Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

NO SUCH THING AS FAIR
In the third week of my negotiations class, we play my
favorite type of game, that is, the kind that shows my

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students how much they don’t understand themselves (I
know—I’m cruel).
It’s called the Ultimatum Game, and it goes like this:
After the students split into pairs of a “proposer” and an
“accepter,” I give each proposer $10. The proposer then has
to offer the accepter a round number of dollars. If the
accepter agrees he or she receives what’s been offered and
the proposer gets the rest. If the accepter refuses the offer,
though, they both get nothing and the $10 goes back to me.
Whether they “win” and keep the money or “lose” and
have to give it back is irrelevant (except to my wallet).
What’s important is the offer they make. The truly shocking
thing is that, almost without exception, whatever selection
anyone makes, they find themselves in a minority. No
matter whether they chose $6/$4, $5/$5, $7/$3, $8/$2, etc.,
they look around and are inevitably surprised to find no split
was chosen far more than any other. In something as simple
as merely splitting $10 of “found” money, there is no
consensus of what constitutes a “fair” or “rational” split.
After we run this little experiment, I stand up in front of
the class and make a point they don’t like to hear: the
reasoning each and every student used was 100 percent
irrational and emotional.
“What?” they say. “I made a rational decision.”
Then I lay out how they’re wrong. First, how could they
all be using reason if so many have made different offers?
That’s the point: They didn’t. They assumed the other guy
would reason just like them. “If you approach a negotiation

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thinking that the other guy thinks like you, you’re wrong,” I
say. “That’s not empathy; that’s projection.”
And then I push it even further: Why, I ask, did none of
the proposers offer $1, which is the best rational offer for
them and logically unrejectable for the accepter? And if they
did and they got rejected—which happens—why did the
accepter turn them down?
“Anyone who made any offer other than $1 made an
emotional choice” I say. “And for you accepters who turned
down $1, since when is getting $0 better than getting $1?
Did the rules of finance suddenly change?”
This rocks my students’ view of themselves as rational
actors. But they’re not. None of us are. We’re all irrational,
all emotional. Emotion is a necessary element to decision
making that we ignore at our own peril. Realizing that hits
people hard between the eyes.
I n Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain,2 neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a
groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who
had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are
generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in
common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could
describe what they should do in logical terms, but they
found it impossible to make even the simplest choice.
In other words, while we may use logic to reason
ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is
governed by emotion.

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