Secure Distance with a Second Language

Never negotiate to buy a used car from an owner who has their toddler sitting in their lap, advise researchers from University of Toronto. People place a higher value on items they’re selling when personal associations to the item are activated, such as subconscious associations to the toddler having ridden in the car. It’s an aspect of the endowment effect, which refers to how people set higher values on objects they own than on equivalent objects they do not.
     Asking the seller to relocate the toddler into their playpen before negotiating eases the endowment effect by increasing the emotional distance from the car. Researchers at Koç University suggest another way for cars and all other items: Conduct negotiations in the seller’s second language. For about 20% of North Americans, that second language is English. Worldwide, mastery of more than one language is relatively common. The Koç studies included dual English/Spanish and dual English/Turkish speakers.
     Multilinguistic skills affect more of consumer psychology than only the endowment effect. When surveying consumers about their likes and dislikes, use the respondent’s favored language. But if this becomes overly cumbersome, use images of happy and sad faces on degree-of-agreement scales, say researchers at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.
     The researchers’ argument is that even when survey respondents comprehend English just fine, those who are not native speakers tend to interpret emotion words differently. Specifically, according to findings, they tend to report more intense emotions when answering in a non-native language than when using their favored language. “Love” and “hate” don’t feel as strong in the second as in the primary tongue. It loses something in translation. So where the Spanish-speaker might say “disagree somewhat” on the Spanish-language version, they’ll say on the English-language version, “strongly disagree” in an effort to correct for the reduced affect.
     Every enterprise benefits from valid surveys of their target audiences. And if your enterprise sells used merchandise or accepts trade-ins, the endowment effect complicates negotiations. A set of Boston University and University of Pittsburgh research studies saw differences of over 20% between price estimates of buyers and sellers. Then those researchers found a way to dramatically reduce the gap with a method which transcends linguistic culture: Demonstrate empathy. Acknowledge the special value the item at issue has to the seller.
     It also wouldn’t hurt to acknowledge the special value to the seller of any toddler sitting in their lap.

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