Americans Don’t Seem to Enjoy Negotiating

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Nnegotiation is a useful life skill. This can help you get a better deal for yourself, whether at work, at the used car lot, or when you buy that guitar from the sketchy guy on Craigslist. But it turns out that Americans don’t really like to negotiate.

Negotiation expert David Hunsaker says he was recently walking through a market in Tel Aviv, Israel, while attending a conference, when he noticed that neither he nor any of his colleagues were trying to haggle for a better price. Hunsaker, a management professor at Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, began to wonder: If even negotiation experts are reluctant to try to close a deal, what about the average person? This curiosity inspired a research project.

Hunsaker and his colleagues were not outliers. In a series of five studies involving a total of 5,881 U.S. participants, the team found that most people avoided negotiating most of the time, even when that avoidance came at a cost. Their results also suggest that Americans’ aversion to negotiation has more to do with fear of conflict or social stigma than with financial miscalculations or laziness.

“Our work focuses on how much individuals are willing to sacrifice, or even pay, to avoid negotiating altogether,” Hunsaker said in a statement. Hunsaker and his co-authors published their results in the journal Negotiation and conflict management Research.

In the first study, researchers asked participants if they had ever passed up an opportunity to negotiate and how often they thought they would tend to skip it. On average, people reported failing to negotiate about half the time when given the opportunity, and women were more likely than men to avoid negotiating.

Read more: “Why your brain hates other people”

In a second study, researchers wanted to know if a certain savings threshold would encourage people to negotiate. Participants were asked to imagine purchasing electronic devices at different prices: $20, $200, $2,000, and $20,000. They were then asked to calculate how much they would need to save before the negotiation would be worth it. People generally didn’t think about this trade-off in fixed amounts, but in percentages: for most people, negotiating was just something they would consider if they could get a reduction of around 21 to 36 percent.

In a third study, scientists sought to determine whether people would pay extra simply to avoid negotiating. About half of those surveyed said they would pay some amount. When asked specifically about buying a $20,000 car, people said they would pay on average about $1,000 more to avoid negotiating. For a $2,000 car, they would pay closer to $230.

To see if small nudges could change the calculus, the researchers tried two tactics: First, they asked participants to think about their hourly wages, which had no effect. In a separate experiment, they asked participants to consider buying a couch on Craigslist. Half of the participants also learned that negotiation was the norm: 80% of Americans negotiate when purchasing an item on Craigslist. This had a moderate positive effect on participants’ reported willingness to bargain.

The study had certain limitations. On the one hand, all the participants came from the United States. The researchers chose this country as a point of interest because of its dominant culture of individualism and self-representation, but follow-up work could test whether similar patterns persist in cultures with “different norms for confrontation, hierarchy, and maintaining relationships,” they write.

All studies were also conducted online, which may have introduced some bias. And the studies only measured intention to negotiate, as opposed to actual negotiation behavior.

Hunsaker and his colleagues nevertheless hope that the project can serve as a starting point for a better understanding of negotiation and its benefits, including empowering individuals and organizations to “realize more value, fairness, and agency in their interactions,” they write in the paper.

Hunsaker also offered some tips for low-conflict negotiations. First, do your research so you know your options in advance. Second, leave room for concessions. If you want to pay a certain amount for something, offer a little less first. And finally, focus on relationships, not winning.

“People who negotiate with a winning mindset end up burning bridges or hurting feelings,” Hunsaker said. “The people you deal with most often will be repeat customers or long-time customers. If you burn those bridges, you’ll miss out on business later,” he said. So listen and build trust while you haggle.

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Main image: Foxy Fox / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 23, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.