Max Bazerman

I'm delighted to be back, and I look forward to hearing the questions that are in the minds of your listeners.

So once we know what role we're in, what side we're playing, what our interests are, our ability to be objective largely disappears.

So if we have, let's say, a plaintiff and a defendant in a lawsuit,

And we ask them to reveal to us what they think that the case is worth.

Plaintiffs naturally think that the case is worth more than the defendants.

It's not just that they're making that claim to convince the jury or the judge.

but they actually come to believe that.

And similarly, lots of salespeople think that what they're selling is worth more than what the buyer thinks that they're buying.

So you have this kind of bias to see the world in the way that would favor your side.

Because negotiation is not one-person decision-making.

If you were the dictator and you could make the decision, it wouldn't be a negotiation.

The fact that you need to work with another person or many other people requires that you take their perspective to imagine what the world looks like from their side so that you aren't putting things on the table that they're never going to accept under any circumstance.

One of the key limitations that we find in negotiation is that people don't do a good enough job of thinking about the decisions of the other party.

Absolutely.

So we see the world from our own perspective.

We have a biased view of what a fair price would be.

And we're overconfident that if we simply hold out for our position that the other side will eventually fold.

And too many deals are missed because we have parties on both sides holding out for something that's tilted in their favor and not finding that viable price in the middle that both sides could in fact live with.

So why in the world do we spend so much money on attorneys?

to go through expensive court procedures to end up with a deal that we could have reached on our own without all those expenses.