Recent research published by Psychological Science from Program on Negotiation faculty member and assistant professor at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology Joshua Greene and his colleague Elinor Amit explores the impact vivid mental imagery has on decision-making processes.
values
The following items are tagged values.
Turn Your Adversary Into Your Advocate: The Benefits of Seeking Advice
Advice seeking inherently employs multiple self-presentation tactics (including ingratiation, self-promotion, and supplication), it allows us to improve both our competence and our likability. Think about the last time someone asked you for advice. How did you respond? You probably had at least one of these reactions:
When You Assume Too Much
Decision makers often overlook others’ viewpoints. When we do take others’ thinking into account, we tend to assume that they know as much as we do. For this reason, marketing experts are generally worse than non-expert consumers at predicting the beliefs, values, and tastes of consumers.
Similarly, individuals who correctly solve a problem overestimate the percentage of their peers who will be just as successful solving the same problem.
Cultural Notes
As members of organizations and families, we all know from experience that even people with identical backgrounds can have vastly different negotiating styles and values. Nonetheless, we continue to be intrigued by the idea that distinct patterns emerge between negotiators from different cultures.
Researchers do confirm a relationship between national culture and negotiation style and success. An ongoing research project sponsored by Northwestern University’s Dispute Resolution Research Center is exploring the link between process and outcomes – specifically, how cultural tendencies lead to certain process choices, which, in turn, can lead to better or worse negotiation results.
Sacred Issues in Negotiation
In a classic New Yorker cartoon, a dinner guest shows up for the party, hands the host a $20 bill, and announce that this was the amount he had planned to spend on a bottle of win before he ran out of time. Negotiation buffs might admire the guest for making an efficient tradeoff that saved him the effort of shopping and gave the host $20 to spend as he wished. But most people would view the guest’s behavior as highly inappropriate. Why?
A Win Without Regrets: Winning an Auction and Not Feeling Disappointed
We have all been in situations in which we are pitted against others in competition for a certain item, whether an award, a promotion, or even in an auction. Often, this competitive atmosphere pushes you to ‘play’ harder than you normally would, overvaluing your objective and over-assessing the importance of victory. Often when a group of people are vying for the same thing, the winner of the auction is revealed to have been overly optimistic about the value of the objective and thus is a victim of the “winner’s curse,” typically described as paying more than the asset is actually worth. The January 2008 issue of the Negotiation newsletter offers three helpful pieces of advice for avoiding the “winner’s curse.”
A creative approach to breaking impasse
Suppose that you and your negotiating counterpart become deadlocked after exchanging a series of offers and counteroffers. With each of you anchored on very different positions, you can’t seem to find a solution that pleases you both.
Rather than making one offer at a time, try issuing multiple equivalent simultaneous offers, or MESOs. When you present
Dealing with an uncooperative counterpart
Business negotiators often complain that although they try to focus on creating value, they run into far too many people on the other side of the table who don’t believe in value creation. Often, they focus exclusively on trying to claim as much as possible for themselves. How should you handle these negotiations?
Despite their lack
New Conflict Management Skills
Adapted from “Resolve Hot Topics with Cooler Heads,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, May 2007.
Negotiating effectively with colleagues can be more challenging than dealing with outsiders. Conventional wisdom advises addressing team conflict by staying focused on tasks and avoiding relationship issues. Yet a study by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and Diana McLain
Should you deal with the devil?
Adapted from “Should You Do Business with the Enemy?” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, March 2010.
At one time or another, most of us have faced the prospect of negotiating with a sworn enemy—whether a “greedy” sibling, an “evil” ex-spouse, or an “immoral” company. There is no right or wrong answer to the question
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