The Art of Negotiation by Michael Wheeler

Author:Michael Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We get one chance to make a first impression. New research by my HBS colleague Amy Cuddy suggests that the impression that people typically hope to make may work to their disadvantage.

Amy, a social psychologist, has built upon extensive research on “spontaneous trait inferences,” people’s impressions when they first see another person’s facial features. In seconds, we make assessments on multiple dimensions. Amy focuses on perceptions of warmth and competence, as they comprise 80 percent of our overall evaluation. Our initial judgment is about warmth, specifically whether we believe a person feels warm or cold toward us. (This is like the friend-or-foe assessment we mentioned earlier.) It’s how we read someone’s intentions, positive or negative. A second or so later, we assess her competence, especially her ability to carry out her inclination. Does she have the capacity to do us good or harm?

Amy’s studies have revealed a curious paradox. We want others to be concerned about us. Yet we prefer other people to see us as competent. In the context of negotiation, competence can mean both holding a strong hand and being skillful at the process.

Now here’s the key: people tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related. Thus, if we view the person that we’re dealing with as competent, then we assume that he feels less warm toward us. That means that the more successful we are in proving our competence, the more distance from others we create. The price of looking supercompetent (our natural impulse) is that we look like foes to other people.

We’ve just seen how this dynamic plays out verbally, when the first pair of real estate negotiators jostles over position, while the second two endeavor to establish connection. As Amy and others note, similar messages are transmitted through facial expressions and body posture. Indeed, the impact of physical signals may be stronger.

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