Work with the Other Side
A few weeks ago, Nobel-Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman passed away. We at Mobus Creative Negotiating have used a lot of his research findings. His prize was in economics, a subject in which he never took a college course. He was a psychologist whose great contribution was to show that people are not “rational actors” as long assumed by economists but instead emotional creatures whose decisions are often guided by those emotions. We at Mobus Creative Negotiating offer many suggestions about how to navigate those emotional waters – what rocky shoals to avoid, what waters are more likely to be calm, and how to safely complete the journey.
Kahneman brought his insights about emotion to his own research. Consider a controversy about a highly influential paper he co-wrote in 2010 with another winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Angus Deaton. From a survey, they found that above an income of $90,000, there was no increase in happiness as income rose. In 2021, the Wharton School’s Matthew Killingsworth found the exact opposite, that is, happiness rose with income no matter how high the income. Kahneman’s response was not to blast away; he called such an approach “angry science.” He preferred what he called “adversarial collaboration.” So he asked Killingsworth to collaborate along with a friendly arbiter, the noted psychologist Barbara Mellers. What they found was that both were partly correct, with the results depending greatly on how one treated the poorest group. In other words, by collaborating, they improved their work. That is how Kahneman worked his entire professional career. He argued, “A common feature of all my experiences has been that the adversaries ended up on friendlier terms than when they started.”
In his New York Times article describing Kahneman’s work, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein writes “with organizations of all kinds… sustained efforts should be made to lower the volume by isolating points of disagreement and specifying tests to establish what’s right.” (The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries) That is great advice for negotiators. We at Mobus Creative Negotiating offer advice, guidelines, and suggestions about how to translate that into practice. We are guided by the advice of the American great Alexander Hamilton, quoted by Sunstein: “The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties…often promote deliberation and circumspection.”
