You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life

25:44What was interesting was that the key narrative theme in this study was not redemption. It was a theme of integration, where we think about the extent to which participants were able to make sense of having had this challenging kid and integrating that into their own life story. So we found that among the chronically stressed parents, stories of integration were associated not only with their self-report of lower levels of psychological stress, but also with significantly less telomere shortening over 18 months. So as far as I know, this is the only study to show a connection between the themes in people's narratives and biological markers of stress and aging.

26:29But it suggests that there may be biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones. What did the parents say in terms of the kinds of stories they told, in terms of stories that were effective or less effective? One of the parents in the study talked about the ways in which parenting is the ultimate life test, is what she said. And she said, you know, you can read a ton about all this stuff, but ultimately you have to learn from your kid. And for her, that taught her a lot about who she was as a person, how she was open and not open, and how she felt like having this challenging parenting experience really helped her reshape who she was as a person and what it meant to her to not only be a parent, but a human in relation with this other human who she loved dearly.

27:27Now, when you hear someone tell a redemptive story and you see that they are experiencing better mental health, there is a question that arises, which is, in which direction does the arrow of causation run? Are they telling redemptive stories and therefore feeling better about their lives? Or are they feeling better about their lives and therefore telling redemptive stories? At one point, you followed a group of patients as they worked with a psychotherapist, and you charted both the changes they experienced while in therapy and the stories they told about their lives, and also which preceded which.

28:02What did you find, Jonathan? Yeah, I became obsessed with that directionality question. In that study, I enrolled a bunch of people, adults ranging from ages 18 to 92. They were seeking individual therapy for a huge range of problems. So there were folks with really significant psychopathology, like depression, anxiety, eating disorders. But there were also people just wanting to do some work on themselves. There was a woman who wanted to think through her own childhood as she was about to become a parent. There was a woman who was feeling lonely in retirement. So before they started with their therapist, we collected their stories and we measured their well-being using standard measures.

28:43And so then on the other side, we had nearly 600 narratives from across all these participants. And what we found was, first, People got better over the course of treatment, which is good because decades of research on psychotherapy suggests that it works. And we found that people's stories changed in meaningful ways over the course of treatment. And then the changes in the story actually came before changes in well-being and not the other way around. because it was as if people were narrating a new version of their lives and then a week or two later their well-being would catch up with the story.

29:27As we go through our lives responding to ups and downs that come at us unpredictably, it can feel as if we are hostages to life events. This is why many people see the hand of fate in the things that happen to them. But everything looks different once we realize that we are not simply a beleaguered character in our life story. We are also the author. When we come back, four principles to tell wiser stories about our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

30:09This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. As you listen to this conversation, do you have questions or comments about narrative psychology? How do you tell the story of your life and how does that shape the way you see yourself? If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, personal stories. All of us constantly construct stories about our lives. Most of the time, this happens under the surface. We are not mindful of the narrative choices we make. Every so often, however, something happens in our lives that causes us to revisit our stories.

30:56A marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a close friend. All of these take time to assimilate into the narrative of our lives. At Olin College of Engineering, psychologist Jonathan Adler has studied what happens when events come along that challenge our pre-existing narratives. John, I want you to tell me the story of a physician named Annie Brewster. Can you describe what Annie's life was like when she was in her late 20s? Annie was one of these unbelievably driven, successful students. She had done extremely well in medical school, landed a great residency, was working a million hours, but she had started to experience some tingling on one side of her body, and she went to get it checked out.

31:49And she was very well connected in the medical sphere and waited to see the uber specialist who quite brusquely told her that she had multiple sclerosis. I want to play a bit of tape here from Annie herself, talking about how she reacted to the news from her doctor. It took me a long time to come to terms with that diagnosis, to accept it into my life. Really, it was difficult for me because I'd always thought of myself as somebody who was really strong. My body had always worked for me, done what I wanted it to do. And to think of myself as someone with an illness, I really had to redefine myself and get over some denial.

32:30Jonathan, you say that Annie was engaging in an internal process of accommodation. What do you mean by this? And is accommodation a good thing? So most of what we do most of the time, we call assimilation. We go on living our lives. And when new things happen, we just assimilate those experiences into the story that we've been telling, whether we do that consciously or not. But sometimes something happens that really makes us question the story we've been telling. And in those instances, the story itself needs to change to accommodate that new experience. And what we call accommodative processing is a key narrative variable in supporting our well-being, but it doesn't support our well-being in exactly the way redemption does, for example.

33:16But accommodative processing, it helps us feel like our life has meaning and we understand it, even if it doesn't always feel good. And so Annie tells this story that once she did finally start to accommodate this experience, when she did really start to reshape her identity to include this idea of herself as having an illness, she stepped away from her very prestigious medical career. She went down to part-time and she founded a nonprofit organization called Health Story Collaborative. And I met Annie about a year into that process and she was going around and collecting other people's stories and curating them.

33:58And 10 years later, we have worked really closely together, developing programs that leverage the science of narrative in order to support storytelling in the highly fragmented and fragmenting medical ecosystem.

34:20When we modify our life stories to accommodate new life events, those events no longer feel random and aberrational. The less we feel buffeted by random events, the more we feel like we are in control of our own lives. This leads to the next idea. Jonathan has found that stories that give us a feeling that we are in charge of our own lives are linked to higher well-being. Agency is a theme in people's stories. We assess it along a continuum from sort of being able to direct your life and then down at the other end of the continuum, you're sort of batted around by the whims of fate. And again, these are themes in stories.

35:01No one is completely in control of their lives. So it's the way you portray the main character in the story, i.e. you.

35:11Jonathan cites the remarkable story of a woman named Leila. So in the last five years, I've been doing a lot of research focused on identity development among people who acquire physical disabilities. And Leila was a participant in one of my studies. She tells this story of having these horrible headaches, which gradually intensified to the point where she couldn't function. She spends time in three different hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives. And no one can figure out what's going on. She decides to fly to India to see a specialist. And he sends her right into surgery. And when she wakes up, the pain is gone.

35:54But she also can't see. And the surgeon had been able to alleviate the unexplained swelling in her head that had been pressing on her optic nerves. But the nerve was also irreparably damaged. So for a few months, everyone held out hope that her vision might return. But Layla was actually the first one to accept that it wouldn't. She said, I realized as soon as I started accepting it, I started becoming less frustrated and sad. And though it was incredibly difficult and scary for her, Leila gradually threw herself into the task of becoming a blind person. So she shifts careers. She moves to the United States to get training in computer science, where she starts working on adaptive technology for other blind and low vision people.

36:48I want to play a clip of Leila talking about her experience. Here she is. I think my blindness is the best thing that ever happened to me. Like even right now, if a doctor came here and told me they have a cure, I would not take it. Because I think for me, it made me understand myself. And it made me like, it gives me these new challenges every single day. It presents me in something. And through those challenges, I'm able to understand myself. So that's a remarkable account, Jonathan. But as I hear Leila talking, I feel like I've heard the same thing in the deaf community. Many deaf people today say, you know, the real problem is not with deafness.

37:31I just happen to speak sign language. I speak a different language than you do. Now, we can all debate how and whether something should be considered a disorder. But I think the point you're trying to make here is that the stories we tell can either put us in the driver's seat or put us in the passenger seat. And Leila is clearly choosing to be in the driver's seat. That's right. Traditional models of disability in the United States have this medical approach where disability is a problem to be solved or eradicated. And social models of disability or relational models really push back on that and say, disability is in the interaction between my body and the built and social environment around us.

38:12In Layla's story, like you said, there's also this sense of agency. Now that this is part of who I am, what am I going to do with it? How can I take control of this and use it for things that matter to me?

38:28You can see a theme emerging here. As you tell the story of your life, do you see yourself as a passive subject, someone to whom things happen, or as an active protagonist, someone who is directing the course of her own life? Now, as Jonathan says, every life offers lots of evidence that allows you to draw either conclusion. Given this, Jonathan is saying, choose narratives that put you in the driver's seat. Most of the narratives we have discussed so far have championed the idea of the individual. But it's also the case that no man is an island. Yeah, so in our conversation so far, we've been very focused on individuals.

39:12But of course, we aren't these isolated individuals. We're all connected. And communion is a theme that captures the quality of people's connections to others. So in my research with people who have disabilities, there's often a lot of talk about their connections, not only with family and friends and co-workers, but with the broader disability community.

39:36So at Olin College, you help organize a yearly event called the Story Slam, It was students perform renditions of their stories, tell about the events in their lives. And in advance of One Year Slam, you worked with a student named Antonio. What was his story, Jonathan? Yeah, so Antonio was really interested in thinking through what it meant to him to be a first-generation Latino student at this small engineering college. and he described feeling isolated during his weekend on campus as a prospective student. It wasn't the conversations about science that made him feel left out. It really was the small talk.

40:18So he has this great line in the story where he says, I'm definitely not fluent in cheese. And what he means is that disconnection gets coded into even the most mundane experiences, not just the grand low points of our lives. but as isolated as he was feeling, Antonia homed in, not on his isolation, but on a moment of connection. I think I finally found somebody who understood. Diego was a person who had also danced at Quintiangueras, who had also brought lunch in a repurposed sour cream container and applied to the same college scholarships for low-income students. one would even think we had done all these things side by side so i can hear the theme of positive communion here jonathan antonio is telling a story that says i'm not alone exactly in this room full of people who did not look like him antonio found someone who did and they really connected and he says you know diego threw down this challenge if you think there should be more people like us here, then come and fix it.

41:26And Antonio says, you know, I'm a competitive guy, and the next fall I was on a one-way bus trip to Olin College. So Jonathan, one final feature of a constructive story is that it generates meaning for the person who tells it. You say we're not always able to tell a happy story about what happens to us, but we can try and tell a meaningful story, and there are benefits to telling such stories. Can you explain what you mean? Yeah. So to pan back for just a second, when we think about the broad study of well-being, it tends to cluster in sort of two domains, which get their cumbersome names from Aristotle.

42:06So on the one hand, we have what's called hedonic well-being, which means it feels good. And on the other hand, we have a kind of well-being called eudaimonic well-being, which means it feels meaningful. And these two domains of well-being are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other. And if we think about our lives for a second, that makes sense, right? We all do plenty of things that feel good, but don't feel particularly meaningful, like we might binge watch TV or something. And we can all think about experiences that feel meaningful, but don't feel particularly good. So in my work with Health Story Collaborative in particular, we find that feeling good is not always an option for people.

42:51Telling redemptive stories or stories high in the theme of agency and communion, that's not always possible. And in those situations, we're often interested in the ways in which people can really think through the hard parts of their lives and find some meaning out of that. And even if the meaning doesn't ultimately feel good in that sort of happy sense, that meaning is still incredibly worthwhile.

43:23I'm trying to imagine how someone who is going through a rough time might hear this episode, Jonathan, and I worry that that person might say, you know, I've just lost my job. I've just gotten divorced. I've just lost a close family friend. And now Jonathan Adler comes along and tells me that if I'm unhappy, it's because I'm not telling the right story about my life. How would you respond to that? I want to say three things to that person. The first thing is, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that things are so hard for you right now. of course they're hard and of course you're not feeling good. The second thing I want to say is there are all kinds of ways of making meaning of these experiences.

44:01And so we might think about exploring themes of agency or communion. So if you lost your job, are you feeling connected to your spouse or your kids? Or if something challenging has happened, might there be some growth that comes from it. So we might explore those themes. But the third thing I want to say is our personal stories exist in a broader narrative ecosystem. And in the United States, there is an expectation that we can narrate challenging experiences in our lives with a redemptive spin. We Americans love the theme of redemption, and we expect people to be able to do it. And I call this the press for redemption.

44:47And in my work with Health Story Collaborative, we often find that people feel like they're having this double whammy experience where, you know, I'm sick and I'm not telling the right kind of story about it. So my cancer didn't teach me that I'm such a fighter or that people love me more than I ever would have realized if I never had cancer. No, some people say, you know, this just sucks. And I think in those instances, we want to acknowledge that and not try to convince them that it doesn't just suck. Let them know that there's a reason they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story because our culture puts a particular premium on a particular kind of story.

45:27And then to help them find other kinds of narrative roots that might lead towards a sense of meaningfulness, even if they can't make you feel better. So many of the examples we've talked about here have involved individuals. But as we've started to see, I think, towards the end of this conversation, we're slowly broadening out beyond the individual because, of course, these ideas are relevant outside of individual minds as well. So societies tell themselves narratives. Nations tell themselves stories all the time. Do you think ideas of narrative psychology speak to how nations talk to themselves and perhaps how they ought to talk to themselves?

46:04I do. And this is really at the forefront of the field. So my colleagues, Kate McLean and Moin Syed have written really compellingly about what they call master narratives. So these are the dominant storylines in our culture that tend to be invisible, but also ubiquitous and sort of rigid and powerful. And we are always in a constant dialogue with the master narratives in our particular cultural contexts. You know, families have narratives that guide the way relationships unfold. And as you said, countries certainly do. So, again, narratives are not all good or all bad at the individual level, and they're not all good or all bad at the national level either.

46:53But these national narratives are emergent from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell. So a number of years ago, Jonathan, when you were still living in Illinois, the junior senator from your state gave a memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I want to play you a clip from the speech that first put Barack Obama in the national spotlight. I'm not talking about blind optimism here. The almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't think about it, or health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it.

47:32That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores. The hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta. The hope of a mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too.

48:04Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope. In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead. I'm wondering, Jonathan, as someone who has studied narrative psychology for a number of years, how do you hear that speech? So then Senator Obama was tapping into the American master narrative of redemption, right? Each of those images includes this shift from negative to positive. And like all political speeches, this was a strategic communication with very particular aims focused on stirring the public to support this speaker's preferred candidates and issues.

48:54So appealing to entrenched master narratives is a very strategic thing to do. And many, many politicians adopt redemptive themes in their speeches. And obviously, there are many wonderful aspects of that storyline, and as we've discussed, problematic ones too. But we see evidence of leaders serving as narrators-in-chief. They shape our narrative ecology as they model storytelling for us. We started this conversation, Jonathan, by talking about ways in which you came to understand the life events in your own life and to tell stories about those life events in a way that was more positive than negative.

49:38I'm wondering, after all these years of studying narrative psychology, do you do this on a regular basis now? What are the stories you tell yourself today in terms of where you are and where your life is and where you want your life to go? So it's not that I am consciously going through my daily experiences and editing them into the kinds of storylines that I have learned are likely to support my well-being. But when difficult things happen in particular, I think I do pause and I remember that there are different kinds of well-being and that the way I make sense of those experiences will lead me to different kinds of well-being.

50:18But I think for a lot of people, just the awareness that you are not only the main character in your story, but also the narrator, and that the way you choose to tell the story of your life really matters, that can be an empowering insight.

50:40Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Oh, it's been an incredible pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

51:18That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

51:26You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

51:43This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Think about the last time you entered a negotiation. Perhaps you were asking your boss for a raise or trying to get your child to do their chores. What was your strategy as you headed into the discussion? Often, our focus is on what we want to get out of the interaction. Any planning we do is focused on how to put our best case forward. But behavioral scientist Max Bazeman offers a different approach. He is at Harvard Business School and author of the book, Negotiation, The Game Has Changed. Max says instead of focusing on our goals, we should focus on our blind spots.

52:28We recently talked with Max on Hidden Brain. Those episodes are titled Relationships 2.0, Become a Better Negotiator. And for our Hidden Brain Plus subscribers, Relationships 2.0, Win-Win. Today, as part of our ongoing series, Your Questions Answered, we asked Max to come back on the show to answer your questions about negotiation. Max Bazeman, welcome back to Hidden Brain. I'm delighted to be back, and I look forward to hearing the questions that are in the minds of your listeners. So, Max, it's understandable that we're often immersed in our own perspectives during a negotiation. But in doing so, you say that we can become biased in our own perspectives, biased by our own needs.

53:14How so, Max? 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.

53:59So you have this kind of bias to see the world in the way that would favor your side. So at one level, of course, when we want something very badly, it makes sense that we spend a lot of time thinking about what we want. Why does this make us less effective as negotiators? 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.

54:43One 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. So you say that when two parties are negotiating, overconfidence can form a major obstacle to reaching an agreement. Is that connected to what you were just telling me about defendants and prosecutors in sort of courtroom settings? 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.

55:22And 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? So anytime that we've incurred these expenses for the opportunity to have this fight with the other side, we're ending up with a deal that's worse than what we could have had had the two parties used reasonable negotiation procedures and reached a deal more efficiently.

56:08Hmm. Many listeners might be listening to this and saying, you know, when I'm going in to have a difficult negotiation, whether that's buying a car or asking for a raise or, you know, discussing something that is unpleasant with a partner or a spouse, I often feel underconfident, not overconfident. Can underconfidence also undermine us? And how do we strike a balance between overconfidence and underconfidence? It's a great question. So my excellent colleague at the Haas School at Berkeley, Don Moore, I think of as the world's expert on appropriate confidence. And he wrote a book called Perfectly Confident.

56:47What Don finds is that when people are in domains where they lack competence, they are even less confident than they should be. But when people are in domains where they feel confident, they're even more confident than their skills and abilities should lead them to be. So given that's the case, and given that sometimes we have to be negotiating in areas that might not be areas of competence, how do we solve this problem? So sometimes we don't need to. If you're in a flea market and you're buying a souvenir for$15 and you make a mistake, no big problem. And I would say get on with life and don't worry about it.

57:27if it's an important part of your work setting and you don't have the expertise, perhaps you need to buy it or borrow it from someone else in your firm or from an outside advisor. So we need to understand when we know too little and we need to make up for our lack of personal expertise by relying on the expertise of someone else who we can trust.

57:54I'd like you to talk about another bias that affects us when we're negotiating. This one is called anchoring. Can you explain what anchoring is? Sure. Fifty years ago, Kahneman and Tversky, well-known psychologists who created the field of behavioral economics in many ways, did an experiment where they basically asked people what percent None of the countries in the United Nations were from Africa. And they said, wait, before you give me your estimate, let's get an estimate from a roulette wheel. And the roulette wheel either stops at 65 or 10. And people are asked, is the number higher or lower than 10 or 65?

58:39And people who see 65 say lower, and they reduce the 65 to 45 on average. The people who see 10 come all the way up to 24. And while both parties rejected these unreasonable anchors, you get a dramatic difference based on did I start high and come down or start low and come up. And the same is true in negotiations. If you're selling, you're much better off starting with a high price and coming down to something viable but favorable to you within the zone of possible agreement. If you're buying, just the opposite. Better to start with a low number and come up into the zone of possible agreement.

59:19So as a negotiator, anchoring can be very, very effective. On the other hand, you want to anchor with a number that's reasonable enough to get their attention. If they're not paying attention to you, then that's not very helpful. So if you look at a house that's on the market for$499 ,000 and you read anchors have a dramatic influence, you might offer them$100 ,000, but they're simply going to ignore you. That's not going to anchor the discussion. But it might be the case that if you've done your homework, that you can anchor, you can respond with 460 rather than 470 and anchor them at a lower number and that that could tilt you in a favorable direction in terms of what the ultimate price will be.

1:00:10So the general advice is to identify what is a viable range of agreements and then anchor near your preferred end of that zone. So let's get to listener questions now, Max. This first one comes from a listener named Rose. I'm just wondering about what negotiation looks like in certain cultures and how much that should play into it. So I'm from the Midwest, where negotiation is kind of looked on pretty negatively. It's accepted for things like buying a car. But in general, if you were to haggle with someone, it's not considered the most socially acceptable thing. So I'm just wondering outside of the Midwest, if there's other places like this, how much that should come into our minds as we start to negotiate with people?

1:01:02Or do I just need to get over my Nebraska niceness to get a better deal? So, Max, there are clearly cultures in which haggling is more the norm than others. when you're living in a haggling, averse culture like Rose's, how should she proceed? Well, first of all, I love Rose's question. And I love the fact that after talking about cultures, she focuses on Nebraska. So a lot of other listeners, when they hear culture, they might have been thinking China or Japan. And I think Rose highlights that we have different cultures in different parts of the US. We have different cultures in different industries.

1:01:42So it's important to understand the world that you're in. So my first advice to Rose is, sounds like life is fine in Nebraska for her, and she should be perfectly comfortable not negotiating in situations that don't call for negotiation. On the other hand, if she moves to a place where negotiation is the norm, she needs to adapt to that. Or if she takes a job and a career where the prices aren't fixed and haggling is normal, she needs to adapt to that. And in my book, Negotiation of the Game Has Changed, one of the points that I make is that we're now negotiating with more and more people who are different from ourselves, who come from different cultures, and we want to understand what the norms look like.

1:02:29Rose might also find it intriguing to know that I was, in December, I was hiking up to Machu Picchu and the guide on the trip said, and by the way, in a lot of emerging economies, it's normal to haggle with people over price. He said, don't do that. People in Peru are used to offering you a fair price and you should take it or leave it rather than to haggle. So it turns out that Cusco and Machu Picchu may have a lot in common with Nebraska that wouldn't have been apparent on the surface. On the other hand, there are times when negotiating matters a whole lot. 30 years ago, Linda Babcock, excellent colleague at Carnegie Mellon, basically found out that women were less likely to haggle.

1:03:18And as a result, their starting salaries were too low and that that created enormous pay differences across their career. Laura Cray, now at Berkeley, suggests that that's no longer true. So we need to understand the culture and the time and the place and what's appropriate and take that into consideration as we develop our own strategy. You know, this makes me think that when you're negotiating with someone, you might be negotiating over something you're actually exchanging. So, you know, you're selling me a car. I'm trying to buy a car. So at one level, the negotiation is about something that is tangible, something that's material.

1:03:56But as we're negotiating with each other, the act of negotiation itself carries psychological meaning. And so if I come in and I basically lowball you to an extent in terms of what you want for the car, you're offering a used car for$6 ,000 and I offer you$100, you're not just going to see that as a low anchor. You might not even dismiss me. You might be offended by what it is that I'm doing. And it makes me realize that negotiations are not just about the thing being negotiated. They're also about how we see ourselves, our self-worth, how we believe the other person sees us. It's tied up with all of these psychological issues.

1:04:36Absolutely. So Shankar, let's assume that we're acquaintances, which we are, but we've never had dinner together. And so let's assume that I'm the one selling the car for$6 ,000. And I think, you know, I'm happy with$5 ,500. And since you're my acquaintance, I'd probably even be okay selling it to you for$5 ,000 and taking a little bit less than what I think the market could bear. But when you open with that$100 offer or even a$3 ,000 offer, I think, wait a second, I was dealing with you as if our relationship matters. Your unreasonable offer suggests this is a very different world. Right. So not only do we get a breakdown in the negotiation, but I don't like you as well because of the way you handled that particular situation.

1:05:26So we got another comment from a listener named Roxana. And Roxana heard the story you shared about getting sucked into a negotiation over a taxi while you and your wife were in Thailand. In the incident that you mentioned, two taxi drivers quoted you a charge that was higher than you wanted to pay. but the difference in both cases was less than a dollar. Roxana shared her own story of witnessing an American tourist haggling over 25 cents when buying a handmade blouse from an indigenous woman in Mexico. And her point was that context matters. When people from wealthy countries visit less wealthy ones, there is a big economic power imbalance.

1:06:08Should we consider that when we're negotiating, Max? Absolutely. If you'll recall in the taxi story, I knew that my students were going to quiz me the next day on what did I pay for the taxi. But my spouse in that story, who was standing on the street, not in the taxi because of my frugalness, would very much be on Roxanna's side of that story. So I think that we should often consider the nature of the relationship, the nature of the transaction, how important the money is to us when we decide whether and how aggressively we should negotiate. So despite the fact that I may be on the wrong side of Roxanna's argument, I'm going to side with her in terms of the general point she's making.

1:06:54Yeah, because I think sometimes, you know, I think this happened to you in Thailand, you sort of get caught up in the moment in sort of the excitement of the negotiation, or even just a sense of fairness where you feel like you're being taken advantage of. And I think The point that she is making here, which is an important one, is that maybe sometimes it's okay to be taken advantage of. Yeah, or I would say reframe it as to there's better uses of your time than haggling with somebody over a small amount of money who needs some money more than you.

1:07:28Our guest is behavioral scientist Max Bezeman, joining us to answer listener questions about his work on negotiation. More of those questions in a moment. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

1:07:56This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Your Questions Answered, our segment where we answer listeners' follow-up questions about ideas we've featured on the show. Today, we're talking with Max Bazeman. He researches the dynamics of negotiation at the Harvard Business School. Max, we got another question from a listener named Elizabeth. She's a divorce attorney and works with couples with years or decades of animosity between them. Elizabeth feels that such hostility can get in the way of reaching the best outcome. So she asks, what are some tips for negotiating in a low trust or zero trust relationship?

1:08:37What do you think, Max? So there's too much harm that occurs in the divorce process in too many cases. And sometimes there are also children involved who suffer as a result of the animosity between parties. I think we should also think about the fact that the longer the process goes on and the more legal activity that occurs, the more expensive the process is to both parties. So one interesting issue is when you raise the temperature in the negotiation out of some sort of desire to harm the other party, how are they going to respond? And a quick answer is that they're likely to reciprocate. And all of a sudden now we're not getting anything out of our venting toward the other party.

1:09:32We're simply increasing the emotional grief we suffer and we're increasing the costs that it's going to take to resolve the dispute. But one role that mediators can play, mediators are simply people with negotiation skills who help two parties reach agreement. One of the nice parts about the use of a mediator is that they can bring down the temperature and bring reasonableness to both sides of the negotiation. So one viable answer to our divorce attorney is that when things get particularly tough, that may be a good time to bring in a skilled mediator. Yeah. I mean, it's a tricky position, I think, for a lawyer to be because the lawyer is committed, professionally committed to serving her client's best interests.

1:10:21And that could often mean getting the client the best deal or getting the client the best outcome in the negotiation. But I think partly what you're saying here is that both parties are not well served when they have two eager attorneys who are willing to go at it hammer and tongs instead of finding someone who can actually bridge the divide between the two. That's right. So imagine that you have a divorcing couple and their family wealth is a half a million dollars,$500 ,000. And they could amicably reach a resolution and they could divide it at$250 ,000 each. Or maybe one side would get$200 ,000, another side would get$300 ,000 for a variety of reasons that could be justified.

1:11:05But if instead we spend a year and a half fighting through the court system and we're paying lawyers along the way and we incur$200 ,000 of legal expenses, now there's only$300 ,000 to divide. in addition to the fact that we've hurt the emotional connection between the two parties that could have all kinds of repercussions. If there were children involved, all that hostility is likely to have a negative effect on the children as well. So figuring out how to get to a wise agreement efficiently and getting over the emotional barriers can be critical to coming up with a wise agreement.

1:11:54Our next comment comes from a listener named Kathy. Kathy heard our interview with you, Max, and called in to share a positive negotiation experience that she had while buying a car. The year was about 1993, and I was a single mom on a shoestring budget with no experience in buying a car. I visited several car lots and was horrified at the transparent lies and aggressive sales tactics, both about their competitors' cars and their own cars. Disillusioned, I did some homework and decided to turn, put the shoe on the other foot. I did a few test drives and realized that a Nissan Sentra was my best option.

1:12:39I researched dealer prices and reasonable markups, decided on my price somewhere around$15 ,700 to$16 ,000, if I remember right, and began. I called the three Nissan dealers within 75 miles, confirmed that they had the car I wanted on site, and explained that I had the cash in hand or in the bank and was willing to buy a car that day. They loved hearing that. Then I pitted the dealers against each other, and every time one got gave me a cheaper price, I called the other two saying, well, can you beat this particular price? And it was impressive how quickly the prices came down. Then the last salesman said to me, I can do better for you.

1:13:25I get a commission on how many cars I sell regardless of price. I will sell you this car for$12 ,700 if you come in today. I was delighted. It was well below dealer price, and I had other salesmen just be astonished at the price I got. So obviously, Cathy did well here, Max, but can you unpack for us what she did right? What can we learn from her story? I love Cathy's story, and it's in a context that a lot of people describe as their least favorite negotiation. People don't like buying cars broadly. So I think that Kathy did two things that are just terrific. One, she did a lot of homework. And when my students take a semester course on negotiation, one of the things that they learn is that so much of negotiation occurs before you even talk to the other side.

1:14:20Doing your homework, learning what the dealer cost is, learning what the competitive landscape looks like is absolutely critical to negotiating effectively. So I think Kathy did a great job at doing her homework. And then second, she did a great job at creating competition. And she was well aware that when she talked to dealer A, dealer B was a very attractive alternative that she had. And when she was talking to B, she knew that C was available. So by having multiple options, it gave Kathy power and comfort. And that allowed her to get a far better price than she would if she simply went into a single car dealer, used her intuition, and kind of winged it.

1:15:06So I give Cathy great marks on both preparation and creating a competitive environment that strengthened her power in negotiating for her desired car. I'm wondering, Max, as you have written this new book, you obviously are the author of many other books on negotiation as well. Are there patterns that you see that come up over and over again? Are there ideas that you would want to leave our listeners with to keep in mind as they go about their lives, negotiating about things that are important to them? Absolutely. So first thing, people too often assume a mythical fixed pie. They assume that the surplus to be divided between the two parties is fixed and they miss opportunities to create joint gain.

1:15:53Second, there are too myopic. They focus on their perspective when there's so much advantage to thinking about the perspective of the other side, to empathize with the position of the other side so that you can understand who they are and how you can negotiate with them most effectively. And following a couple of the questions, to understand how important it is to understand the environment, perhaps culture, perhaps economic circumstances of the other side, to figure out what the actual negotiation game looks like and how to best negotiate effectively in that environment.

1:16:36Max Bazeman is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. He is the author of Negotiation, The Game Has Changed. Max, thank you so much for joining us again on Hidden Brain. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to be back with you again.

1:16:54Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoy the ideas we explore on the show, be sure to check out our weekly newsletter. We bring you new and interesting research about human behavior in every issue. And we always include a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can read our newsletter and subscribe at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's N-E-W-S dot hiddenbrain dot org.

1:17:36I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

1:17:44Thank you.