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Mike Wheeler
A curious experiment
Sometimes in negotiation—often, in fact—we come to a crossroads. Do we take the safe path, avoid risks and make a deal that we can live with? Or, do we cross our fingers, roll the dice, and push for more, knowing that our boldness may backfire?
Being prudent may be the wiser course at times but being too cautious comes at the cost of squandering opportunities that could pay off handsomely. How should we weigh the upside and the downside of being ambitious?
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, researchers Taly Reich, Alexander G. Fulmer, and Ravi Dhar report that too often people err in the direction of caution.1 Their surprising solution: Become more ambivalent!
In a study, they had subjects describe their dream job and then imagine they actually had been offered the position. Salary had been agreed upon, but the benefits package still had to be worked out.
People in Group A were asked to come up with three pros for getting more vacation days. By contrast, those in Group B were instructed to think of one pro and two cons for getting more time off. Frequent pros included more family time and the chance to relax more. Common cons were having work pile up or missing out on a new project.
Then the researchers asked all of the subjects if they would negotiate further to get more vacation days. Guess what happened: Group B people who had come up with one pro and two cons were more willing to negotiate further when those who had only listed positives!
Analysis
That doesn't seem to make any sense. Why did greater emphasis on the downside actually make people more willing to run the risk of failure? The researchers stated that:
"We suggest that it acts as a shield against the fear of rejection; it lowers the desirability of a prospect just enough to make negative outcomes less threatening while still maintaining the attractiveness of the outcome itself."
If I get that right, another way of saying it might be that lessening our grip on the bird in our hand makes it easier for us to accept the risk of reaching for another one in the bush. Just speculation on my part, but I wonder if the exercise also shifts people's thinking in other ways.
First, writing a list of pros and cons (as opposed one made up solely of pros) may build people’s confidence that they’ve given the decision appropriate thought, and thus can thus feel secure about being appropriately ambitious. Second, spelling out specific risks may reveal that any potential problems are manageable and perhaps unlikely, as well. If so, that may relieve people of more general, undefined worry that things somehow will go wrong.
Next time you're feeling ambivalent about negotiation choices, give this simple pro/con routine a try and reflect on how that allows you to see things differently. In a post for paid subscribers later this week, I'll offer some classic advice on balanced decision-making from Benjamin Franklin, more than two centuries ago.
Housekeeping
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In turn, the HBR article is drawn from a more extensive piece, "In the face of self-threat," Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, January 2022.