Shaking hands affects the outcome of a competitive negotiation, research finds

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Shaking hands before negotiations affects the outcome leading to a fairer outcome for all parties involved, a new research by University of Bath researchers has established.

When two people meet face-to-face, it has been shown that the shaking of hands before negotiating increases the likelihood that a more powerful negotiator will choose not to exploit their counterpart as fully as they are able to, ultimately leading to a fairer outcome for all parties involved.

In their study, published in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Dr Bevan and Professor Stanton Fraser designed a scenario whereby one of a pair of negotiators performed their role ‘tele-presently’, using a humanoid robot ‘Nao’ to represent their physical presence at the negotiating table.

Using the robot, the tele-present negotiator could see and speak to their partner (whilst themselves being potentially anywhere in the world). However, the other negotiator could only hear the voice of their ‘opponent’ through their robotic avatar, and were not able to see their true face.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that negotiating under such conditions would increase the likelihood that the distant negotiator – who could be thousands of miles away and is essentially hidden from view – would exploit this potential tactical advantage. This would then have a knock-on effect upon the degree to which both negotiators come to trust and cooperate with one another.

However, by representing the distant negotiator using a humanoid robot with limbs, the researchers were able to create a system that allowed the negotiators to shake hands even though they were in different locations. By using touch sensitive sensors in the robot’s hand, a ‘virtual’ handshake was designed that transmitted a signal when the robot’s hand was grasped, making a controller in the distant negotiator’s hand simultaneously vibrate, creating a sense of ‘ connectedness’ between the negotiators.

The results of the experiment showed that – as seen between people who negotiate face to face – the inclusion of this virtual handshake significantly increased the fairness of a negotiation held between one person and a robotic avatar that represented another person. Importantly, this effect held regardless of whether the more powerful negotiator was performing their role ‘behind’ the robot or not.

demonstrated the powerful pro-social effects of combining the symbolic act of shaking hands with the power of touch, and that manufacturers of robotics platforms should be mindful to incorporate the capability to support these phenomena in their designs.