The possible role of empathy and emotions in virtual negotiation

The goal of the present study is to explore the role of empathic and emotional skills in virtual negotiation, and to try to verify their possible role in different contexts: monetary/non-monetary, in circumstances in which a counterparty is familiar or unknown, and with respect to polite or rude responses from the negotiating counterparty. To this end, 320 participants aged between 19 to 25 years old were involved in a simulated virtual negotiation. Participants were required to fill in a Basic Empathy Scale (BES) questionnaire, they were also asked to report the prevalent emotion they had felt during the interaction, and if they thought they were interacting with a real person. The results of this research confirm the tendency of participants to minimise losses. Although the capacity for empathy does not seem to have a role, the behaviour of participants appears more cooperative when they have to deal with a familiar negotiation counterparty. Emotions appear to play a positive role when negotiating with, what is perceived to be, a real person. Practitioner summary: We conducted this study as part of a Master's Degree programme which was specifically focussed on human-computer interaction. Results show that negotiation was affected by emotions experienced during the experiment, and by the perception of the negotiating counterparty as a familiar person more so than by empathy. Abbreviations: AE: affective empathy; AMIS: assessment model of internet systems; ANOVA: ANalysis Of VAriance; BES: base empathy scale; CE: cognitive empathy; CMC: computer mediated communication; ENS: e-negotiation systems; FTF: face-to-face communication; NSA: negotiation support agents; PC: personal computer.