The Lab for Social Decision-Making & Risk

Research on negotiation has devoted considerable attention to the risks of misplaced trust, particularly the possibility that negotiators may be exploited by deceptive counterparts. Less attention has been given to the opposite form of trust miscalibration: under-trust, and particularly, unwarranted pessimism regarding counterparts' honesty. This review focuses on such undue distrust and proposes a misperceived motivations account to explain its emergence. According to this account, negotiators' excessive distrust stems from an asymmetry between the motives that negotiators attribute to their counterparts and the motives that actually guide those counterparts’ behavior. When deciding whether to behave honestly, negotiators are driven not only by self-interest but also by concerns about moral self-image and anticipated moral emotions, which constrain dishonesty. However, when deciding whether counterparts are honest, negotiators assume that their counterparts are primarily motivated by self-interest and fail to foresee the constraining moral-identity concerns. We integrate evidence from the literature on negotiation, trust, and moral psychology to explain why pessimism is especially likely to emerge and persist in competitive bargaining contexts, highlight circumstances that may attenuate or amplify it, and identify implications for theory and research, alongside practical inferences for fostering truthful disclosure and credible honesty in negotiation.