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Miswanting
Chris Guthrie & David Sally*
Editors’ Note: If you’re assuming that a settlement will make you (or your client) happy, it’s time to question that assumption. By explaining the work of positive psychology (or what makes people happy), these authors explore how people often end up misdiagnosing their own goals. But if you understand your own and your client’s pressures toward misidentifying what you need out of a negotiation, you are better prepared to set goals that will actually work for you both.
This chapter is republished from the same editors’ Negotiator’s Fieldbook (American Bar Assoc. 2006). We appreciate the ABA’s courtesy in agreeing to this republication. Although this chapter was not updated for the NDR, we believe it continues to be a unique and valuable resource. Some formatting and the authors’ bios have been updated; the text of the chapter is unaltered.
The defining feature of “principled” or “problem-solving” negotiation is its emphasis on “interests” rather than “positions.” In negotiation parlance, positions are what disputants declare they want. Interests, on the other hand, are the “needs, desires, concerns, and fears” that underlie stated positions.1
Disputants routinely negotiate over positions. Each party to a negotiation adopts a position, argues for it, and eventually makes concessions (or not) to reach an agreement. Unfortunately, however, agreements based on positions are unlikely to meet the wants and needs that motivated the parties to adopt those positions in the first place.
Proponents of problem-solving negotiation argue that disputants should therefore seek not to assert positions but rather to identify and satisfy their underlying interests. Indeed, according to the proponents of this approach to negotiation, the very “object of a negotiation” is to satisfy “underlying interests.”2 On this view, disputants should try to get what they really want at the bargaining table.
But what if they don’t know what they really want?
Impact Bias
Researchers from an emerging movement within psychology—labeled “positive psychology” or “hedonic psychology”—have learned a great deal in recent years about what people really want. Of greatest relevance to this Chapter, researchers have discovered that people are often mistaken about what they want or what will make them happy.
It is not that people are entirely unaware of what they want or how they will feel. In fact, people are generally quite skilled at predicting whether they will feel positively or negatively about some event or item.3 People accurately predict, for example, that they will feel favorably about a promotion and unfavorably about a demotion. Likewise, people are generally pretty good at predicting the specific emotion(s) they will experience upon obtaining some item or experiencing some event.4 People anticipate, for instance, that they will feel pride and joy upon being promoted and anger and embarrassment upon being demoted.
What people struggle with, however, is predicting both the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to an event or outcome. One’s sense of well-being turns significantly on this kind of prediction:
Often people predict correctly the valence of their emotional reactions (“I’ll feel good if I get the job”) and correctly predict the specific emotions they will experience (e.g., joy). Even when achieving such accuracy, however, it is important for people to predict what the initial intensity of the reaction will be (how much joy they will experience) and the duration of that emotion (how long will they feel this way). It is useful to know that we will feel happy on our first day at a new job, but better to know how happy and how long this feeling will last, before committing ourselves to a lifetime of work as a tax attorney. It is helpful to know that it will be painful to end a long-term relationship, but better to know how painful and whether the pain will last half a second or half a decade.5
Unfortunately, people have a tendency to overestimate the impact of future events on their emotional well-being. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson refer to this phenomenon as the “impact bias.”6
Gilbert, Wilson, and other researchers have found that the impact bias influences reactions to all kinds of life events, including romantic breakups, personal insults, failed exams, sports victories, electoral defeats, winning prizes, receiving gifts, failing to lose weight, failing to obtain a promotion, and being diagnosed with a serious illness.7 With few exceptions, people tend to overestimate the emotional impact such events will have on their lives.
Researchers are not entirely sure why people have such difficulty assessing the emotional impact of various life events and outcomes, but they have identified several potential explanations. First, when predicting reactions to a future event, people tend to ignore the impact that other events are likely to have on their sense of well-being. Researchers refer to this as “focalism”8 or a “focusing illusion.”9 Relatedly, when choosing between items, people tend to ignore the features the items share in common and overestimate the emotional impact that distinct features of the chosen option will have on their well-being. People are prone, in other words, to an “isolation effect.”10 Also, people underestimate the extent to which they use “sense-making processes” to dampen the emotional impact of an experience or outcome.11 People “inexorably explain and understand events that were initially surprising and unpredictable, and this process lowers the intensity of emotional reactions to the events.”12 …..
For full contents please purchase The Negotiator’s Desk Reference.
Endnotes
*Chris Guthrie is the Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School.
David Sally has a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and is co-author of The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong, published by Penguin UK, translated into a dozen languages, and praised by The Times as “the book that could change football forever.” He co-founded Anderson Sally LLC and has consulted with clients around the globe about football tactics, personnel moves, organizational change, and acquisitions.
This Chapter was adapted from Chris Guthrie & David Sally, The Impact of the Impact Bias on Negotiation, 87 Marquette Law Review 817 (2004).
1 Roger Fisher, et al., Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In 40 (2d ed. 1991).
2 Id.
3 Timothy D. Wilson & Daniel T. Gilbert, Affective Forecasting, 35 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 345, 347 (2003).
4 Id. at 347.
5 Id. at 349.
6 Id. at 351.
7 See Daniel T. Gilbert, et al., The Trouble with Vronsky: Impact Bias in the Forecasting of Future Affective States, in The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional Intelligence 114, 116 (Lisa Feldman Barrett & Peter Salovey eds., 2002).
8 Wilson & Gilbert, supra note 3, at 366.
9 David A. Schkade & Daniel Kahneman, Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction, 9 Psychological Science 340 (1998).
10 Elizabeth W. Dunn, et al., Location, Location, Location: The Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries, 29 Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 1421, 1422 (2003).
11 Wilson & Gilbert, supra note 3, at 371.
12 Id.
This chapter is republished from the same editors’ Negotiator’s Fieldbook (American Bar Assoc. 2006). We appreciate the ABA’s courtesy in agreeing to this republication. Although this chapter was not updated for the NDR, we believe it continues to be a unique and valuable resource. Some formatting and the authors’ bios have been updated; the text of the chapter is unaltered.
The defining feature of “principled” or “problem-solving” negotiation is its emphasis on “interests” rather than “positions.” In negotiation parlance, positions are what disputants declare they want. Interests, on the other hand, are the “needs, desires, concerns, and fears” that underlie stated positions.1
Disputants routinely negotiate over positions. Each party to a negotiation adopts a position, argues for it, and eventually makes concessions (or not) to reach an agreement. Unfortunately, however, agreements based on positions are unlikely to meet the wants and needs that motivated the parties to adopt those positions in the first place.
Proponents of problem-solving negotiation argue that disputants should therefore seek not to assert positions but rather to identify and satisfy their underlying interests. Indeed, according to the proponents of this approach to negotiation, the very “object of a negotiation” is to satisfy “underlying interests.”2 On this view, disputants should try to get what they really want at the bargaining table.
But what if they don’t know what they really want?
Impact Bias
Researchers from an emerging movement within psychology—labeled “positive psychology” or “hedonic psychology”—have learned a great deal in recent years about what people really want. Of greatest relevance to this Chapter, researchers have discovered that people are often mistaken about what they want or what will make them happy.
It is not that people are entirely unaware of what they want or how they will feel. In fact, people are generally quite skilled at predicting whether they will feel positively or negatively about some event or item.3 People accurately predict, for example, that they will feel favorably about a promotion and unfavorably about a demotion. Likewise, people are generally pretty good at predicting the specific emotion(s) they will experience upon obtaining some item or experiencing some event.4 People anticipate, for instance, that they will feel pride and joy upon being promoted and anger and embarrassment upon being demoted.
What people struggle with, however, is predicting both the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to an event or outcome. One’s sense of well-being turns significantly on this kind of prediction:
Often people predict correctly the valence of their emotional reactions (“I’ll feel good if I get the job”) and correctly predict the specific emotions they will experience (e.g., joy). Even when achieving such accuracy, however, it is important for people to predict what the initial intensity of the reaction will be (how much joy they will experience) and the duration of that emotion (how long will they feel this way). It is useful to know that we will feel happy on our first day at a new job, but better to know how happy and how long this feeling will last, before committing ourselves to a lifetime of work as a tax attorney. It is helpful to know that it will be painful to end a long-term relationship, but better to know how painful and whether the pain will last half a second or half a decade.5
Unfortunately, people have a tendency to overestimate the impact of future events on their emotional well-being. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson refer to this phenomenon as the “impact bias.”6
Gilbert, Wilson, and other researchers have found that the impact bias influences reactions to all kinds of life events, including romantic breakups, personal insults, failed exams, sports victories, electoral defeats, winning prizes, receiving gifts, failing to lose weight, failing to obtain a promotion, and being diagnosed with a serious illness.7 With few exceptions, people tend to overestimate the emotional impact such events will have on their lives.
Researchers are not entirely sure why people have such difficulty assessing the emotional impact of various life events and outcomes, but they have identified several potential explanations. First, when predicting reactions to a future event, people tend to ignore the impact that other events are likely to have on their sense of well-being. Researchers refer to this as “focalism”8 or a “focusing illusion.”9 Relatedly, when choosing between items, people tend to ignore the features the items share in common and overestimate the emotional impact that distinct features of the chosen option will have on their well-being. People are prone, in other words, to an “isolation effect.”10 Also, people underestimate the extent to which they use “sense-making processes” to dampen the emotional impact of an experience or outcome.11 People “inexorably explain and understand events that were initially surprising and unpredictable, and this process lowers the intensity of emotional reactions to the events.”12 …..
For full contents please purchase The Negotiator’s Desk Reference.
Endnotes
*Chris Guthrie is the Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School.
David Sally has a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago and is co-author of The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong, published by Penguin UK, translated into a dozen languages, and praised by The Times as “the book that could change football forever.” He co-founded Anderson Sally LLC and has consulted with clients around the globe about football tactics, personnel moves, organizational change, and acquisitions.
This Chapter was adapted from Chris Guthrie & David Sally, The Impact of the Impact Bias on Negotiation, 87 Marquette Law Review 817 (2004).
1 Roger Fisher, et al., Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In 40 (2d ed. 1991).
2 Id.
3 Timothy D. Wilson & Daniel T. Gilbert, Affective Forecasting, 35 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 345, 347 (2003).
4 Id. at 347.
5 Id. at 349.
6 Id. at 351.
7 See Daniel T. Gilbert, et al., The Trouble with Vronsky: Impact Bias in the Forecasting of Future Affective States, in The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional Intelligence 114, 116 (Lisa Feldman Barrett & Peter Salovey eds., 2002).
8 Wilson & Gilbert, supra note 3, at 366.
9 David A. Schkade & Daniel Kahneman, Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction, 9 Psychological Science 340 (1998).
10 Elizabeth W. Dunn, et al., Location, Location, Location: The Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries, 29 Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 1421, 1422 (2003).
11 Wilson & Gilbert, supra note 3, at 371.
12 Id.