What 7 negotiating tricks can we learn from FBI hostage negotiators?
ry Noesner, former chief negotiator with the FBI's Critical Incident Response Group and author of Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator wrote an interesting piece on active listening skills. You don't need to be dealing with barricaded gunmen to improve your communication skills with the techniques he describes. In the early part of any negotiation, information exchange and building rapport are key. These are some of the most powerful and tested techniques available to achieve those goals: …
4 minutes
Guys, how should you speak so women remember what you say?
en take note: If you want women to remember, speak to them in a low pitch voice." Via Eurekalert: ...according to a new study by David Smith and colleagues from the University of Aberdeen in the UK. Their work shows for the first time that a low masculine voice is important for both mate choice and the accuracy of women's memory. The research is published online in Springer's journal, Memory & Cognition. Join over 190,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via…
1 min read
Should you be optimistic going into negotiations?
o studies demonstrate that negotiation processes and outcomes can be altered by the creation of Positive Expectations. Study 1 participants were American undergraduates seeking agreement with a confederate about allocation of funds to programs differentially favoring undergraduates vs. graduates. Study 2 participants were Israeli Business School students seeking agreement with an Arab confederate about allocation of funds to projects differentially favoring Israelis vs. Palestinians. In both studies prior information suggesting the consistent success of previous dyads prompted acceptance of the…
1 min read
An easy way to dramatically improve your listening skills:
e technique is called non-evaluative listening: We can achieve real communication and avoid this evaluative tendency when we listen with understanding. This means seeing the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, sensing how it feels to the person, achieving his or her frame of reference about the subject being discussed. This may sound absurdly simple, but it is not. In fact, it is an extremely potent approach in psychotherapy. It is the most effective way…
2 minutes
What are the first words you should say in a negotiation?
mething very similar to what the guy on the other side of the table just said: We hypothesized that in online, virtual formats, negotiators receive better outcomes when mimicking their counterpart's language; furthermore, we predicted that this strategy would be more effective when occurring early in the negotiation rather than at the end, and should also be effective across both independent and interdependent cultures. Results from two experiments supported these hypotheses. Experiment 1 was conducted in Thailand and demonstrated that…
1 min read
Does a limit on how many you can buy make you buy more?
om Brian Wansink's excellent book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think: A while back, I teamed up with two professor friends of mine—Steve Hoch and Bob Kent—to see if anchoring influences how much food we buy in grocery stores. We believed that grocery shoppers who saw numerical signs such as “Limit 12 Per Person” would buy much more than those who saw signs such as “No Limit Per Person.” To nail down the psychology behind this, we repeated…
1 min read
A Quick, Easy Trick For Getting People To Like You
socially optimistic. Expect that people will like you and they probably will. Via Psyblog: So this provides evidence that the acceptance prophecy holds true. In this experiment people who expected to be accepted did act more warmly towards a stranger and consequently they were perceived as more likeable. And: Social optimists, of course, are in the happy position of expecting to be accepted and finding that, generally speaking, they are. Social pessimists, though, face the dark side of what…
1 min read
The Color That Helps Hitchhikers Get Picked Up
search has shown that with some nonhuman primates, red is associated with greater sexual attractiveness of females. Five female confederates in their early 20s posed as hitchhikers wearing T-shirts of different colors (black, white, red, blue, green, or yellow). It was found that the women wearing red solicited a higher response in the number of male drivers who stopped to offer a ride. No color effect was found when considering the behavior of female drivers. Source: "Color and women hitchhikers'…
1 min read
