I'd like to return to to key constructs in negotiations that are really important. I want to talk about Anger and Power. One idea is that powerful people have wider latitude and what they can do. So powerful people. It's the surgeon in the operating room that can throw instruments, not the orderly, it's the law partners that can scream at people, not the paralegals. Powerful people can just do different things than other people. And it's particularly true with respect to expressing anger. We let powerful people express more anger than low power people. Another key idea is that we tend to make that reverse inference. We tend to give greater status to people who express anger. So somebody who's expressing anger, we assume, they must be powerful. So expressing anger for high power people is a less risky thing for them to do. And in uncertain situations, people who express some anger are perceived to be more powerful. And in negotiations, people often make concessions to somebody who's expressing anger though they really don't like it. So, anger is very common in negotiation, particularly disputes rather than opportunities. And as I already mentioned, people want to come to negotiations angry. It gives them a sense of control and people often paper over their emotions with anger. They regulate to become angry rather than anxious. Now, anger can often result when somebody's goals are blocked, they feel as if they were treated unfairly as if they can't do things they want to do. And here people are more likely to feel anger. Now when we are depleted, when we feel run down. So after a long trip after we said late, if we're tired, we haven't eaten, people can't regulate their emotions well and smaller triggers will move them to feel anger. And one of the key ideas I mentioned before is it's not good for you if your counterpart feels angry. Now, what kinds of things set people off? So the blocked goals not acknowledging what they're saying, personal attacks, eye-rolling, interrupting other people. There are lots of impolite things like language irritate, as we might say, pointing out where somebody is wrong, making something personal rather than about the broader problem, telling other people what to do. There are many triggers that can trigger anxiety and we want to be careful as we're communicating, that we minimize some of these things. So there's somebody on your negotiating team, you want to make sure that they're focusing on the problem, not attacking the person. Now, when people feel anger, it harms trust, people become more critical. They're less receptive to advice. Remember I said, when people feel anxious, they're more receptive, angry people are less receptive to what people are saying. And when people feel angry, they're also more likely to use deception. There more self focused and less concerned about others. Another key thing anger does is it harms perspective taking. So if we feel angry were collapsing our focus on ourselves, we're taking other people's perspective less. Well, now, imagine I said, you know, here's a picture, there's a number in front of somebody else and I say what numbers in front of that person. Now, we can look at this number and we can say look, the number in front of this person is the number 16. Or we can say, well we're taking their perspective and it's 91. Remember I mentioned before, perspective taking is essential for good negotiators. Effective negotiators will take those sides perspective, figure out what they need, what they're willing to accept and perspective taking creates the space for a negotiated agreement that's more likely to be good for you. So what I want to think about is how perspective taking enables us to collaborate more effectively and more efficiently. But anger can curb our ability to take perspective. So this effortful thinking of perspective taking is harder when we feel anger and anger collapses are focused on ourselves, so we're less likely to think expansively about our counterpart and think about their needs. Across studies that I've done with Jeremy ip we looked at different emotions and perspective taking, and we consistently find that in trials, like the one that I mentioned before, like what numbers in front of this person. In many perspective taking contexts, when people feel angry, they're far less likely to take other side's perspective, they're far more likely to see the world from their own perspective and see things in a self serving, self focused way. So perspective taking is extremely important for negotiations. Anger is one of the key things that harms our perspective inability. Power also harms perspective taking because it's effortful and powerful people get out of the habit of thinking about other people. So we need to work harder at perspective taking, particularly for feeling a little bit upset, or we're feeling like we're more powerful or we're feeling more self focused to reach across, to figure out where the spaces in the negotiation, we've gotta work extra hard at perspective taking.
