuality.
Narrator: Taken together, the results most closely support the lens-based theory. In this setting, race was the dominant lens for minority buyers. Sexuality only appeared to shape behavior when the buyer was White. The final price didn’t change, but the tone did. And that difference can have real consequences.
Erika Kirgios: In a second study, where we used those actual seller responses and kind of sampled across the politeness distribution, we found that receiving more impolite messages discouraged buyers from wanting to initiate negotiations in the future.
Narrator: In other words, identity may not always change the economic outcome of a deal, but it can shape who feels welcome to bargain in the first place. So even when the numbers are equal, are the negotiations really the same?
