Hidden Brain - You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life
Episode Date: July 28, 2025We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In our latest You 2.0 episode, we bring you a favorite convers...ation with psychologist Jonathan Adler. He shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing. Then, Max Bazerman answers your questions about the science of negotiation.Do you have follow-up questions or ideas that you’d like to share after listening to our conversation with Jonathan Adler? How do you tell the story of your life, and how does that shape the way you see yourself? If you’re comfortable sharing your thoughts and questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line “personal stories.”
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
When Leon Fleischer was a small child, his older brother took piano lessons.
The brother didn't much care for them.
But afterwards, little Leon would climb onto the piano bench and play, note for note, the pieces his brother had practiced.
That's when his mother realized Leon was the one who should study the instrument.
Leon Fleischer made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1944. He was just 16 years old.
Who is to perform Brahms piano concerto number one in D minor.
A New York Times music critic said this performance established him as one of the most remarkably
gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists.
He went on to perform with the world's top orchestras throughout the 1950s and early
60s.
Paul's story here and Leon Fleischer's life is a triumph.
But then something unexpected happened.
He started to notice an odd stiffness in his right index finger. His fourth and fifth finger
started curling under. The pain and stiffness grew steadily worse. Within a matter of months,
his career as a concert pianist was virtually over. As you can well imagine without becoming melodramatic,
it was... I was in a very despairing state of depression for about two years.
If we were to take stock of Leon Fleischer's life at this point,
we might say it was a tragedy.
But Leon Fleischer still had so much music in him,
so he reinvented himself, becoming
a much admired conductor and teacher. Meanwhile, he continued to try every available measure
to heal his right hand. Eventually, a combination of Botox injections and deep tissue massage
started to help. In 2003, Leon Fleischer made a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall.
He was 75 years old.
The next year, he released a CD, his first two-handed recording in more than 40 years.
Today we conclude this year's U2.0 series on Purpose, Passion, and Meaning.
We'll bring you a favorite episode about the stories we tell about ourselves, and the
many subtle and powerful ways in which our personal narratives shape who we are.
How the way we understand the ups and downs of our lives can shape the ups and downs of
our lives, this week on Hidden Brain.
As we make our way through life, it can feel as if we are buffeted by a swiftly moving
series of events. Sometimes it's all we can do to keep our heads above water as we wait for the next wave to crash over us.
But research in psychology hints at a different process unfolding beneath the waves, an undercurrent
that has powerful effects on our well-being, mental health, and life outcomes.
powerful effects on our well-being, mental health, and life outcomes. At Olin College, psychologist Jonathan Adler studies how our minds are shaped by this
undercurrent and how becoming mindful of it can help us better deal with setbacks
and failure. Jonathan Adler, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Oh, I'm so excited to be here with you. Jonathan, I want to take you back to your college days in Maine.
You were a capable and hardworking student,
but you were also struggling with a secret.
What were you going through?
Yeah, like you said, I was a good student.
I was curious and took classes in a ton of different departments.
But socially, I was more reserved.
I had a really tight group of friends in high school.
And I was sort of angry that that chapter of my life
had closed just because high school had ended.
And I was also struggling with my sexuality,
though that's not something I was necessarily conscious of
for a big chunk of college.
So you came up with a solution to these challenges and it was something of a radical
solution. What did you, what was the plan you devised? Yeah, well so a lot of college,
a lot of students at the college spent part of their junior year studying abroad and that seemed
to me like a rare opportunity to take a break from my regular life and figure out some things about myself.
So I ended up in Perth,
which is on the West Coast of Australia.
Wow.
Which is literally as far away from my life as you could get.
I mean, if you draw a line from New England
through the center of the earth,
you end up off the coast of Perth.
And this was your way of reinventing yourself. Well, it felt like an opportunity to step outside my life
and sort of explore who I was in a context
that wouldn't then have any ramifications
for the life that I was living.
So, okay, so you fly all the way to Australia.
What happens?
Did you find that your social life improved,
that you found deep connections with other people?
No. When I arrived, I knew that I was going to need to find some friends. So I auditioned
for the theater department's play. I was studying psychology and theater in college, and I knew
that being involved in a show was a surefire way to make fast friends and that it also
was a place where there might be opportunities to date.
And so the play that the department was doing that semester was this weird,
postmodern adaptation of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya
by the admittedly brilliant British playwright Howard Barker.
And there's this relatively minor character in the original play, Asterov,
who's this brooding intellectual
who just thinks but never does anything.
And I figured, oh, that's perfect for me.
But much to my astonishment, I got cast as Vanya,
which is one of the only leading roles that I'd ever had.
Wow.
Yeah, so most of Chekhov's plays are about people
who are stuck in their lives
and sort of consumed with what might have been the joke about Chekhov is that nothing ever happens.
And so this playwright, Barker, took this play and decided to imagine what would happen
if the same characters just did whatever their impulses told them to do.
So in this version, there are gun battles and unconstrained sex and a whole lot of chaos.
It's total liberation.
And I was an anxious actor, and so having to carry this play
in a role that was deeply unsuited
to my natural tendencies was all consuming.
I had gone looking for the kind of liberation
that these characters were given by their playwright,
but in finding
it in this fictional world, it completely shut down my own world.
I felt I had to spend my time mastering this incredibly complex and unnatural language.
I mean, the first line of the play is just the word uncle repeated over and over.
And I just lost all the bandwidth for everything else.
It ended up being one of the loneliest periods of my life
with me actually starting to count down the days
until I could come home.
And what I had envisioned as a time for freedom
and exploration actually became this burdened, lonely time.
And I think it set me back in the process of coming out.
and I think it set me back in the process of coming out. So you returned to Maine after the semester abroad. You're back now in the same college
where you were previously frustrated. What goes through your head at this point?
I think I felt profoundly disappointed in myself for not having capitalized on this rare opportunity
and stifled to be back in my old life without having figured anything out.
And yeah, so I think I just sort of put my head down and kept doing what I knew how to
do, which was be a brain, not a fully integrated body.
Jonathan's time in Australia felt like more than a misadventure.
It felt like a sign.
He had made the trip with high hopes,
hoping to become a new person.
When he returned no different than before,
it didn't just feel the same.
It felt worse.
Many of us have had experiences similar to Jonathan's.
We suffer setbacks and failures, humiliations and disappointments.
When these happen to us frequently enough, we start to think that we will never be happy,
never be whole.
When we come back, why unhappiness can breed unhappiness and how to break the cycle.
You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Jonathan Adler spent much of his young adulthood feeling unsatisfied, yearning for more.
He sensed he was gay, but didn't feel comfortable coming out.
He spent a semester in Australia to break free
of the constraints of his college life in Maine,
but found that he was just as lonely on another continent.
Sometime after he returned to the United States, however,
Jonathan made a discovery.
He came by the work of a pioneering scientist in a field known as narrative psychology. Dan McAdams at
Northwestern University was arguing that the stories we tell about our lives have
profound effects on our well-being. Jonathan moved to Northwestern, became
Dan's PhD student and later his scientific collaborator.
In time, Jonathan came to see his own life through the lens of his research.
He realized that he had been telling the story of his life in a way that was self-defeating.
And he came to see that by telling that story differently, it could make a profound difference.
We'll get to that in a moment. First, I asked Jonathan to explain to me the basic idea behind narrative psychology.
You can't totally control the things that
happen to you in your life.
You have some more say about how you make sense of it.
And it's important to remember, we're
talking about stories here.
So we know from research on memory
that we're not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience
For a long time that frustrated cognitive scientists, but in more recent years
It's become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason
So if you think about why we have memory in the first place
It's not so we can hold on to every single thing that's happened to us in some veridical way
we have memories so that we can make sense of what's happening to us right now and anticipate what might
happen next.
So if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out, you don't necessarily need to remember
that cave and that bear, but you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places.
So the slippery, reconstructive nature of
memory is a feature of the system. It's not a bug. And stories are an amazing
tool for holding on to the meaning of our past experiences. So the objective
facts of our lives are what they are, but the stories are about where we draw
connections between things, where we parse the chapter breaks of our lives.
And those are narrative acts, not historical acts.
And the way we do that can have big implications for our well-being.
Jonathan and Dan McAdams have found that one of the most crucial choices
we make in telling our stories, and it's important to underscore that most of us make these choices
unconsciously, is where we start and stop the different chapters of our life story.
All lives have good and bad in it and so stories that start bad and end bad
don't feel great and stories that start good and end bad don't feel great. And stories that start good and end good, those feel good.
But what we find in the research is that
where we draw connections between the negative
and the positive matters a lot.
So stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good,
we call that a redemption sequence.
And stories that start good and end bad,
we call that a contamination sequence.
I see, so a redemption sequence is in some ways
something bad happens to you,
but in some ways you're rising from the ashes, so redemption.
And a contamination sequence is things are going pretty well,
but then something bad happens to you,
and then everything is downhill from there.
So one basically has an upward trajectory,
the other one has a downward trajectory.
That's right, and again, we're remembering these are stories.
So this is how we narrate the experience, not necessarily the objective facts of
our lives, because all lives have good and bad. I mean, your story about going
to Australia, for example, you know, you go to Australia with high hopes, you get the
starring role in a play. We know many people would say that's a very good
thing to have happened to you. And then the play turns out to not be quite what
was best for you, or the role turns out to be not what was best for you, and you
end up being very lonely. And then you can sort of see a downward sort of
spiral in some ways, and in some ways, it becomes a contamination story,
a story where something good turned bad,
and then you come back to the United States.
And now it feels like the bad thing that happened in Australia
is with you even now.
And that's sort of how contamination works.
It has a contagious effect and spreads and infects
other things.
That's right.
And again, I didn't know about Dan's work
at that moment in my life.
So I wasn't thinking about it in storied terms,
but indeed, I think I was living out
what I can now retrospectively see
was a contamination sequence.
I wanna talk a little bit about the effects
of these sequences on our life,
the effect of a redemption narrative
and a contamination narrative.
What effects do these different stories have on our lives?
What's the difference on our mental well-being
and happiness of redemption stories
versus contamination stories?
I have a nice short example of this
from a participant in one of my earliest studies, briefly.
This was a little middle-aged man
he's recounting the story of the first date that he went on with the woman that he ultimately goes on to marry and
The facts of the story are they go out when he brings her home
They're standing on her front porch and he leans in for a kiss and then her dad opens the front door and interrupts them
So in the version that this man narrated when he shared his life story as part of participating in our research, he frames
the experience as a redemption sequence. He says, it really brought us close right
at the very start of our relationship and we stayed that way ever since. So this
embarrassing moment had given them something to laugh about on their
second date and and maybe it accelerated their connection. But he might have
narrated the exact same sequence of events by concluding that it was this stain on the beginning
of their relationship that could have contaminated the relationship in a way that they moved on from
but never could erase. So neither version is more accurate in the historical sense. These are
narrative interpretations
that take on different thematic arcs,
redemption and contamination.
But these different ways of narrating our lives
have different implications for your well-being.
We find over and over that when redemption sequences occur
in people's life stories,
they tend to be associated with positive well-being,
good life satisfaction, lower levels of things like depression,
higher self-esteem, and it's just the opposite
for themes of contamination.
So what's important here, and you've mentioned this before,
is that the underlying facts of the story
don't have to change for the story, in fact,
to be a very different kind of story.
So, for example, in your own life,
you're still a gay man coming of age
at a time when homophobia is rampant,
you're still lonely in college,
the Australia trip was less of an escape
and more of a setback,
but you can tell both a contamination story
as well as a redemption story built around those facts.
That's right, and again, the shift there
is about where we draw the chapter breaks in my life.
So if we end that story, end that chapter, when I get back to college, it feels like
a contamination sequence.
But if I string it together with the things that came next, spoiler alert, it feels like
a redemption sequence.
Tell me what happened next and how it becomes a redemption story.
As I neared the end of college, I largely dealt with my internal turmoil by just throwing
myself into my work.
So I was one of the top students in my class and I got some awards and I took a research
job after college at Harvard, which was, you know, my plan was going to graduate school.
And I felt like I had done everything expected of me.
And I didn't really seek out any mentorship
as I applied to 10 very competitive PhD programs.
And then when the whole process was done,
I only got into one program.
So I always tell students, you only go to one school.
So it only takes one.
And that is true.
But at the time it felt like a shock.
Don't get me wrong, I was actually really excited
by the one option in front of me.
But I had sort of imagined that I might have more choice
when approaching this next big chapter of my life.
And as you said, the one school I got into
was in the Midwest, a place that I had never been
for more than a few days.
And so I was thinking a lot about what
it would mean to be a gay man living
in this different part of the country than I was used to.
So how does this become a redemption story?
It sounds actually the contamination
is getting worse here, because you apply to all these colleges
and you don't get into them.
Right.
So here's what happened.
So I went to campus for my interview.
And it was spring break week so no one was
really around but after the the formal stuff was done I I sort of casually
walked by the LGBT student groups office and there was this little yellow
envelope of business cards tacked to the bulletin board outside that said
something like questions? Email us at and then you know some generic email address.
So when I got home I I sent this email saying,
I'm thinking of coming here for graduate school,
I've never lived in the Midwest,
what's it like to be there and be a gay person,
both on campus and in the surrounding community?
And we didn't even have internet at the house
that I was renting with some friends,
so I had to sneak into the computer lab
at the nearby college to check my email.
So a few days later, I got a perfectly nice and very thorough email
reassuring me from a senior undergrad about what it was like to go to school
there and live in the town.
And I'm sure it was a copy and paste of an email that he had sent many times
before, but I appreciated how clear it was and the bits of humor sprinkled in.
And I wrote back to say, you know, thanks, that was so super helpful.
And then this student said, I'm actually graduating early, but I'm going to be hanging around.
I'm handing off the listserv.
But if you have questions, you know, just send me an email.
And so quite a bit of time goes by and I did commit to going to school there.
And when it was time for me to start looking for an apartment, I reached out again. And more than 20 years later, we
are now married and have two kids and a dog. So those first emails weren't even remotely
flirty, but they were attuned and connected and kind and funny and and eventually they did get
flirty as did my responses and so I look back at this turning point in my life
with a profound sense of first of all gratitude but also redemption right what
at the time felt like close to failure right that all my work in college and all my ignoring
of my personal life for the sake of my intellectual life had presented me with only one option,
now feels like the universe trying to make sure that I found my way. And within a year,
I was having a more gratifying intellectual experience than I had ever imagined, and I
was in love.
I'm wondering in some ways if the narrative changing played some role in sort of these
things happening in your life.
Is it just that you had a series of bad luck and bad events happening to you, and then you had a series of bad luck and bad events happening to you,
and then you had a series of good luck
and good events happening to you?
I mean, that might be the case,
but that's not particularly interesting
from a psychological point of view.
Do you think that the way you were thinking
about your own life and your exposure to Dan's ideas
was, had reshaped your ability or your willingness
to be open to thinking about a relationship
in a different way
or thinking about flirting on email with someone?
Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing that up,
because indeed, one could say, well,
the objective facts where things were bad and then things
were good, it really matters where we draw the chapter
breaks in our lives.
So yeah, one could say, well, that horrible chapter is over,
and this new chapter is just a good chapter
But I actually think it is the way I have woven those two experiences together in my life story
Where it feels like?
Redemption instead of being a story where it was bad and then it was good
this is a story that is about a shift from
loneliness and compartmentalization
to professional and personal fulfillment and identity integration.
Notice where you start and stop Jonathan's story makes a profound difference about whether the story is a redemptive story or a contamination story. If you draw a connection between
his unhappiness in college, his setbacks in Australia, and the fact he got into
only one graduate school after working so hard in college, that story looks like
an endless loop of setbacks. On the other hand, if you tell the story of a lonely closeted gay kid who just happens to get into the one school where he is going to be professionally successful and personally happy, then it looks like the heavens have parted and a star is pointing the way forward for Jonathan.
The objective facts of the story don't change, but the way you think of the story changes
profoundly.
You can see how powerful this is in a study conducted by William Dunlap and Jessica Tracy.
They were researching the stories told by people fighting addiction.
They looked at the relationship between personal narratives and the maintenance of sobriety
among people navigating
alcohol dependence.
So they asked people involved in Alcoholics Anonymous support groups to tell the story
of their last drink.
They actually had two samples, one of people who had remained sober for four years or longer,
and another sample who were in the earliest stages of sobriety.
And in both groups, they found that people
who told redemptive stories of their last drink
were more likely to stay sober than people
whose stories didn't contain redemptive themes.
So for example, they talk about one participant
who felt like the last drink for him
really symbolized the low point.
And it was the moment when he committed
to really turning his life around,
which he then goes on to do.
And that is emblematic of many findings in the field,
some that look at behavior, some that look mostly
at mental health outcomes, where we
find that the stories that we tell about our lives
are strong predictors of how we're doing.
Jonathan has also found that the way
we tell stories
about our lives can have biological effects.
In one study, Jonathan tracked a group of parents
experiencing chronic stress.
His co-author on the study, Ashley Mason,
was interested in the science of telomeres.
So telomeres are the end caps on our chromosomes
that protect them from getting frayed or tangled
each time a cell divides, because each time the cell divides, they get shorter and shorter,
and eventually the cell is left unprotected and it dies.
So some scientists see telomere length as a biological marker of aging.
And we know that under conditions of chronic stress, telomeres wear down faster.
So in this study, we had a group of chronically stressed participants. These were parents who had
children with quite severe autism spectrum disorders, and we compared them to parents
of neurotypical kids, which as a parent of neurotypical kids is still a stressful experience,
but the degree of chronic stress is different.
So we had their stories at the beginning of the study, and then we had measures of their
well-being and also data about their telomere length at that first time point, and then
again 18 months later.
And what we found was that among these chronically stressed parents, their stories mattered a
lot. What was
interesting was that the key narrative theme in this study was not redemption.
It was a theme of integration where we think about the extent to which
participants were able to make sense of having had this challenging kid and
integrating that into their own life story. So we found that among the chronically stressed parents,
stories of integration were associated
not only with their self-report
of lower levels of psychological stress,
but also with significantly less telomere shortening
over 18 months.
So as far as I know, this is the only study
to show a connection between the themes in
people's narratives and biological markers of stress and aging, but it suggests that
there may be biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones.
What did the parents say in terms of the kinds of stories they told, in terms of stories
that were effective or less effective.
One of the parents in the study talked about the ways
in which parenting is the ultimate life test,
is what she said.
And she said, you know, you can read a ton
about all this stuff, but ultimately you have to learn
from your kid.
And for her, that taught her a lot about who she was
as a person, how she was open and not open,
and how she felt like having this challenging parenting experience really helped her reshape who she was as a person
and what it meant to her to not only be a parent, but a human in relation with this other human who she loved dearly.
Now, when you hear someone tell a redemptive story
and you see that they are experiencing better mental health,
there is a question that arises, which is,
in which direction does the arrow of causation run?
Are they telling redemptive stories
and therefore feeling better about their lives?
Or are they feeling better about their lives and therefore telling redemptive stories? At one point,
you followed a group of patients as they worked with a psychotherapist and you charted both the
changes they experienced while in therapy and the stories they told about their lives and also which
preceded which. What did you find, Jonathan? Yeah, I became obsessed with that directionality question.
In that study, I enrolled a bunch of people,
adults ranging from ages 18 to 92.
They were seeking individual therapy
for a huge range of problems.
So there were folks with really significant psychopathology,
like depression, anxiety, eating disorders.
But there were also people just wanting
to do some work on themselves.
There was a woman who wanted to think
through her own childhood
as she was about to become a parent.
There was a woman who was feeling lonely in retirement.
So before they started with their therapist,
we collected their stories
and we measured their wellbeing using standard measures.
And so then on the other side,
we had nearly 600 narratives
from across all these participants.
And what we found was, first,
people got better over the course of treatment,
which is good because decades of research
on psychotherapy suggests that it works.
And we found that people's stories changed
in meaningful ways over the course of treatment.
And then the changes in the story actually came before changes in well-being and not
the other way around.
Because it was as if people were narrating a new version of their lives and then a week
or two later, their well-being would catch up with the story.
As we go through our lives responding to ups and downs that come at us unpredictably, it can feel as if we are hostages to life events. This is why many people see the hand of fate in
the things that happen to them. But everything looks different once we realize that we are not
simply a beleaguered character in our life story, we are also the author.
When we come back, four principles to tell wiser stories about our lives.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta. As you listen to this conversation, do you
have questions or comments about narrative psychology? How do you tell the story of your
life and how does that shape the way you see yourself? If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts with a Hidden Brain audience, please record
a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.
Use the subject line, personal stories.
All of us constantly construct stories about our lives.
Most of the time, this happens under the surface.
We are not mindful of the narrative choices we make.
Every so often, however, something happens in our lives
that causes us to revisit our stories.
A marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child,
the death of a close friend.
All of these take time to assimilate
into the narrative of a close friend. All of these take time to assimilate into the
narrative of our lives. At Olin College of Engineering, psychologist Jonathan
Adler has studied what happens when events come along that challenge our
pre-existing narratives. John, I want you to tell me the story of a physician
named Annie Brewster. Can you describe what Annie's life was
like when she was in her late 20s? Annie was one of these unbelievably driven, successful students.
She was, had done extremely well in medical school, landed a great residency, was working
a million hours, but she had started to experience some tingling
on one side of her body and she went to get it checked out and, you know, she was very
well connected in the medical sphere and waited to see the Uber specialist who quite brusquely
told her that she had multiple sclerosis.
I want to play a bit of tape here from Annie herself talking about how she reacted to the
news from her doctor.
It took me a long time to come to terms with that diagnosis, to accept it into my life.
Really it was difficult for me because I'd always thought of myself as somebody who was
really strong.
My body had always worked for me, done what I wanted it to do.
And to think of myself as someone with an illness,
I really had to redefine myself and get over some denial.
Jonathan, you say that Annie was engaging
in an internal process of accommodation.
What do you mean by this?
And is accommodation a good thing?
So most of what we do most of the time,
we call assimilation.
We go on living our lives, and when new things happen,
we just assimilate those experiences into the story
that we've been telling, whether we do that consciously or not.
But sometimes something happens that really makes us question
the story we've been telling.
And in those instances, the story itself
needs to change to accommodate that new experience.
And what we call accommodative processing is a key narrative variable in supporting our well-being,
but it doesn't support our well-being in exactly the way redemption does, for example.
But accommodative processing, it helps us feel like our life has meaning and we understand it,
even if it doesn't always feel good.
And so Annie tells this story that once she did finally start to accommodate this experience,
when she did really start to reshape her identity to include this idea of herself as having
an illness, she stepped away from her very prestigious medical career.
She went down to part-time and she founded a nonprofit organization called Health Story
Collaborative.
And I met Annie about a year into that process, and she was going around and collecting other
people's stories and curating them.
And 10 years later, we have worked really closely together developing programs that leverage the science of narrative
in order to support storytelling in the highly fragmented and fragmenting medical ecosystem.
When we modify our life stories to accommodate new life events, those events no longer feel
random and aberrational.
The less we feel buffeted by random events, the more we feel like we are in control of
our own lives.
This leads to the next idea.
Jonathan has found that stories that give us a feeling that we are in charge of our
own lives are linked to higher well-being.
Agency is a theme in people's stories. We assess it along a continuum from sort of being able to
direct your life and then down at the other end of the continuum you're sort of batted around by the whims of fate. And again these are themes and stories. No one is completely in control of their
lives so it's the way you portray the main character in the story, i.e. you.
Jonathan cites the remarkable story of a woman named Leila.
So in the last five years, I've been doing a lot of research focused on identity development
among people who acquire physical disabilities. And Lela was a participant in one of my studies.
She tells this story of having these horrible headaches, which
gradually intensified to the point
where she couldn't function.
She spends time in three different hospitals
in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives.
And no one can figure out what's going on.
She decides to fly to India to see a specialist,
and he sends her right into surgery,
and when she wakes up, the pain is gone.
But she also can't see,
and the surgeon had been able to alleviate
the unexplained swelling in her head
that had been pressing on her optic nerves,
but the nerve was also irreparably damaged.
So for a few months, everyone held out hope that her vision might return,
but Layla was actually the first one to accept that it wouldn't.
She said, I realized as soon as I started accepting it, I started becoming less frustrated and sad.
And though it was incredibly difficult and scary for her,
Layla gradually threw herself into the task of becoming a blind person.
So she shifts careers, she moves to the United States to get training in computer science,
where she starts working on adaptive technology for other blind
and low vision people.
I want to play a clip of Leila talking about her experience.
Here she is.
I think my blindness is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Even right now, if a doctor came here and told me they have a cure,
I would not take it.
Because I think for me, it made me understand myself and it made me
like it gives me these new challenges every single day. It presents me with
something and through those challenges I'm able to understand myself. So that's
a remarkable account Jonathan but as I hear Leila talking I feel like I've heard the same thing in the deaf
community. Many deaf people today say, you know, the real problem is not with deafness. I just
happen to speak sign language. I speak a different language than you do. Now we can all debate how
and whether something should be considered a disorder. But I think the point you're trying
to make here is that the stories we tell can either put us in the driver's seat or put us in the passenger's seat, and Leila is clearly choosing to be in the driver's
seat.
That's right.
Traditional models of disability in the United States have this medical approach where disability
is a problem to be solved or eradicated, and social models of disability or relational
models really push back on that and say,
disability is in the interaction between my body
and the built and social environment around us.
In Layla's story, like you said,
there's also this sense of agency.
Now that this is part of who I am,
what am I gonna do with it?
How can I take control of this
and use it for things that matter to me?
You can see a theme emerging here. As you tell the story of your life,
do you see yourself as a passive subject, someone to whom things happen, or as an active protagonist,
someone who is directing the course of her own life?
Now as Jonathan says, every life offers lots of evidence that allows you to draw either conclusion.
Given this, Jonathan is saying, choose narratives that put you in the driver's seat.
Most of the narratives we have discussed so far have championed the idea of the individual.
But it's also the case that no man is an island. Yeah, so in our conversation so far,
we've been very focused on individuals.
But of course, we aren't these isolated individuals.
We're all connected.
And communion is a theme that captures the quality
of people's connections to others.
So in my research with people who have disabilities,
there's often a lot of talk about
their connections not only with family and friends and co-workers, but with the broader disability community.
So at Olin College, you help organize a yearly event called a Story Slam, at which students
perform renditions of their stories, tell about the events in their lives.
And in advance of one year slam, you worked with a student
named Antonio.
What was his story, Jonathan?
Yeah, so Antonio was really interested in thinking
through what it meant to him to be a first generation Latino
student at this small engineering college.
And he, he described feeling isolated, um, during his weekend on
campus as a prospective student.
It wasn't the conversations about science that made him feel left out.
It really was the small talk.
So he has this great line in the story where he says, I'm
definitely not fluent in cheese.
And what he means is that disconnection gets coded
into even the most mundane experiences,
not just the grand low points of our lives.
But as isolated as he was feeling,
Antonia homed in, not on his isolation,
but on a moment of connection.
I think I finally found somebody who understood.
connection. I think I finally found somebody who understood. Diego was a person who had also danced at Quintaneras, who had also brought lunch in
a repurposed sour cream container and applied to the same college scholarships
for low-income students. One would even think we had done all these things side
by side.
So I can hear the theme of positive communion here, Jonathan.
Antonio is telling a story that says, I'm not alone.
Exactly.
In this room full of people who did not look like him, Antonio found someone who did, and
they really connected.
And he says, you know, Diego threw down this challenge.
If you think there should be more people like us here,
then come and fix it.
And Antonio says, you know, I'm a competitive guy
and the next fall I was on a one-way bus trip
to Olin College.
So Jonathan, one final feature of a constructive story
is that it generates meaning for the person who tells it.
You say we're not always able to tell a happy story about what happens to us,
but we can try and tell a meaningful story
and there are benefits to telling such stories.
Can you explain what you mean?
Yeah, so to pan back for just a second,
when we think about the broad study of wellbeing,
it tends to cluster in sort of two domains,
which get their cumbersome names
from Aristotle.
So on the one hand, we have what's called hedonic well-being, which means it feels good.
And on the other hand, we have a kind of well-being called eudaimonic well-being, which means
it feels meaningful.
And these two domains of well-being are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other.
And if we think about our lives for a second, that makes sense, right?
We all do plenty of things that feel good, but don't feel particularly meaningful, like
we might binge watch TV or something.
And we can all think about experiences that feel meaningful, but don't feel particularly
good.
So in my work with Health Story Collaborative in particular,
we find that feeling good is not always an option for people.
Telling redemptive stories or stories high in the theme of agency and communion,
that's not always possible.
And in those situations,
we're often interested in the ways in which people can really think through the hard parts of their lives and find some meaning out of that.
And even if the meaning doesn't ultimately feel good in that sort of happy sense, that
meaning is still incredibly worthwhile.
I'm trying to imagine how someone who is going through a rough time might hear this episode,
Jonathan, and I worry that that person might say, you know, I've just lost my job.
I've just gotten divorced.
I've just lost a close family friend.
And now Jonathan Adler comes along and tells me that if I'm unhappy, it's because I'm not
telling the right story about my life.
How would you respond to that?
I want to say three things to that person.
The first thing is, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that things are so hard for you right now.
Of course, they're hard, and of course, you're not feeling good.
The second thing I want to say is, there
are all kinds of ways of making meaning of these experiences.
And so we might think about exploring themes of agency or communion. So if
you lost your job, are you feeling connected to your spouse or your kids? Or, you know, if something
challenging has happened, might there be some growth that comes from it? So we might explore
those themes. But the third thing I want to say is our personal stories exist in a broader narrative ecosystem.
And in the United States, there is an expectation that we can narrate challenging experiences in our lives with a redemptive spin.
We Americans love the theme of redemption, and we expect people to be able to do it.
And I call this the press of redemption and we expect people to be able to do it and I call
this the press for redemption and in my work with Health Story Collaborative we
often find that people feel like they're having this double whammy experience
where you know I'm sick and I'm not telling the right kind of story about it
so my cancer didn't teach me that I'm such a fighter or that people
love me more than I ever would have realized if I never had cancer. No, some people say,
you know, this just sucks. And I think in those instances, we want to acknowledge that
and not try to convince them that it doesn't just suck. Let them know that there's a reason
they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story, because our culture puts a particular premium on a particular kind of story, and then to help them find other
kinds of narrative roots that might lead towards a sense of meaningfulness, even if they can't
make you feel better.
So many of the examples we've talked about here have involved individuals, but as we've
started to see, I think, towards the end of this conversation,
we're slowly broadening out beyond the individual.
Because of course, these ideas are
relevant outside of individual minds as well.
So societies tell themselves narratives.
Nations tell themselves stories all the time.
Do you think ideas of narrative psychology
speak to how nations talk to themselves
and perhaps how they ought to talk to themselves?
I do.
And this is really at the forefront of the field.
So my colleagues Kate McLean and Moin Syed
have written really compellingly about what
they call master narratives.
So these are the dominant storylines in our culture
that tend to be invisible, but also ubiquitous and sort
of rigid and powerful. And we are always
in a constant dialogue with the master narratives in our particular cultural contexts.
Families have narratives that guide the way relationships unfold, and as you said,
countries certainly do. So again,
narratives are not all good or all bad at the individual level and they're not all good or all bad at the
at the national level either, but these national
narratives are emergent from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell.
So a number of years ago, Jonathan, when you were still living in Illinois, the junior senator from your state gave a memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention. I want to play you a clip from the speech that first put
Barack Obama in the national spotlight.
I'm not talking about blind optimism here. The almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't think about
it, or health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about something more substantial.
It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs.
The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores. The hope of a young naval
lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta. The hope of a mill worker's son who dares
to defy the odds. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America
has a place for him too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope.
In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in
things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.
I'm wondering, Jonathan, as someone
who has studied narrative psychology for a number
of years, how do you hear that speech?
So then Senator Obama was tapping into the American master
narrative of redemption.
Each of those images includes this shift
from negative to positive.
And like all political speeches, this
was a strategic communication with very particular aims,
focused on stirring the public to support this speaker's
preferred candidates and issues.
So appealing to entrenched master narratives
is a very strategic thing to do.
And many, many politicians adopt redemptive themes in their speeches.
And obviously there are many wonderful aspects of that storyline and as we've discussed problematic
ones too, but we see evidence of leaders serving as narrators in chief. They shape our narrative
ecology as they model storytelling for us.
We started this conversation, Jonathan, by talking about ways in which you came to understand
the life events in your own life
and to tell stories about those life events
in a way that was more positive than negative.
I'm wondering, after all these years
of studying narrative psychology,
do you do this on a regular basis now?
What are the stories you tell yourself today in terms of where you are and where your life is and where you want
your life to go?
So it's not that I am consciously going through my daily experiences and editing them into
the kinds of storylines that I have learned are likely to support my well-being. But when
difficult things happen in particular, I think I do pause and I
remember that there are different kinds of well-being and that the way I make sense of
those experiences will lead me to different kinds of well-being. But I think for a lot of people,
just the awareness that you are not only the main character in your story, but also the narrator,
and that the way you choose to tell the story of your life really matters, that can be an empowering insight.
Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College.
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Oh, it's been an incredible pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Do you have follow-up questions or ideas that you'd like to share after listening to this episode?
How do you tell the story of your life, and how does that shape the way you see yourself?
If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts with the Hidden Brain audience, please record
a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.
Use the subject line, personal stories.
That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org
You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Think about the last time you entered a negotiation.
Perhaps you were asking your boss for a raise or trying to get your child to do their chores.
What was your strategy as you headed into the discussion?
Often, our focus is on what we want to get out of the interaction.
Any planning we do is focused on how to put our best case forward.
But behavioral scientist Max Bezerman offers a different approach.
He's at Harvard Business School and author of the book Negotiation, The Game Has Changed.
Max says instead of focusing on our goals, we should focus on our blind spots.
We recently talked with Max on Hidden Brain. Those episodes are titled
Relationships 2.0 Become a Better Negotiator and for our Hidden Brain Plus
subscribers Relationships 2.0 Win-Win. Today as part of our ongoing series
Your Questions Answered we asked Max to come back
on the show to answer your questions about negotiation.
Max Baserman, welcome back to Hidden Brain.
I'm delighted to be back and I look forward to hearing the questions that are in the minds
of your listeners.
So Max, it's understandable that we're often immersed in our own perspectives during a
negotiation, but in doing so, you say that we can become biased in our own perspectives,
biased by our own needs.
How so, Max?
So once we know what role we're in, what side we're playing, what our interests are, our
ability to be objective largely disappears.
So if we have, let's say a plaintiff
and a defendant in a lawsuit,
and we ask them to reveal to us what they think
that the case is worth,
plaintiffs naturally think that the case is worth
more than the defendants. It's not just that they're making that claim to convince the jury
or the judge, but they actually come to believe that. And similarly, lots of
salespeople think that what they're selling is worth more than what the buyer
thinks that they're buying. So you have this kind of bias to see the world in
the way that would favor your side.
So at one level, of course, when we want something very badly, it makes sense that we spend a
lot of time thinking about what we want.
Why does this make us less effective as negotiators?
Because negotiation is not one person decision making.
If you were the dictator and you could make the decision,
it wouldn't be a negotiation. The fact that you need to work with another person, or many other people, requires that you take their perspective to imagine what the world looks like
from their side so that you aren't putting things on the table that they're never going to accept
under any circumstance. One of the key limitations that we find in negotiation
is that people don't do a good enough job
of thinking about the decisions of the other party.
So you say that when two parties are negotiating,
overconfidence can form a major obstacle
to reaching an agreement.
Is that connected to what you were just telling me
about defendants and prosecutors
in sort of courtroom settings? Absolutely. to reaching an agreement. Is that connected to what you were just telling me about defendants and prosecutors
in sort of courtroom settings?
Absolutely.
So we see the world from our own perspective.
We have a biased view of what a fair price would be.
And we're overconfident that if we simply hold out
for our position, that the other side
will eventually fold.
And too many deals are missed because we have parties on both sides
holding out for something that's tilted in their favor
and not finding that viable price in the middle
that both sides could in fact live with.
So why in the world do we spend so much money on attorneys
to go through expensive court procedures
to end up with a deal that we could have
reached on our own without all those expenses. So anytime that we've incurred these expenses for the
opportunity to have this fight with the other side, we're ending up with a deal that's worse
than what we could have had had had the two parties used reasonable negotiation
procedures and reached a deal more efficiently. Hmm. Many listeners might be
listening to this and saying, you know, when I'm going in to have a difficult
negotiation, whether that's buying a car or asking for a raise or, you know,
discussing something that is unpleasant with a partner or a spouse, I often feel underconfident, not overconfident. Can underconfidence also undermine us and how
do we strike a balance between overconfidence and underconfidence?
It's a great question. So my excellent colleague at the Haas School at Berkeley,
Don Moore, I think of as the world's expert on appropriate confidence.
And he wrote a book called Perfectly Confident.
What Don finds is that when people are in domains
where they lack competence,
they are even less confident than they should be.
But when people are in domains where they feel confident,
they're even more confident than their skills
and abilities should lead them to be.
So given that that's the case,
and given that sometimes we have to be negotiating
in areas that might not be areas of competence,
how do we solve this problem?
So sometimes we don't need to.
If you're in a flea market and you're buying a souvenir
for $15 and you make a mistake, no big problem.
And I would say, get on with life and don't worry about it.
If it's an important part of your work setting
and you don't have the expertise,
perhaps you need to buy it or borrow it
from someone else in your firm or from an outside advisor.
So we need to understand when we know too little,
and we need to make up for our lack of personal expertise
by relying on the expertise of someone else who we can trust.
I'd like you to talk about another bias that affects us when we're negotiating.
This one is called anchoring. Can you explain what anchoring is?
Sure. 50 years ago Kahneman and Tversky, well-known
psychologists who created the field of behavioral economics in many ways, did an experiment where
they basically asked people what percent of the countries in the United Nations were from Africa,
and they said, wait, before you give me your estimate,
let's get an estimate from a roulette wheel.
And the roulette wheel either stops at 65 or 10,
and people are asked is the number higher or lower
than 10 or 65.
And people who see 65 say lower,
and they reduce to 65 to 45 on average. The people who see 10 come all the way up to 24.
And while both parties rejected these unreasonable anchors, you get a dramatic difference based on
did I start high and come down or start low and come up. And the same is true in negotiations.
If you're selling, you're much better off starting with a
high price and coming down to something viable but favorable to you within the zone of possible
agreement. If you're buying just the opposite, better to start with a low number and come up
into the zone of possible agreement. So as a negotiator, anchoring can be very, very effective.
On the other hand, you wanna anchor with a number
that's reasonable enough to get their attention.
If they're not paying attention to you,
then that's not very helpful.
So if you look at a house for,
that's on the market for $499,000,
and you read anchors have a dramatic influence,
you might offer them $100,000,
but they're simply gonna ignore you.
That's not gonna anchor the discussion.
But it might be the case that if you've done your homework
that you can anchor, you can respond with 460 rather than 470
and anchor them at a lower number
and that could could favor that
could tilt you in a favorable direction in terms of what the ultimate price will
be. So the general advice is to identify what is a viable range of agreements and
then anchor near your preferred end of that zone. So let's get to listener
questions now Max. This first one comes from a listener
named Rose.
I'm just wondering about what negotiation looks like in certain cultures and how much
that should play into it. So I'm from the Midwest where negotiation is kind of looked
on pretty negatively. It's accepted for things like buying a car, but in general, if you were to haggle with someone, it's not considered the most socially acceptable thing. So I'm
just wondering outside of the Midwest, if there's other places like this, how much that
should come into our minds as we start to negotiate with people, or do I just need to get over my Nebraska niceness
to get a better deal?
So Max, there are clearly cultures
in which haggling is more the norm than others.
When you're living in a haggling,
averse culture like Rose's, how should she proceed?
Well, first of all, I love Rose's question,
and I love the fact that after talking about
cultures, she focuses on Nebraska.
So a lot of other listeners, when they hear culture, they might have been thinking China
or Japan.
And I think Rose highlights that we have different cultures in different parts of the U.S.
We have different cultures in different industries.
So it's important to understand the world that you're in.
So my first advice to Rose is,
sounds like life is fine in Nebraska for her,
and she should be perfectly comfortable not negotiating
in situations that don't call for negotiation.
On the other hand, if she moves to a place
where negotiation is the norm, she needs to adapt to that. Or if she takes a job
and a career where the prices aren't fixed and haggling is normal, she needs to adapt to that.
And in my book, Negotiation and the Game has Changed, one of the points that I make is that
we're now negotiating with more and more people who are different from ourselves, who come from different cultures, and we want to understand what the norms look like.
Rose might also find it intriguing to know that I was in December, I was hiking up to Machu Picchu
and the guide on the trip said, and by the way, in a lot of emerging economies, it's normal to haggle with people
over price. He said, don't do that. People in Peru are used to offering you a fair price,
and you should take it or leave it rather than to haggle. So turns out that Cusco and Machu
Pichu may have a lot in common with Nebraska that wouldn't have been apparent on the surface. On the other hand, there are times when negotiating matters a whole lot.
30 years ago, Linda Babcock, excellent colleague at Carnegie Mellon, basically
found out that women were less likely to have a hagwool and as a result, they're
starting salaries were too low and that that created enormous pay differences
across their career. Laura
Cray, now at Berkeley, suggests that that's no longer true. So we need to understand the
culture and the time and the place and what's appropriate and take that into consideration
as we develop our own strategy.
This makes me think that when you're negotiating with someone, you might be negotiating
over something you're actually exchanging.
So you're selling me a car, I'm trying to buy a car.
So at one level, the negotiation is about something that is tangible to something that's
material.
But as we're negotiating with each other, the act of negotiation itself carries psychological
meaning.
And so if I come in and I basically lowball you
to an extent in terms of what you want for the car, you know, you're offering a used car for,
you know, $6,000 and I offer you a hundred bucks, you know, you're not just going to see that as a
low anchor. You might not even dismiss me. You might be offended by what it is that I'm doing.
And it makes me realize that negotiations are not just about the thing being negotiated, they're also about how we see ourselves,
our self-worth, how we believe the other person sees us. It's tied up with all of these psychological
issues. Absolutely. So Shankar, let's assume that we're acquaintances, which we are, but we've never
had dinner together. And so let's assume that I'm the one selling the car
for 6,000.
And I think, you know, I'm happy with 5,500.
And since you're my acquaintance, you know,
I'd probably even be okay selling it to you for $5,000
and taking a little bit less
than what I think the market could bear.
But when you open with that $100 offer,
or even a $3,000 offer, I think, wait a second,
I was dealing with you as if our relationship matters.
Your unreasonable offer suggests
this is a very different world.
Right.
So not only do we get a breakdown in the negotiation,
but I don't like you as well
because of the way you handled that particular situation.
So we got another comment from a listener named Roxana, and Roxana heard the story you shared
about getting sucked into a negotiation over a taxi while you and your wife were in Thailand.
In the incident that you mentioned, two taxi drivers quoted you a charge that was higher
than you wanted to pay, but the difference in both cases was less than a dollar.
Roxana shared her own story of witnessing an American tourist haggling over 25 cents
when buying a handmade blouse from an indigenous woman in Mexico. And her point was that context
matters. When people from wealthy countries visit less wealthy ones, there is a big economic power imbalance. Should we consider that when
we're negotiating, Max? Absolutely. If you'll recall in the taxi story, I knew
that my students were gonna quiz me the next day on what did I pay for the taxi.
But my spouse in that story, who was standing on the street, not in the taxi because of my frugalsness,
would very much be on Roxanna's side of that story.
So I think that we should often consider
the nature of the relationship, the nature of the transaction,
how important the money is to us when we decide
whether and how aggressively the money is to us when we decide whether and how aggressively
we should negotiate.
So despite the fact that I may be on the wrong side
of Roxana's argument, I'm gonna side with her
in terms of the general point she's making.
Yeah, because I think sometimes,
I think this happened to you in Thailand,
you sort of get caught up in the moment
in sort of the excitement of the negotiation,
or even just a sense of fairness
where you feel like you're being taken advantage of. And I think the point that she is making here,
which is an important one, is that maybe sometimes it's okay to be taken advantage of.
Yeah, or I would say reframe it as to there's better uses of your time
than haggling with somebody over a small amount of money who needs some money more than you.
than haggling with somebody over a small amount of money who needs some money more than you.
Our guest is behavioral scientist Max Bezerman joining us to answer listener
questions about his work on negotiation. More of those questions in a moment.
You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Your Questions Answered, our segment where we answer listeners' follow-up questions
about ideas we've featured on the show. Today we're talking with Max Bezerman. He
researches the dynamics of negotiation at the Harvard Business School.
Max, we got another question from a listener named Elizabeth. She's a divorce
attorney and works with couples with years or decades of animosity between
them.
Elizabeth feels that such hostility can get in the way of reaching the best outcome.
So she asks, what are some tips for negotiating in a low trust or zero trust relationship?
What do you think, Max?
So there's too much harm that occurs in The divorce process in too many cases and sometimes there are also children involved who suffer as a result of the animosity
Between parties. Um, I think we should also think about the fact that
The longer the process goes on and the more legal
Activity that occurs the more legal activity that occurs,
the more expensive the process is to both parties.
So one interesting issue is when you raise the temperature
in the negotiation out of some sort of desire
to harm the other party, how are they going to respond?
And a quick answer is that they're likely to reciprocate.
And all of a sudden, now we're not getting anything
out of our venting toward the other party.
We're simply increasing the emotional grief we suffer
and we're increasing the costs that it's gonna take
to resolve the dispute.
But one role that mediators can play,
mediators are simply people with negotiation skills
who help two parties reach agreement.
One of the nice parts about the use of a mediator
is that they can bring down the temperature
and bring reasonableness to both sides of the negotiation.
So one viable answer to our divorce attorney
is that when things get particularly tough,
that may be a good time to bring in a skilled meat eater.
Yeah, I mean, it's a tricky position, I think,
for a lawyer to be, because the lawyer is committed,
professionally committed, to serving
her client's best interests,
and that could often mean getting the client the best deal
or getting the client the best outcome in the negotiation. you know the best outcome in the negotiation but I think
partly what you're saying here is that both parties are not well served when
they have two eager attorneys who are willing to go at it hammer and
tongs instead of finding someone who can actually bridge the divide between the
two. That's right so imagine that you have a divorcing couple and their family wealth is a half a million
dollars, $500,000.
And they could amicably reach a resolution and they could divide it at $250,000 each
or maybe one side would get 200,000 and other side would get 300,000 for a variety of reasons
that could be justified.
But if instead we spend a year and a half fighting through the court system, and we're paying lawyers along the way and we incur $200,000 of legal expenses, now there's only $300,000 to
divide in addition to the fact that we've hurt the emotional connection between the two parties,
they could have all kinds of repercussions.
If there were children involved, all that hostility is likely to have a negative effect
on the children as well.
So figuring out how to get to a wise agreement efficiently and getting over the emotional
barriers can be critical to coming up with
a wise agreement.
Our next comment comes from a listener named Kathy.
Kathy heard our interview with you, Max, and called in to share a positive negotiation
experience that she had while buying a car.
The year was about 1993 and I was a single mom on a shoestring budget with no experience
in buying a car.
I visited several car lots and was horrified at the transparent lies and aggressive sales
tactics both about their competitors cars and their own cars.
Disillusioned, I did some homework and decided to put the shoe on the other foot.
I did a few test drives and realized that a Nissan Sentra was my best option.
I researched dealer prices and reasonable markups, decided on my price, somewhere around
$15,700 to $16,000 if I remember right, and began.
I called the three Nissan dealers within 75 miles, confirmed that they had the car I wanted
on site, and explained that I had the cash in hand or in the bank and was willing to
buy a car that day.
They loved hearing that.
Then I pitted the dealers against each other.
And every time one guy gave me a cheaper price,
I called the other two saying, well,
can you beat this particular price?
And it was impressive how quickly the prices came down.
Then the last salesman said to me,
I can do better for you. I get a commission on how many cars
I sell regardless of price. I will sell you this car for $12,700
if you come in today. I was delighted.
It was well below dealer price and I had other salesmen
just be astonished at the price I got.
So obviously Cathy did well well here, Max,
but can you unpack for us what she did right?
What can we learn from her story?
I love Kathy's story, and it's in a context
that a lot of people describe as their least favorite negotiation.
People don't like buying queries broadly.
So I think that Kathy did two things that are just terrific. One,
she did a lot of homework. And when my students take a semester course on negotiation,
one of the things that they learn is that so much of negotiation occurs before you even talk to the
other side. Doing your homework, learning what the dealer cost is, learning what the competitive
landscape looks like is absolutely critical to negotiating effectively. So I think Cathy did a
great job at doing her homework. And then second, she did a great job at creating competition.
And she was well aware that when she talked to dealer A, dealer B was a very attractive alternative that she had.
And when she was talking to B,
she knew that C was available.
So by having multiple options,
it gave Kathy power and comfort.
And that allowed her to get a far better price
than she would if she simply went into a single car dealer,
used her intuition and kind of winged it. So I give
Cathy great marks on both preparation and creating a competitive environment that strengthened her
power in negotiating for her desired car. I'm wondering, Max, as you have written this
new book, you obviously are the author of many other books on negotiation as well.
Are there patterns that you see that come up over and over again?
Are there ideas that you would want to leave our listeners with to keep in mind as they
go about their lives negotiating about things that are important to them?
Absolutely.
So, first thing, people too often assume a mythical fixed pie.
They assume that the surplus to be divided
between the two parties is fixed
and they miss opportunities to create joint gain.
Second, there are two myopic.
They focus on their perspective
when there's so much advantage to thinking
about the perspective of the other side,
to empathize with the position of the other side so that you can understand who they are and how you can negotiate with them
most effectively.
And following a couple of the questions, to understand how important it is to understand
the environment, perhaps culture, perhaps economic circumstances of the other side to figure out what the actual
negotiation game looks like and how to best negotiate effectively in that environment.
Max Bezerman is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School.
He's the author of Negotiation, The Game Has Changed.
Max, thank you so much for joining us again on Hidden Brain.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure to be back with you again.
["The Game Has Changed"]
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