The Psychology of Asking for a Raise

The number a man says first in a salary conversation tends to matter more than almost anything he says afterward, a finding that runs against how most people intuitively approach these conversations, treating the actual ask as a kind of afterthought that follows a longer case for why a raise is deserved.

Researchers Adam Galinsky and Thomas Mussweiler, in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found across several experiments that whichever party in a negotiation made the first offer consistently ended up with a better final outcome, regardless of whether that party was buying or selling. A later analysis by Galinsky and colleagues, examining real negotiation outcomes, found that the first number put on the table explained somewhere between half and the large majority of the variation in where negotiations actually ended up settling.

This is an example of anchoring, the same cognitive bias documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in other contexts entirely: an initial number, even one with no inherent authority, pulls subsequent judgment toward it. Once a figure has been said out loud in a salary conversation, the negotiation tends to orbit around that number rather than starting fresh from a neutral, unbiased evaluation of what the role and the person are actually worth.

This has a direct and somewhat uncomfortable implication for how these conversations tend to go. A manager who opens with a number anchors the conversation in the company's favor before the employee has said anything at all. An employee who waits to be told a figure, rather than proposing one first, has already ceded a meaningful part of the negotiation before it began, regardless of how strong the case is that follows.

This has a direct and somewhat uncomfortable implication for how these conversations tend to go.

Galinsky's research also found something worth naming directly: the willingness to make a first offer correlates with a sense of confidence and control at the table, and people who feel they have less power or fewer alternatives are measurably less likely to open with a number at all, which means the reluctance many men feel toward proposing a figure first is not simply personal hesitation. It is a well documented pattern tied to felt power in the situation, and naming it as a pattern rather than a personal failing makes it easier to act against deliberately.

None of this means an opening number can be picked arbitrarily. Research on negotiation also finds that anchors work best within a plausible range, since an offer perceived as wildly unreasonable can damage trust or end a negotiation rather than anchor it productively. The useful move is coming in with a specific, well researched number, not the highest imaginable one, stated early and directly rather than waiting to see what gets offered first.

A further, more counterintuitive finding is worth knowing when choosing what number to actually say. Research on anchoring has found that precise figures function as stronger anchors than round ones. A number like sixty two thousand five hundred tends to be taken more seriously, and anchor a negotiation more effectively, than a round sixty two thousand, apparently because precision signals that real research and calculation produced the figure, rather than a rough guess pulled from thin air.

There is also a documented countermeasure worth knowing if someone else opens first with a lower number than expected. Galinsky's research found that deliberately focusing on one's own target figure, or on the other party's actual alternatives, rather than dwelling on the number that was just stated, measurably reduces how much that first number distorts the rest of the conversation.

Asking for a raise is often framed as primarily an act of courage, and courage is certainly part of it. But the mechanics of the conversation itself, who speaks a number first and how that number gets handled once said, follow well studied patterns that have very little to do with courage and a great deal to do with a bias that shapes outcomes long before either side has made a single argument.