Bargaining for Advantage, the book by Wharton professor G. Richard Shell, often backs its arguments with tidbits drawn from psychological research. For example, the "consistency principle" refers to people's need to appear reasonable. You can take advantage of this by "skillful use of standards" to make other people feel they need to use your standards to feel reasonable. And the more authoritative your standards seem, the better. You Can Negotiate Anything, probably the most entertaining of the books, skips any allusion to scholarship about the human tendency to defer to authority, instead citing an old Candid Camera episode in which a surprising number of highway drivers confronted with the sign "Delaware Closed" actually turned around. And, of course, you want to give special attention to sussing out what your opponent really wants.
The other key thing that preparation should give you is alternatives. Getting to Yes talks about arriving at your BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Others command you to never, ever negotiate without good alternatives.
Of course, when you start trying to apply advice about research to your own situation, you may run into the problem of limited information. One of the things that makes us feel weak as negotiators -- and it's those of us who feel weak that are likely to go looking for advice -- is the sense that the other side has more information than we do. That guy in the bazaar sells brass dishes all day, every day; I'm just walking by and haven't given brass cookware a thought. How am I supposed to know that he desperately needs cash to meet short-term rent payments on his stall? Or where I might find alternative cookware?
The advisers who get most specific about information gathering are the memoirists -- the re-nowned negotiators offering their own glorious past as the model you should emulate. But their real-life anecdotes don't always help. When sports agent Leigh Steinberg says in Winning With Integrity that you should "surround yourself" with a support team to gather information, he is probably right, but not in a way that will help you get a raise next month. It would be great to have a staff of 20, as he does, to help you with every negotiation, but you probably don't. At one point he recounts a negotiation with the Minnesota Vikings. As the team made its case to Steinberg, one of his minions took its written presentation into another room, "worked out a detailed set of responses, and delivered them to me just as [the team was] wrapping up." Sounds nice. I'll try to remember that at the used-car lot.
When it comes to the brass-tacks moment of actually facing your negotiating adversary, the advice tends to agree on a small number of practical, basic points. In general, for example, the experts say it's better to let your adversary make the opening offer. The Power of Nice describes an exercise from the authors' seminars, in which attendees are paired off, each playing either the "agent" or the "publisher" in working out a book deal. Each pairing of agent and publisher gets the same canned set of facts -- yet the deals the pairs end up with range from $550,000 to $2.95 million. The authors often say they have found the side that makes the first offer tends not to do as well in the negotiation. Why? Because people often underestimate their own strengths and exaggerate those of their rivals. Presumably, the best way to deal with this in a real negotiation is with better preparation.
Unsurprisingly, most also say you should ask for more than you think you'll get. The more learned-sounding books position this point as asking for the most you can reasonably defend. More interestingly, while we might imagine that the likely winner is the one who makes a forceful and overbearing presentation, the experts tend to agree that this is wrong: You are better off doing more listening and questioning than bloviating.
In fact, practically everyone endorses out-and-out silence. Let's say you're faced with an opponent who behaves irrationally; resist the temptation to respond in kind, counsels Getting to Yes. You might counter with a question ("How did you arrive at that figure?") or you might not counter at all. "Silence is one of your best weapons....The best thing to do may be to just sit there and not say a word." Cohen agrees: "You often force the other person to talk, if only out of discomfort" -- and that person is likely to revise his or her position and reveal useful information in the process.
Questions, the experts suggest, are useful for fending off someone else's question that you're not prepared to answer. (It's tempting to imagine two negotiators stuck on the crucialness of queries, sinking into an infinite loop of statement avoidance.) And they are useful in figuring out what the other side's logic is -- meaning that you should ask questions even when you think you know the answer. Shell cites studies showing that the most successful negotiators also happen to be the most persistent question-askers -- and listeners. "You often get more by finding out what the other person wants than you do by clever arguments supporting what you need." As he later adds, "It almost never hurts to talk less."
One psych-out technique is to exaggerate the significance of issues that you don't actually care about.
Negotiation gurus Roger Dawson and Chester Karrass, among others, not only support this idea but note that questions beginning with who, where, what, why, and how are better than yes-no queries. Jim Camp, a negotiation coach whose book Start With No was published last year, goes into considerable detail on "interrogative-led" questions. For example "What is the biggest issue we face?" is better than "Is this the biggest issue we face?" for the simple reason that it invites your adversary to give more information. Camp's thinking is that in any conversation, it's the listener who has the power. "People have a weakness for talking," he writes, and questions should "invite the adversary to indulge this weakness." Getting to Yes urges the reader to phrase confrontational questions as neutrally as possible to avoid sinking into emotional bickering: "Did we overpay?" is better than "Did you screw us over?"
