Negotiation is an art we all practice. It’s not just about trade issues, it’s mainly about how we balance day-to-day obligations, duties and concessions.
Investigators Moran Deutsch and Robert Krauss wanted to know why many of our negotiations fail.
Thanks to the Deutsch experience
They also managed to establish that there are two types of negotiation: cooperative and competitive.
We’ll see how they came to these conclusions in the Deutsch experiment
“Unity is variety, and variety in unity is the supreme law of the universe. ” Isaac Newton.
Deutsch’s first experience
The goal is to make as many trips as possible between Point A and Point B. There are two paths: one short and one long, however, the short road has only one direction and can only be transited by one truck at a time. .
At the end of the short tour, there is a door that will remain closed until the truck returns on the way home, the two people who participate in the game have no chance of communicating with each other, they must interpret each other’s actions according to the way they play.
In the first series of experiments, the result was that participants handled the game by blocking their opponent’s options, using the door as a way to force their opponent to take the long road and take advantage of it.
By playing this way, both have made only small gains
In the second part of the Deutsch experiment
This allowed both players to communicate with each other to make the game more fluid, however, although they can communicate, they have not, so the result was the same as that of the first experiment.
Deutsch’s third experiment
The result of the third experiment was varied, in some cases forced disclosure has facilitated the conclusion of certain minimum agreements, which has increased the benefit of all, in other cases this has not taken effect. The same has just happened with the previous two experiments.
Based on Deutsch’s experience
The characteristics that predominate in this style are a higher level of communication, endowed with kindness and goodwill, seeks to coordinate efforts and sees the difference of conflicting interests as a problem to be solved and not as a threat.
The second style is competitive. In this predominates obstructive communication, that is, communication is simply used as a weapon to confuse or deceive the opponent, which in the end eliminates confidence and is therefore an obstacle to reaching agreements.
When competitiveness takes hold, actors generally have to do twice as much effort, because they do not share the work or benefit from each other’s skills, as in the cooperative model.
Disagreements and attempts to neutralize the opponent also limit profits.
For all these reasons, the Deutsch experience
This limits the triumph itself. When there is cooperation, however, some of the profit is canceled, but there is less effort investment and a guaranteed partial victory.