Who Negotiates? The Political Psychology of Price Negotiations.

Price negotiation is often a zero-sum interaction where one party's gain is another's loss. In such contexts, a buyer's willingness to negotiate can depend on the perceived justifiability of negotiation. This research examines how political ideology shapes these perceptions. Two archival studies (N = 56,615) and four preregistered studies (N = 3,157) show that conservative buyers are more likely to negotiate prices for houses and used cars. Conservatives also hold stronger beliefs that buyers should negotiate prices regardless of the seller's identity-be it a professional dealer, an ordinary seller, a stranger, or a friend. This heightened propensity to justify price negotiation is rooted in conservatives' endorsement of free-market ideology, which motivates and even moralizes the pursuit of economic self-interest in marketplace interactions. These findings offer a nuanced account of interactions in the marketplace, demonstrating that marketplace behaviors are influenced not only by economic considerations but also by ideological beliefs.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

• Publication date

  2025-05-03

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Political Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/01461672251335697PMID 40317244
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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