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

parties in a negotiation usually start.
If you don’t ever get off that dynamic, you end up
having showdowns, as each side tries to impose its point of
view. You get two hard skulls banging against each other,
like in Dos Palmas. But if you can get the other side to drop
their unbelief, you can slowly work them t o your point of
view on the back of their energy, just like the drug dealer’s
question got the kidnapper to volunteer to do what the drug
dealer wanted. You don’t directly persuade them to see your
ideas. Instead, you ride them to your ideas. As the saying
goes, the best way to ride a horse is in the direction in which
it is going.

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Our job as persuaders is easier than we think. It’s not to
get others believing what we say. It’s just to stop them
unbelieving. Once we achieve that, the game’s half-won.
“Unbelief is the friction that keeps persuasion in check,”
Dutton says. “Without it, there’d be no limits.”
Giving your counterpart the illusion of control by asking
calibrated questions—by asking for help—is one of the most
powerful tools for suspending unbelief. Not long ago, I read
this great article in the New York Times2 by a medical
student who was faced with a patient who had ripped out his
IV, packed his bags, and was making a move to leave
because his biopsy results were days late and he was tired of
waiting.
Just then a senior physician arrived. After calmly
offering the patient a glass of water and asking if they could
chat for a minute, he said he understood why the patient was
pissed off and promised to call the lab to see why the results
were delayed.
But what he did next is what really suspended the
patient’s unbelief: he asked a calibrated question—what he
felt was so important about leaving—and then when the
patient said he had errands to handle, the doctor offered to
connect the patient with services that could help him get
them done. And, boom, the patient volunteered to stay.
What’s so powerful about the senior doctor’s technique
is that he took what was a showdown—“I’m going to leave”
versus “You can’t leave”—and asked questions that led the
patient to solve his own problem . . . in the way the doctor

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wanted.
It was still a kind of showdown, of course, but the doctor
took the confrontation and bravado out of it by giving the
patient the illusion of control. As an old Washington Post
editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has
learned to disagree without being disagreeable has
discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.”
This same technique for suspending unbelief that you
use with kidnappers and escaping patients works for
anything, even negotiating prices. When you go into a store,
instead of telling the salesclerk what you “need,” you can
describe what you’re looking for and ask for suggestions.
Then, once you’ve picked out what you want, instead of
hitting them with a hard offer, you can just say the price is a
bit more than you budgeted and ask for help with one of the
greatest-of-all-time calibrated questions: “How am I
supposed to do that?” The critical part of this approach is
that you really are asking for help and your delivery must
convey that. With this negotiating scheme, instead of
bullying the clerk, you’re asking for their advice and giving
them the illusion of control.
Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already
been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful
negotiating technique for transforming encounters from
confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving
sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.