Negotiation Biases | Zakelijke Onderhandelingen

Professioneel Onderhandelen met hulp van Zakelijk Onderhandelaar

Vooroordelen bij zakelijke onderhandelingen.

Ondanks dat een ieder bij zakelijke onderhandelingen denkt rationeel te werk te gaan, is het tegendeel vaak waar. Zelfs als er financieel veel op het spel staat staat, is niets menselijks ons vreemd. We weten feiten niet van subjectieve werkelijkheid te onderscheiden en barsten van de vooroordelen die een mogelijk gunstige overeenkomst in de weg staat. In bijgaande infographic heb ik de meest voorkomende “Negotiation Biases” in Engels op een rij gezet die bij zakelijke onderhandelingen in de weg kunnen zitten om resultaat te behalen.

What do you remember from your negotiations?

 After a negotiation your memories could be off from the presented facts

•  Suggestibility in negotiations means being inclined to accept and act on suggestions of others, even where the information is false, but plausible
• False memory is a psychological phenomenon, where in the negotiations you recall things that did not happen, or differently from the way it happened
• Misattribution of memory in negotiations refers to the ability to remember information correctly, but being wrong about the source

In negotiations you discard details to form generalities

• Negativity bias in negotiations is the notion that negative elements have a greater effect on your psychological state, than neutral or positive things
• Prejudice in negotiations is your preconceived feeling towards a person based solely on that person’s group membership, being social class, age, culture, etc.
• The generalization of the opposing person at the negotiating table, because you assume the stereotype is true for each individual person in the group

You reduce negotiation events to key elements

• Primacy and recency effect in negotiations refers to the phenomenon that the first and last terms of a list are best remembered
• List and length effect in negotiations refers to the finding that recognition performance for a short list is superior to that for a long list
• Peak–end rule in negotiations is a phenomenon in which you judge the experience based on how you felt at its climax and the end, rather than the whole experience

You store negotiation memories differently based on how you experienced them

• Misinformation effect in negotiations happens when your memories becomes less accurate, because of post-event information
• Next-in-line effect in negotiations is the phenomena where you are unable to recall information concerning events immediately preceding your turn to perform
• Absent-mindedness in negotiations means that you are so lost in thought that you do not realize what you are doing and what is happening around you

Information overload

In negotiations you primarily notice things already memorized or repeated often

• Availability heuristic in negotiations promotes that if something can be recalled, it must be important, at least more important than alternative solutions
• Illusory truth effect (also known as the validity effect) in business negotiations is the tendency to believe information to be correct after repeated exposure
• Empathy gap in business negotiations is the tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of positive and negative feelings, in either oneself or others
• Omission bias in negotiations is the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, than equally harmful omissions (inactions), because actions are more obvious than inactions

Extraordinary things in negotiations stick out more than common things

• Picture superiority effect in business negotiations refers to the phenomenon in which images are more likely to be remembered than words
• Negativity bias in negotiations is a psychological phenomenon, by which you have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories

You notice when something has changed during the negotiation process

• Anchoring in negotiations is the tendency to rely heavily on the “anchor”, usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject, when making decisions
• Conservatism or belief revision in negotiations is the tendency to revise your belief insufficiently, when presented with new clear evidence
• Framing effect in negotiations means that parties draw different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented
• Money illusion in business negotiations is the tendency to concentrate on the nominal value of money, rather than its real value in terms of purchasing power

You are drawn to negotiation details confirming your existing beliefs

• Confirmation bias in business negotiations is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information that confirm your preconceptions
• Post-purchase rationalization in business negotiations is the tendency to persuade yourself through rational argument that a purchase was good value
• Expectation bias is to believe and act on data that agree with your expectations for the negotiation outcome and to discard data that conflicts with those expectations

In negotiations you notice flaws in others more easily than flaws in yourself

• Bias blind spot in business negotiations is the tendency to see yourself as less biased, than other people
• Naïve cynicism in business negotiations is the expectation of more egocentric bias in others than in oneself
• Naïve realism belief in negotiations means that you see reality as it really is and the facts are clear to all parties. Those who don’t are uninformed, irrational, or biased

Not enough value

Even in sparse negotiation data you find stories and patterns

• Neglect of probability in business negotiations is the tendency to completely disregard probability, when making a decision under uncertainty
• Illusion of validity that our judgments are accurate in business negotiations, especially when available information is consistent and correlated
• Gambler’s fallacy in negotiations is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged
• Hot-hand fallacy in negotiations is the belief that if you have experienced success with a random event, you have a greater chance of success in additional attempts

Filling in negotiation elements from stereotypes and generalities

• Groupthink in negotiations occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony and conformity results in irrational or dysfunctional decision-making
• Just-world hypothesis in negotiations is the tendency for you to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing you to rationalize inexplicable injustice
• Authority bias in business negotiations is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and be more influenced by that opinion
• Bandwagon effect in negotiations is the herd mentality to do or believe things, because many other people do or believe the same

During negotiations you imagine things and people you are familiar with as better

• Not invented here in negotiations is the aversion to contact with or use of products, research, standards, or knowledge developed outside a group
• Reactive devaluation in business negotiations is the devaluing of proposals, only because they are originated by your adversary
• You simplify probabilities and numbers to make negotiations easier to understand
• Normalcy bias in negotiations is the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before in business deals
• Survivorship bias in negotiations is concentrating on the people or things that survived and overlooking those that didn’t, because of their lack of visibility
• Zero-sum bias in negotiations is a bias, whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game (i.e., one person gains at the expense of another)

You project your negotiation mindset and assumptions onto the past and the future

• Consistency bias in negotiations is incorrectly remembering your past attitudes and behavior as resembling present attitudes and behavior
• Pro-innovation bias gives you an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses
• Outcome bias in business negotiations is the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made
• Hindsight bias in business negotiations is the inclination to see past events as being more predictable, than they actually were

In business negotiations you think you know what other people are thinking

• Illusion of transparency in negotiations is a tendency for you to overestimate how well you understand others’ personal and mental states
• Illusion of asymmetric insight in negotiations is a cognitive bias, whereby you think your knowledge of others surpasses other people’s knowledge of you

Need for action in negotiations

To act in negotiations, you must be confident and know what is important

• Effort justification is when you value the efforts to achieve a negotiation outcome greater, than the objective value of the outcome
• Illusory superiority in negotiations is overestimating your desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people
• Illusion of control in negotiations is the tendency to overestimate your degree of influence over other external events
• Optimism bias in business and contract negotiations is the tendency to be over-optimistic, overestimating favorable deals and results
• Overconfidence effect in any negotiation is the excessive confidence in your own answers to (complex) questions

To get things done, you want to complete things you have invested time and energy in

• Endowment effect in negotiations is the tendency for you to demand much more to give up an object than you would be willing to pay to acquire it
• Disposition effect is the tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value
• Zero-risk bias is the preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk
• Loss aversion in negotiations refers to your tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5, than to find $5
• Sunk cost fallacy is that you justify increased investment in a decision, based on your cumulative prior investment, despite evidence the decision was wrong

What do you remember from your negotiations?

Motivated to preserve your status in a group, you avoid mistakes and irreversible decisions

• Status quo bias in business negotiations is the tendency you like things to stay relatively the same, so that you do not take action
• Social comparison bias in negotiations is when making decisions, you favor potential candidates who don’t compete with your own particular strengths
• Decoy effect is that you will tend to have a change in preference between two options, when presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominated

You favor simple options and complete information over complex negotiation options

• Less-is-better effect in negotiations is the tendency to prefer a smaller set to a larger set judged separately, but not jointly
• Law of triviality in business and contract negotiations is the tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues
• Belief bias in negotiations is an effect where your evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion
• Information bias in business negotiations is a cognitive bias to seek additional information, when it does not affect action
• Ambiguity effect in negotiations is that you have the tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown

Sessie strategie voor zakelijke onderhandelingen

Als je jouw zakelijke onderhandelingen met een strategisch bekwame onderhandelaar wilt bespreken, maak dan een afspraak met me. Samen personaliseren we onderhandelingsstrategieën die voor jou werken. De bovenstaande elementen om een kwalitatief gedegen beslissing te nemen, tonen aan wat je kan bereiken als je jouw onderhandelingen goed voorbereidt.