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

THE PINOCCHIO EFFECT
With Carlo Collodi’s famous character Pinocchio, it was
easy to tell when he was lying: you just had to watch the
nose.

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It turns out that Collodi wasn’t far off reality. Most
people offer obvious telltale signs when they’re lying. Not a
growing nose, but close enough.
In a study of the components of lying,2 Harvard
Business School professor Deepak Malhotra and his
coauthors found that, on average, liars use more words than
truth tellers and use far more third-person pronouns. They
start talking about him, her, it, one, they, and their rather
than I, in order to put some distance between themselves
and the lie.
And they discovered that liars tend to speak in more
complex sentences in an attempt to win over their suspicious
counterparts. It’s what W. C. Fields meant when he talked
about baffling someone with bullshit. The researchers
dubbed this the Pinocchio Effect because, just like
Pinocchio’s nose, the number of words grew along with the
lie. People who are lying are, understandably, more worried
about being believed, so they work harder—too hard, as it
were—at being believable.
PAY ATTENTION TO THEIR USAGE OF PRONOUNS
The use of pronouns by a counterpart can also help give
you a feel for their actual importance in the decision and
implementation chains on the other side of the table. The
more in love they are with “I,” “me,” and “my” the less
important they are.
Conversely, the harder it is to get a first person pronoun

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out of a negotiator’s mouth, the more important they are.
Just like in the Malhotra study where the liar is distancing
himself from the lie, in a negotiation, smart decision makers
don’t want to be cornered at the table into making a
decision. They will defer to the people away from the table
to keep from getting pinned down.
Our cabdriver kidnapper in the Philippines of Alastair
Onglingswan used “we,” “they,” and “them” so rigorously
early on in the kidnapping I was convinced we were
engaged with their leader. I just never knew how literally
true it was until the rescue. In the Chase Manhattan Bank
robbery from Chapter 2, the bank robber Chris Watts
consistently talked out how dangerous the “others” were
and how little influence he had on them, all a lie.