When to Pause Instead of Speak in Negotiations

Many negotiation gurus describe silence as a form of strategic display—a tool for intimidation, pressure, or dominance. The underlying assumption is straightforward: silence unsettles the other side and prompts concessions.

A paper by Curhan and colleagues (2022) challenges this dominant framing.

Rather than asking how silence affects the counterpart, the authors ask how silence affects the person who uses it. Across four studies, they show that extended silence during negotiation—pauses longer than about three seconds—can increase joint value creation, not by intimidating the other side, but by changing how negotiators themselves think.

A crucial clarification is that the authors focus on intentional pauses during the negotiation itself, not silence between negotiation sessions. These pauses are long enough to disrupt automatic back-and-forth, yet short enough to remain part of the ongoing interaction.

Importantly, one party’s use of silence is sufficient. The positive effect on value creation does not depend on both parties pausing.

The Overlooked Variable: Deliberation

The mechanism identified in the paper is a shift in mindset.

Extended silence fosters a move away from a fixed-pie mindset and toward a deliberative mindset. When negotiations slow down, negotiators become less reactive and more reflective. They think more carefully about trade-offs across issues and about how value might be created jointly.

Crucially, silence does not reliably increase individual value claiming. Its effects are integrative, not distributive.

Silence helps people think better—not bargain harder.

When Silence Works—and When It Doesn’t

The benefits of silence are not uniform.

When high-status negotiators initiate extended silence, joint value creation increases. In these cases, silence works primarily through the initiator’s own deliberative mindset, rather than by altering the counterpart’s mindset.

For low-status negotiators, the pattern is different. When they use extended silence, they report lower satisfaction with the negotiation process, show no increase in deliberative mindset, and do not necessarily create more value.

Silence, in other words, functions as a cognitive resource for some negotiators—but can feel costly for others.

What This Means for Leaders

The implication for managers and leaders is that silence can serve as a way to slow down their own thinking in complex negotiations. Briefly pausing—longer than feels comfortable, but still part of the interaction—can create the mental conditions needed for better joint outcomes.

Notably, this research shows that instructing negotiators to use extended silence increases value creation more than instructing negotiators to adopt a joint problem-solving motivational orientation. In that sense, silence appears to be at least as effective—and in some cases more effective—than explicitly framing negotiations as joint problem-solving exercises.

Key Takeaway

For managers, the lesson is subtle but consequential:

Silence is not powerful because it pressures the other side. It is powerful because it gives the negotiator space to think.

Used intentionally and in the right context, extended silence can shift negotiations away from reflexive bargaining and toward more deliberate value creation—by changing how the person who pauses approaches the negotiation.

Reference: Curhan, J. R., Overbeck, J. R., Cho, Y., Zhang, T., & Yang, Y. (2022). Silence is golden: Extended silence, deliberative mindset, and value creation in negotiation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(1), 78–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000877