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

HOW TO DISCOVER THE EMOTIONAL DRIVERS

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BEHIND WHAT THE OTHER PARTY VALUES
A few years ago, I stumbled upon the book How to Become
a Rainmaker,3 and I like to review it occasionally to refresh
my sense of the emotional drivers that fuel decisions. The
book does a great job to explain the sales job not as a
rational argument, but as an emotional framing job.
If you can get the other party to reveal their problems,
pain, and unmet objectives—if you can get at what people
are really buying—then you can sell them a vision of their
problem that leaves your proposal as the perfect solution.
Look at this from the most basic level. What does a good
babysitter sell, really? It’s not child care exactly, but a
relaxed evening. A furnace salesperson? Cozy rooms for
family time. A locksmith? A feeling of security.
Know the emotional drivers and you can frame the
benefits of any deal in language that will resonate.
BEND THEIR REALITY
Take the same person, change one or two variables, and
$100 can be a glorious victory or a vicious insult.
Recognizing this phenomenon lets you bend reality from
insult to victory.
Let me give you an example. I have this coffee mug, red
and white with the Swiss flag. No chips, but used. What
would you pay for it, deep down in your heart of hearts?
You’re probably going to say something like $3.50.
Let’s say it’s your mug now. You’re going to sell it to

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me. So tell me what it’s worth.
You’re probably going to say something between $5 and
$7.
In both cases, it was the exact same mug. All I did was
move the mug in relation to you, and I totally changed its
value.
Or imagine that I offer you $20 to run a three-minute
errand and get me a cup of coffee. You’re going to think to
yourself that $20 for three minutes is $400 an hour. You’re
going to be thrilled.
What if then you find out that by getting you to run that
errand I made a million dollars. You’d go from being
ecstatic for making $400 an hour to being angry because
you got ripped off.
The value of the $20, just like the value of the coffee
mug, didn’t change. But your perspective of it did. Just by
how I position the $20, I can make you happy or disgusted
by it.
I tell you that not to expose our decision making as
emotional and irrational. We’ve already seen that. What I
am saying is that while our decisions may be largely
irrational, that doesn’t mean there aren’t consistent patterns,
principles, and rules behind how we act. And once you
know those mental patterns, you start to see ways to
influence them.
By far the best theory for describing the principles of our
irrational decisions is something called Prospect Theory.
Created in 1979 by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and

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Amos Tversky, prospect theory describes how people
choose between options that involve risk, like in a
negotiation. The theory argues that people are drawn to sure
things over probabilities, even when the probability is a
better choice. That’s called the Certainty Effect. And people
will take greater risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains.
That’s called Loss Aversion.
That’s why people who statistically have no need for
insurance buy it. Or consider this: a person who’s told he
has a 95 percent chance of receiving $10,000 or a 100
percent chance of getting $9,499 will usually avoid risk and
take the 100 percent certain safe choice, while the same
person who’s told he has a 95 percent chance of losing
$10,000 or a 100 percent chance of losing $9,499 will make
the opposite choice, risking the bigger 95 percent option to
avoid the loss. The chance for loss incites more risk than the
possibility of an equal gain.
Over the next few pages I’ll explain a few prospect
theory tactics you can use to your advantage. But first let me
leave you with a crucial lesson about loss aversion: In a
tough negotiation, it’s not enough to show the other party
that you can deliver the thing they want.
To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that
they have something concrete to lose if the deal falls
through.