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Great Negotiators Think With Heads, Not Hearts

This article is more than 10 years old.

You'd think that mutual-benefit negotiators would be marshmallow roasting kumbya singing feel-good left coast long-haired hippie soft-minded liberal push-overs . . . girly men . . . but you'd be wrong.

One of our favorite negotiation experts - Adam Galinsky at the Kellogg School of Management - recommends negotiating with our heads rather than our hearts.

In Why it pays to get inside the head of your opponent, Galinksy explains,

Perspective-taking . . .  involves understanding and anticipating an opponent's interests, thoughts, and likely behaviors, whereas empathy focuses mostly on sympathy and compassion for another.

"Perspective takers are able to step outside the constraints of their own immediate, biased frames of reference," wrote the authors [of a recent study]. "Empathy, however, leads individuals to violate norms of equity and equality and to provide preferential treatments."

The researchers performed a total of three studies designed to assess the relationship between successful negotiations and perspective-taking and empathy tendencies. In two of the studies, the participants negotiated the sale of a gas station where a deal based solely on price was impossible: the seller's asking price was higher than the buyer's limit.

However, both parties' underlying interests were compatible, and so creative deals were possible. In the first study, those participants who scored highly on the perspective-taking portion of a personality inventory were more likely to successfully reach a deal. In contrast, higher scores on empathy led dyads to be less successful at reaching a creative deal.

Why Enlightened Self-Interest Trumps Sympathy

In short, negotiation requires hard heads rather than soft hearts.

Why?

Because our competitive natures ("I need my stuff to survive") will almost always trump our collaborative inclinations ("we need each other to survive").  If this weren't so, the world wouldn't be divided into its current "pie pieces" -- the first, second and third worlds for instance.

"Zero sum" or win-lose bargaining is all about getting "our share" of a fixed pie. Mutual benefit or  interest-based negotiations require the parties to:  (1) learn about and attempt to satisfy their bargaining partners' needs and desires; and, (2) to collaborate in an effort to find ways to satisfy those needs and desires in novel and creative ways.

That's simply not how the whole western civilization competition-creates-excellence paradigm operates. Check out the current political circus and you'll understand why candidate-bashing causes most people so much heart-burn that they eventually just change the channel to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Perspective-Taking, Sympathy and Foreclosure

Here's a story to illustrate the differences between empathy and perspective-taking from my book, the Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution.

I understand from the local grapevine that my neighbors, who I don't know well, are selling their house because the wife, Shirley, lost her job and hasn't been able to find a new one for a year.

If we lived in another country or if the neighborhood belonged to certain religious sects that make it their business to take care of their own, we might all come together to help the neighbors save their house.  But we don't.

We have and express a lot of sympathy when we discuss our neighbors' plight.

"Must be hard for the kids," we say, "and the parents have worked so hard to improve the property.  It would be a shame if they lost their equity."

Our sympathy, however, does not lead us to trump our self-interest (which includes simply "keeping to ourselves") in favor of the interests of the neighbors.

If, however, we learned that the neighbors were about to sell the house to a local fraternity, you can put easy money on the neighborhood mobilizing into action to find a solution.  And once the neighborhood starts looking for an affordable solution to a neighborhood problem, the chances that the interests of the distressed family and their (temporarily) better-off neighbors will intersect and that new resources will be brought to the table ("hey, George, I know a lawyer who specializes in these things" or a banker or a politician or a journalist for the L.A. Times) increase exponentially.

Heck, instead of hiring lawyers to stop the sale to the fraternity, we might put together an emergency neighborhood loan-fund.   Or simply help find the unemployed neighbor a new job.  There are a lot of resources in my neighborhood.  And many good-hearted people.  But I'm afraid modern American folk-ways just don't allow for a neighborhood solution to one of its member's problems.  Until, that is, our own self-interests are threatened.

So it might seem counter-intuitive to say that mentally putting ourselves into another's shoes to ascertain their interests needs and desires (perspective-taking) is more likely to create a "deal" between people than simple sympathy.

But we didn't survive as a species because we're particularly loving.  We survived as a species because it's in our best interest -- our only interest -- to cooperate with one another.

Empathy Can Subvert Human Well-Being

As my new conflict resolution guru, Steven Pinker, writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, "empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness."

He explains,

Great harm has befallen societies whose political leaders and government employees act out of empathy by warmly doling out perquisites to kin and cronies rather than heartlessly giving them away to perfect strangers . . . The institutions of modernity depend on carry out abstract fiduciary duties that cut across bonds of empathy.

Not only that, but empathy is a sucker. "Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity and communal solidarity.

No feel-good commie is Pinker.

To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.

What's important to the well-being of people on the planet is not, argues Pinker, an expanded circle of empathy but an expanded circle of rights - "a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation.

Pinker continues,

For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people [of overlooked groups] are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses . . . The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need.

As a former litigator and trial attorney turned mediator, peace seeker and negotiation trainer and consultant, I live on the razor's edge between sympathy and fairness, between adversarialism and collaboration, between my head and my heart.

As a conflict resolution guru closer to hand has always said to me, "we need cynical minds and hopeful hearts." Only when we're able to achieve the balance between head and heart are we able to serve ourselves and the larger good at the same time.

Join us in the adventure in January at the She Negotiates Signature "Asking for It" online training. You'll be surprised at how the training clears your mind of old unworkable strategies and tactics and replaces it with the most up-to-date ways to get what your head wants without sacrificing your heart.

Here's a lengthy debate about the validity of the conclusions drawn here that I believe negotiators and those interested in collaborative dispute resolution would find useful.

Edwin Rutsch is director of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. CultureofEmpathy.com contains the largest collection of  articles, conferences, definitions, experts, history, interviews, videos, scientific material about empathy and compassion.