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

HEART VS. MIND
In the early 1980s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the hot
spot in the negotiating world, as scholars from different
disciplines began interacting and exploring exciting new
concepts. The big leap forward came in 1979, when the
Harvard Negotiation Project was founded with a mandate to
improve the theory, teaching, and practice of negotiation so
that people could more effectively handle everything from
peace treaties to business mergers.
Two years later, Roger Fisher and William Ury—
cofounders of the project—came out with Getting to Yes,2 a
groundbreaking treatise on negotiation that totally changed
the way practitioners thought about the field.
Fisher and Ury’s approach was basically to systematize
problem solving so that negotiating parties could reach a
mutually beneficial deal—the getting to “Yes” in the title.
Their core assumption was that the emotional brain—that
animalistic, unreliable, and irrational beast—could be
overcome through a more rational, joint problem-solving
mindset.
Their system was easy to follow and seductive, with four

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basic tenets. One, separate the person—the emotion—from
the problem; two, don’t get wrapped up in the other side’s
position (what they’re asking for) but instead focus on their
interests (why they’re asking for it) so that you can find what
they really want; three, work cooperatively to generate win-
win options; and, four, establish mutually agreed-upon
standards for evaluating those possible solutions.
It was a brilliant, rational, and profound synthesis of the
most advanced game theory and legal thinking of the day.
For years after that book came out, everybody—including
the FBI and the NYPD—focused on a problem-solving
approach to bargaining interactions. It just seemed so
modern and smart.
Halfway across the United States, a pair of professors at the
University of Chicago was looking at everything from
economics to negotiation from a far different angle.
They were the economist Amos Tversky and the
psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Together, the two launched
the field of behavioral economics—and Kahneman won a
Nobel Prize—by showing that man is a very irrational beast.
Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking.
As you’ve seen, when business schools like Harvard’s
began teaching negotiation in the 1980s, the process was
presented as a straightforward economic analysis. It was a
period when the world’s top academic economists declared
that we were all “rational actors.” And so it went in
negotiation classes: assuming the other side was acting
rationally and selfishly in trying to maximize its position, the

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goal was to figure out how to respond in various scenarios
to maximize one’s own value.
This mentality baffled Kahneman, who from years in
psychology knew that, in his words, “[I]t is self-evident that
people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and
that their tastes are anything but stable.”
Through decades of research with Tversky, Kahneman
proved that humans all suffer from Cognitive Bias, that is,
unconscious—and irrational—brain processes that literally
distort the way we see the world. Kahneman and Tversky
discovered more than 150 of them.
There’s the Framing Effect, which demonstrates that
people respond differently to the same choice depending on
how it is framed (people place greater value on moving
from 90 percent to 100 percent—high probability to
certainty—than from 45 percent to 55 percent, even though
they’re both ten percentage points). Prospect Theory
explains why we take unwarranted risks in the face of
uncertain losses. And the most famous is Loss Aversion ,
which shows how people are statistically more likely to act
to avert a loss than to achieve an equal gain.
Kahneman later codified his research in the 2011
bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.3 Man, he wrote, has two
systems of thought: System 1, our animal mind, is fast,
instinctive, and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberative,
and logical. And System 1 is far more influential. In fact, it
guides and steers our rational thoughts.
System 1’s inchoate beliefs, feelings, and impressions

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are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate
choices of System 2. They’re the spring that feeds the river.
We react emotionally (System 1) to a suggestion or
question. Then that System 1 reaction informs and in effect
creates the System 2 answer.
Now think about that: under this model, if you know
how to affect your counterpart’s System 1 thinking, his
inarticulate feelings, by how you frame and deliver your
questions and statements, then you can guide his System 2
rationality and therefore modify his responses. That’s what
happened to Andy at Harvard: by asking, “How am I
supposed to do that?” I influenced his System 1 emotional
mind into accepting that his offer wasn’t good enough; his
System 2 then rationalized the situation so that it made sense
to give me a better offer.
If you believed Kahneman, conducting negotiations
based on System 2 concepts without the tools to read,
understand, and manipulate the System 1 emotional
underpinning was like trying to make an omelet without first
knowing how to crack an egg.