Chicago Booth Review Podcast Do Gay Men Have a Tougher Time Buying Used Cars?

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Erika Kirgios: Here, we're finding that people don't negotiate differently with gay men, conditional on responding. There's no difference in the discount rate that they're offered if they receive a response. There's just a difference in whether people are willing to negotiate with them at all.

Hal Weitzman: The stereotypical good negotiator is tough, assertive, and dominant. When we think of those traits, we may well think of a certain stereotypical kind of person who we think fits with that and who doesn't fit. How do people respond differently depending on who they think they're negotiating with? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Erika Kirgios about her research on stereotypes and negotiation in the used-car market.

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Hal Weitzman: Erika Kirgios, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Erika Kirgios: Thank you for having me.

Hal Weitzman: We're delighted that you're here. We're here to talk about distributive negotiation, which I guess means bargaining when there's a simple one-person-

Erika Kirgios: Zero-sum.

Hal Weitzman: Zero-sum type.

Erika Kirgios: What I get, you lose.

Hal Weitzman: Classic car-buying thing, and that's actually what we're going to talk about. When we think about the stereotypical good negotiator or the person who says they're a good negotiator, they're tough, they're assertive. They're dominant. They're usually male. When we think of those traits, we think of people who go with that and the kind of people who don't fit with that. You're digging into that and how cultural stereotypes that we have about certain groups like White women or East Asian men might conflict with those traditional stereotypical expectations. Tell us a bit about that. How does that work psychologically? We think about one kind of person, and then what do we think about people who do not fit into that category?

Erika Kirgios: Especially in the realm of distributive negotiations, because you can have negotiations that also involve common interest issues or that are integrative where, yes, our preferences are in opposite directions, but we have different priorities, and so we can find fruitful trades. When it comes to distributive negotiation, it's really zero-sum. There's a fixed pie, what I get, you lose. There, our schema of who is a successful negotiator is, like you said, somebody who's aggressive, take no prisoners. When we think about women, for example, we think about people who we stereotype as being communal, as being cooperative.

There's an inherent mismatch between the person that we think of as a great distributive negotiator and what we expect women to be or what we believe women to be. There's been a lot of research on gender in negotiations showing that that can harm women's outcomes, both because of how they're treated during a negotiation and because they internalize those expectations. They worry about being judged or experiencing backlash if they behave more aggressively, more like a typical assertive negotiator, and so they refrain from doing that so that they're not punished, so that they don't damage relationships.

Hal Weitzman: It sounds like, actually, not only do people who are not-- men have perceptions about women or White men have perceptions about non-White men, but those other groups also have perceptions about themselves that are shaped by these stereotypes.

Erika Kirgios: Yes, if not beliefs about themselves, beliefs about how they'll be judged. What standard am I going to be held to? Because cultural narratives are well-known by everybody. Women know what people think women are like, and men know what people think women are like, and that can affect actually how people judge women, and it can also just expect the kind of script that they expect to be held to. If you worry that you're going to be judged negatively for being aggressive as a woman because people expect you to be cooperative and communal, you might hold yourself back in order to avoid that punitive backlash.

It can be strategic. It's not necessarily that you think women are like this, and therefore, I want to be like this, but women are like this, and so I'll be judged negatively if I don't behave like this.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. You've actually conducted research on this to test these things out. Tell us briefly, what did you find out?

Erika Kirgios: Yes, we moved away from studying gender here. We wanted to study some identities that have received a lot less attention in the negotiation literature. It's hard to say why. [chuckles]

Hal Weitzman: Because there's quite a lot of stuff on women, right?

Erika Kirgios: Quite a lot of stuff on gender.

Hal Weitzman: For example, I was thinking of that when you said often the research finds that women don't ask for, for example, pay raises, and so they don't get them.

Erika Kirgios: Yes. That's changing a bit. I think especially as we teach more and more MBA students about negotiations in the classroom, we're finding that at least amongst MBA graduates, those gender gaps no longer exist. There's a value to teaching people that it's useful to ask even when you worry that you'll be penalized for asking.

Hal Weitzman: There's a bit of a hole in the literature when it came to racial groups.

Erika Kirgios: Yes, so there's far less literature looking at racial disparities in negotiations. There's some work on Black negotiators, almost no work on East Asian negotiators, and very little work on sexual minorities in negotiations. What we wanted to look at is restricting our attention to men just to reduce noise. How do people perceive and treat East Asian and Black men versus White men, and gay men versus straight men?

To study this question, we first wanted to look at the field. We wanted to know how real negotiations play out as opposed to imaginary context in the lab because we want to know what happens when stakes are on the line, when people don't know their behavior is being studied, and they're just operating naturalistically in the world. We went to Craigslist where people sell used cars all the time, individual sellers. We initiated negotiations over 3,000 cars with individual sellers all across the United States.

We avoided anybody that had multiple car listings because we thought those were maybe dealerships and we didn't want to negotiate with dealerships. We wanted these to be one-on-one transactions. We had a script. We made sure that from the negotiator side, the behavior was constant across the board. We're reaching out and saying, "I saw your X make model of car, and I'm interested, is the price negotiable?" We varied two things in these emails. One was the person's name.

We used the name to signal whether they were White, Black, or East Asian men. The second was whether they said, "I'm negotiating on behalf of myself and my wife," or, "I'm negotiating on behalf of myself and my husband." "My wife and I are looking for a car," or, "My husband and I are looking for a car." Because these names all sounded like men, whether it's Scott or Lamar, when you say, "I'm negotiating on behalf of myself and my husband," people assume that you're in a homosexual relationship. When you say, "Myself and my wife," they assume you're in a heterosexual relationship. That's how we manipulated sexuality in a way that feels natural in the world.

What we were interested in is how often do people respond at all? Do you just ignore this email, or do you get a reply? When they respond, are they willing to negotiate? Do they say, "Sure, give me a counteroffer," or, "These are the ranges of prices I'd consider"? Then if we continue the interaction, as soon as they respond, as long as they don't say, "This car is already sold," or, "I'm not willing to negotiate on price," we always responded asking for a 15% discount on the listed price, and then what was the final discount that they offered in their response?

Did they say, "No, I'm sorry, the original price is all accept," or did they say, "That's too low, but here's a 5% discount"? Then we looked at the quality of their response. We used some natural language processing methods to look at how polite or impolite their response was to these buyers. That's the general design.

Hal Weitzman: What's the result? What did we learn from all this? Sounds great.

Erika Kirgios: Yes, the exciting part. In terms of response rates, the primary difference that we find is that gay White men are almost 8% points, about 22% less likely to receive a response than straight White men. There does seem to be a pretty large penalty for gay White men relative to straight White men. This is consistent with what we would expect from the prior literature because gay men are stereotyped to be more feminine. They are held to some of those cultural expectations that we usually assign to women.

Hal Weitzman: Which means what in this particular context? That the seller wouldn't want to negotiate with them?

Erika Kirgios: It's interesting because if you look at the gender literature, they haven't really separated whether you're willing to negotiate with someone from how you're willing to negotiate. We don't always know where the action comes from. Whether it's like, "I'm just not expecting a fruitful conversation with this person. I don't even want to engage," versus, "Sure, I'll negotiate with women, but I'll negotiate differently." Here, we're finding that people don't negotiate differently with gay men, conditional on responding. There's no difference in the discount rate that they're offered if they receive a response. There's just a difference in whether people are willing to negotiate with them at all.

We can't fully disentangle whether that's pure discrimination, "I just don't even want to talk to gay White men," versus a stereotype about how they'll behave. What I will say is that we don't find the same pattern for Black and East Asian men. There, there's no penalty for being gay. In fact, we don't actually find any difference in response rates between White men, Black men, and East Asian men, regardless of Black and East Asian men's sexual orientation. What we find is a difference in how people interact with Black and East Asian men, again, regardless of sexuality.

Whether Black and East Asian men are gay or straight, they receive significantly less polite responses. You could imagine a polite response as something like, "Thank you so much for reaching out. I'm so excited that you're interested in my car. The price is negotiable, but I would really love to hear back from you what you're willing to offer." Some of the less polite responses are things like, "If you could see this car, you would know what it's worth. What kind of price are you thinking?" Much more abrupt, none of the niceties, and that's what the natural language processing algorithm is really picking up on.

We see that people are systematically less polite in their responses to Black and East Asian negotiators relative to White negotiators, again, regardless of sexuality.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating results there. One is about whether you'll engage at all, and the other one's about how you engage.

Erika Kirgios: How you engage, yes.

Hal Weitzman: You're using cars, and used car sales is a very male-type domain, isn't it? Do you think it might have been different if you were talking about a different product?

Erika Kirgios: I think that's totally possible. Part of the reason we wanted to do cars is because we wanted to look at high-stakes negotiations, and we did want to look in a prototypically masculine domain and one that's been looked at in prior negotiations literature. I do think it's possible that if we were negotiating for items that are stereotypically perceived to be more feminine, whether it's home goods or baby products, that some of these results could look quite different. That people, for example, might be more amenable to negotiating with gay men relative to straight men. We talk a bit in the paper about different theories of intersectionality that we're testing against each other here.

Part of the reason we wanted to look at these identities in particular beyond the fact that they're understudied is that this intersection of identities allows us to really pit against each other different theories in the intersectionality literature that prior literature has found evidence for and hasn't ruled out. There are four different dominant theories of how people treat those with intersectional identities. You might think of Black women relative to Black men and White women, or you might think of East Asian gay men relative to White gay men or East Asian straight men. All of these four theories have some empirical evidence in the literature.

There has been no empirical evidence that would allow us to rule out three out of the four and say this one is the one that holds water. That's what we wanted to do here. That's what these particular identities allow us to do. If it's not two in the weeds, I'm happy to talk about the four theories and why we can pit those against each other here. If it is two in the weeds, I can just tell you which theory we found evidence for and how I think it relates to these results. You can let me know.

Hal Weitzman: Just to be clear, could you tell what the gender or race was of the people who were selling the cars?

Erika Kirgios: Unfortunately not. Usually, their email addresses are scrambled by Craigslist, and so we couldn't tell from the email address what their name was. Many of them didn't sign off with a full name. We didn't have enough information to identify their gender or race.

Hal Weitzman: What do you suspect? What would be your intuition about the kind of people who would be selling their car on Craigslist as opposed to taking it to a dealer?

Erika Kirgios: We can't necessarily be sure about the counterfactual of taking it to a dealer. What we do know is based on the county that the car is being sold in, what is, for example, the racial representation in that county, what is the ideological lean of that county, what is the LGBTQ representation in that county? We looked at whether any of that affects our results. We found that the patterns were similar regardless of county-level features that might be predictive of who's on the other side of this email chain.

Hal Weitzman: Relatedly, any pattern geographically-like, was the south different to the northeast or whatever?

Erika Kirgios: We didn't find that either. No, we found consistent patterns across the board.

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Erika Kirgios, in the first half, we talked to you about your research on used car sales, very stereotypically male domain, and your research about responses to different kinds of people who are-- I guess you're not actually using gay White men, you're using the names that would suggest to the reader that they are gay White men. The non-responses that gay White men got or relative lack of responses and relative hostility, I guess.

Erika Kirgios: Incivility.

Hal Weitzman: Incivility, thank you, towards Black and East Asian men. We're now getting into the question of why. How do you explain this? You've got your theoretical framework. Walk us through those and then where you landed on this.

Erika Kirgios: We came in with four competing predictions, all of which are supported from the prior literature. What we really wanted to do was do some theory pruning. There has been this proliferation of theories of intersectionality and not enough work to prune those and see what really holds water in the world.

Hal Weitzman: In what discipline?

Erika Kirgios: In organizational behavior and psychology.

Hal Weitzman: Okay.

Erika Kirgios: One theory, the one that I think is intuitive immediately to listeners, is double jeopardy. It's this idea that disadvantage is cumulative. If a person is a Black woman, she has the disadvantage of being Black, the disadvantage of being a woman, and so she will experience more cumulative disadvantage than a White woman or a Black man. It's additive or multiplicative. That feels intuitive to people. If that held, what we would have expected is that in all accounts for all DVs, whether it's responsiveness or incivility, people would treat Black and East Asian gay men worse than Black straight men, East Asian straight men, or gay White men. That's not what we found.

The other theory is intersectional invisibility. The idea here is that for each marginalized or underrepresented identity, we have a prototype in our heads. When we think of women, we think of White women. When we think of Black people, we think of Black men. That renders people who are at the intersection of those identities invisible in some way. Black women are less representative of Blackness and less representative of womanhood. That can be both good and bad. Sometimes that means that you can escape negative stereotypes or you can escape negative experiences because you're not expected to act like the prototypical woman or to act like the prototypical Black person.

There's some evidence that Black women actually are advantaged in negotiations because they're not held to those same standards of cooperativeness and communality as White women are. If that held water here, then what we might expect is that the people who receive the worst outcomes are gay White men, Black straight men, and East Asian straight men, whereas Black and East Asian gay men would receive better outcomes because they're less prototypical. We didn't see that.

The other one is mosaic. It's this idea that stereotypes operate differently when they complement each other versus when they're at loggerheads with each other. If you are a Black woman, you have the stereotypes of Blackness and the stereotypes of womanhood. If in this particular context, so in the context of negotiations, those are in conflict, then you might receive advantages relative to White women or Black men. Again, you would expect Black women to have better outcomes in negotiations, which prior literature suggests is true.

Here, this is where I think it also gets interesting. For Black men, stereotypes of Blackness and gayness are in conflict because Black men are typically perceived as assertive, aggressive, masculine, and gay men as more effeminate. There, you might expect that Black gay men in negotiations would have better outcomes than Black straight men, whereas East Asian men are perceived as effeminate, and gay men are perceived as effeminate. You would expect East Asian gay men to have worse outcomes than East Asian straight men because they are really perceived as overly communal, overly cooperative, not that assertive, agentic negotiator that people expect. Again, we don't see evidence of that. The final theory--

Hal Weitzman: None of these works.

Erika Kirgios: None of these works.

Hal Weitzman: At least none of these fits with your results. Let's put it that way.

Erika Kirgios: None of these fits with our results, yes. The final theory of intersectionality is in some sense the most flexible one and the only one that fits at all with our results, which is a lens-based model of intersectionality. The lens-based model, which was proposed by Chris Petsko about 2022, maybe this is too specific, but the lens-based model essentially suggests that we have different lenses for viewing people based on the context we're in. Depending on which lens is in focus, we will judge them differently.

If we're in a context that really activates or makes salient a gender lens, we will judge people based on their gender, regardless of whether they are Black or East Asian, women or men. We're just going to mostly judge them on a gender basis, whether they're women or whether they're men. If we're in a context where a race-based lens is in focus, then we're primarily going to judge them on the basis of their race. Sometimes, intersectional lenses can be in focus, and then we judge them based on the stereotypes of an intersectional identity. That is what we see playing out here more than anything.

It seems like people have a dominant race-based lens, and so they're treating racial minorities the same way regardless of their sexuality. Then, conditional on being White, now that's when stereotypes of gayness kick in and affect the way I treat you.

Hal Weitzman: I see. With the Black and the East Asian supposed participants, then what was salient about them was their race, and with White gay men, what was salient about them was that they're gay.

Erika Kirgios: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: I see. Fascinating. All right. I love the way you talked us through. It's like a detective thing. A little complicated, but I was following you. I was trying to follow you as much as possible. Here's a puzzle. When you did get a sale, the sale price wasn't different. You said that. How do you account for that?

Erika Kirgios: The way we would account for that is basically that people treated negotiators the same conditional on responding to them. We don't even see response rate differences for Black and East Asian men, so it's not surprising that the discount rates they received were similar. For gay White men, conditional on responding, you don't see a difference. If I choose to engage with a White gay man, I treat them the same way as a White straight man. The primary difference is whether I choose to engage at all.

What we take from that is that people are basically-- when it comes at least to White men, they're making a decision, "Do I want to engage with this person or not?" Once you've opted into engaging, you treat them like any other White man, whether or not they're gay.

Hal Weitzman: Which is interesting. The prejudice only really happens right at the moment when you--

Erika Kirgios: Decide whether to respond.

Hal Weitzman: Which is fascinating because you might think, like you say, that if you have a suspicion or a stereotype that a gay man is less aggressive in this negotiation--

Erika Kirgios: You would try to take advantage of that.

Hal Weitzman: Yes, but that doesn't happen.

Erika Kirgios: We don't see that, which I thought was really interesting too.

Hal Weitzman: That's fascinating. You did a follow-up experiment to this, looking into these less polite responses. That found that you significantly harmed participants' expectations about negotiations. What does that mean?

Erika Kirgios: The goal here was to say, is this meaningful? Because sure, you're a little less polite, does that matter? What we wanted to know is if you're on the receiving end of these responses, how does that affect you? We sampled across the politeness distribution. We had this, again, this natural language processing algorithm that gave each response a politeness score from 0 to 100. We sampled 50 of the real emails we got back from negotiators in the field that were all across from the top to the bottom of the politeness distribution.

In this follow-up study, we had people imagine being the buyer. Imagine that you wrote this email saying, "I'm interested in this car, are you willing to negotiate?" Then you're randomly assigned to see one of those 50 responses. Then we asked them, "In the future, when negotiating over big-ticket items, how would you expect that negotiation to go? How optimistic or pessimistic are you? Would you be willing to engage in that negotiation at all?" What we find is that people become significantly more pessimistic about future negotiations when they receive impolite responses, and they become less willing to initiate those negotiations at all.

That's important because, to your point earlier, there's all this work. Women don't ask. There's even work suggesting that East Asians are less likely to negotiate than White people. All of that puts the onus on the negotiator. If some of that unwillingness to negotiate comes from prior experiences where you've been treated with less civility, less kindness, less basic politeness, then that might explain why you're now less willing to engage in negotiation in the future because you expect it to go poorly. You expect to be treated negatively. It can create future inequality, even if we didn't see a difference in economic outcomes in this experiment.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating. Now, you said this was about men because you said you didn't want more noise. What would happen if you complicated it and brought in gay women of color? How would that change things, do you think?

Erika Kirgios: We are still interested in this. I think it's hard to predict because there's the question when you're looking at women in the context of a negotiation, particularly a negotiation over a masculine product, all of a sudden does the gender lens dominate? Or is it the case that when you're emailing and you see this highly racially coded name that race always dominates, and so we see similar results where the primary differences are on the basis of race for racial minorities, and it doesn't matter if the woman's a lesbian or not, and being a lesbian or not only matters for White women.

I'm not entirely sure because it depends on what lens we expect to be in focus. Given how masculine the context is, it might be the case that gender matters a little bit more than just race.

Hal Weitzman: All right. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you very much, Erika, for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Erika Kirgios: Thank you for having me as well.

Hal Weitzman: We'll have you back in the next year, next 12 months.

Erika Kirgios: [chuckles] All right.

Hal Weitzman: Thanks again. That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.

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