Breaking Bread Produces Bigger Pies: An Empirical Extension of Shared Eating to Negotiations and a Commentary on Woolley and Fishbach (2019)
Abstract
Around the globe, negotiators often meet to divide a resource, barter goods, or make mutually beneficial trade-offs. In many cultures, negotiators “break bread” before negotiating by sharing food. Although breaking bread has biblical origins, it has come to symbolize shared eating as a pathway to increased cooperation. Building off this reasoning, Woolley and Fishbach (2019) empirically confirmed that shared eating leads to higher cooperation than separate eating. The present research conceptually replicated Woolley and Fishbach’s findings and extended them in fundamental ways. First, Woolley and Fishbach’s studies involved isolated, sequential decisions made with zero communication. Although their paradigm elegantly captured cooperation versus competition decisions, rarely do negotiations or decisions happen without any backand-forth communication. Therefore, we conducted two face-to-face negotiation experiments in which negotiators verbally and nonverbally communicated with each other and made decisions jointly. Furthermore, Woolley and Fishbach’s studies involved a single issue (e.g., strike days), whereas the negotiations in the present research involved eight issues, thus increasing the complexity of negotiating. The introduction of multiple issues not only makes the present negotiations closer to real-life negotiations but also enabled us to explore the efficient integration of resources, known colloquially as “expanding the pie” or “increasing joint gain” and known technically as Pareto efficiency. When a Pareto-efficient agreement is reached, “no [other] agreement is possible that would be preferred by both negotiators or would be preferred by one and to which the other would be indifferent” (Tripp & Sondak, 1992, p. 279). By focusing on face-to-face negotiations involving multiple issues, we explored whether prior shared-eating effects can be extended to more complex forms of human interactions that resemble most negotiations.
- DOI
- 10.1177/0956797620939532
- Sources
- semanticscholar openalex