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A book I am currently reading to develop my negotiation skills, Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell, starts with an interesting thought experiment to determine the reader’s negotiation style.
You are one of ten strangers in a room sitting at a round table. Someone walks into the room and offers a thousand dollars to the first two people who can persuade the person sitting opposite them to stand up, walk round the table and stand behind their chair. Everyone else will walk away empty handed. You need to think quick, before someone else succeeds in the task. What is your strategy?
Shell suggests that a person’s response is a good indicator of their negotiating style.
An ‘avoider’ will be reluctant to take part in the exercise, fearing looking silly, suspecting a trick, or being unable to consider the possibility of being able to persuade the other party to walk round the table.
A ‘compromiser’ see the possibility of offering $500 to the person sitting opposite if they run around the table. This is the most common solution to the problem (and the one I came up with). Shell points out that, in practice, it is often difficult to reach agreement on who should do the running, however. People fear they may be tricked and would prefer the other party to move. The time it takes for this secondary negotiation may cost both parties the prize.
The person beating the compromisers may be an ‘accommodator’ who, having listened to the problem, sees time as of the essence and immediately runs around the table and stands behind the other person’s chair. They risk being able to convince their opposite number to share the spoils after the event, trusting in the better nature of the other party.
A ‘competitor’ will try to gain as much of the full thousand dollars by any means necessary. At the most unscrupulous level, this may mean making promises to their counterpart which they later try to back out of, or making excuses to prevent them from having to run round the table to ensure the other party does.
Finally, the best overall solution may be attained by the ‘problem solver’. This person immediately starts running, and shouts at the other person to do the same as, if you both do so, you both stand to win $1,000 without having to do so.
The experiment is instructive because it indicates an important dimension to negotiating which is often overlooked. In negotiation situations our first focus is often on how we can get as big a slice of the pie as possible, which means we perceive any gain as being at the expense of the other party. This mode of thinking can lead to a highly adversarial form of negotiation where each side sees depriving the opponent as the only way to succeed. This puts off many people from trying to make a deal, as they see it as a highly competitive, distasteful process. Successful negotiators, Shell argues, don’t fall for this fallacy, and instead look for opportunities to increase the overall size of the pie, as in the above example where the problem solver sees $2,000 at stake for the two parties rather than $1,000.
Practical situations are rarely as cut and dried as the one above. Shell points out, however, that giving full consideration to the other party’s interests and how they may coincide with your own will often provide insights to make the negotiation process smoother and potentially more beneficial to both parties. He uses everyday shopping as a simple example. Those who fail to fully consider the priorities of the merchant will be reluctant to haggle, as they will fail to give sufficient consideration to the seller’s desire to keep a customer happy. His students have discovered that merely asking for a discount from a retailer will often result in a reduction of price without any need to haggle, as the retailer will consider a reasonable discount a price worth paying to make a customer happy.
Shell’s book is great at providing a theoretical framework upon which to build one’s negotiation style and strategy, and also contains plenty of practical examples and advice on how to apply the theories. To those who find bargaining a natural process this may be over the top and unnecessary, but to us lesser mortals, particularly those with a geeky penchant for underpinning theories and conceptual frameworks, it’s a very worthwhile read.
Having recently read Daniel Gilbert’s excellent Stumbling Upon Happiness, I was pleased to find an article penned by him relaunching the New York Times’ Happy Days blog.
It was in ‘Stumbling Upon Happiness’ that I first read about the ‘change blindness’ experiments that I covered in my most recent post. In the book, Gilbert convincingly shows how our overestimation of our brain’s ability to effectively collect, process and evaluate data leads us to act in highly irrational and inconsistent ways in the pursuit of our own happiness. In particular, he demonstrates how bad we are at predicting how we will feel in the future. We consistently overestimate the happiness that riches and good fortune will bring us, as well as the unhappiness wrought by misfortune. Not only that, but our brains also seem to lack the ability to ever learn from such mistakes. You are probably be saying to yourself that this is no great revelation, but at the same time I would predict that you are as helpless as I am to convert your knowledge into a strategy to overcome the problem.
As an example of the paradoxes involved in predicting our own future happiness, Gilbert cites the example of a bride about to get married. If you asked her how she would feel if she was jilted at the altar, you would expect her to say that it would be her worst nightmare. And yet you could equally predict that if you asked a selection of brides who had been faced this nightmare a couple of years ago that a good number would say that it was the best thing that had ever happened to them. They would likely report that they had narrowly escaped a marriage that was clearly wrong for them, and had since moved on to create a new life for themselves, perhaps finding a new partner who, in retrospect, is a much better choice. The bride-to-be, however, is highly unlikely to take such a long-term view into account when considering the effects of being left at the altar. It turns out that such ‘future blindness’ afflicts all of us on a pretty much constant basis.
Daniel Gilbert’s post in the New York Times shows how, in a similar fashion, uncertainty leaves us with a disproportionate degree of unhappiness compared to those who have no doubt of their fate:
Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.
That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur.
[...]
Similarly, researchers at the University of British Columbia studied people who had undergone genetic testing to determine their risk for developing the neurodegenerative disorder known as Huntington’s disease. Those who learned that they had a very high likelihood of developing the condition were happier a year after testing than those who did not learn what their risk was.
Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
As my wife and I search for our first permanent work since arriving in Canada last October, we may occasionally be laid low for a couple of days by bad news of rejection following a promising interview, or from a temporary position not developing into something longer term but, by and large, I can imagine that our states of mind are healthier than many of those in fear of losing their jobs at the moment. Our optimism bounces back as soon as our focus returns to the possibilities in front of us. Applying for jobs is a process that spurs the imagination to what we could do if successful (getting our belongings out of storage and getting a place of our own, just for starters), and the mere process of writing nice things about oneself in résumés and cover letters seems to inject positivity.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder how we would feel if we were both working for GM or Chrysler at the moment with the threat of unemployment hanging over both of our heads. We would likely be scared to death about ending up in the situation we are currently living in. It would be great if had the mental wherewithal to learn something from this observation in order to avoid stresses in the future when I have more to lose. As Daniel Gilbert suggests, however, this is far easier said than done.
If you didn’t catch it first time around, you can find out the debilitating affects of inattentional blindness by taking the following test:
To be frank, I’m not sure how much this awareness of the shortcomings of our observational powers will help in avoiding collisions with bikes, but it does make you think of how much our brains fail to observe of what is going on around us. I am a particularly unobservant person, often failing to notice quite blatant household rearrangements that my wife has made in my absence, much to her chagrin and my embarrassment. On the other hand, I have a very keen eye for birds and other wildlife that often completely escappes the attention of others. It seems we all operate on different cognitive frequencies, but our brains all seem to only be able to process a selected edited highlights of what goes on around us. Here’s another experiment which discusses some of the cognitive science involved:
Finally, here’s a video showing Derren Brown exploiting this ‘change blindness’ to the extreme.
On a more serious note, around 20 cyclists are killed on London’s roads every year, over half by heavy goods vehicles. On a more practical note, Transport For London has issued 10,000 fresnel lenses to the capital’s freight operators. These lenses allow the driver to see below and behind the normal range of vision, which they hope will reduce serious accidents in the future. For the rest of us, I guess avoiding distractions (not using cellphones when driving is a particularly obvious example) and trying to be aware as possible of what is going on around us is the best advice although, ironically, the above experiments hint that the occasional ‘moonwalking bear’ will always occasionally evade our notice. All we can do is try to keep them to a minimum.
For the first time in its nineteen year history, Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival is to include a production of Othello, having lined up black Canadian actor Michael Blake to play the role.
“It’s been an omission, no question,” says festival artistic director Christopher Gaze. “But I don’t think it got away from us, it’s purely been a question of finding the right actor. … There just aren’t enough black actors here in Vancouver,” he adds. “And to be able to play a part of this measure – if you’re black or of an ethnicity that would work – like any other part, you have to win it. This is a massive role – in scope and emotion – it’s very difficult.”
Ray Fearon as Othello
The greatest tragedy is that no black actors in the West of Canada have been considered good enough to play the role up to now, even if the role is considered one of the toughest in the repertoire. Having played Othello with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, British actor Ray Fearon commented:
People say Iago is the better role. But Othello is mammoth emotionally. I tell you, it finished me off. It demolished me physically. I had to have two months off afterwards and I grew up as a damn athlete!
Fearon’s performance was something of a watershed. Only ten years ago he became the first black actor to play the role in the main theatre at Stratford (although Ben Kingsley played the role without makeup as an Arab in 1985). Donald Sinden was the last white actor to perform the part in ‘blackface’ for the RSC in 1978.
Olivier: "My kingdom for a banjo!"
Even if one accepts the defeatist view that decent black Shakespearean actors are as rare as hens’ teeth, can it really ever be the best option to leave such a major play out of the repertoire? The theatre has always been a place where masks and disguises are worn and the audience is asked to suspend disbelief, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays. Many of his works originally featured men dressed as women dressed as men. There is no controversy when Shylock is played by a gentile, when Lear is played by a young man or, indeed, when black actors play Hamlet or Kings of England.
Clearly, casting the role of Othello causes more of a problem, as Othello’s racial difference inspires much of the fierce invective spoken by Iago and the rest of the supporting cast. Perhaps the cleverest solution, was a 1997 production in Washington, D.C., in which Patrick Stewart played Othello with an otherwise entirely black cast. However, it is surely possible to find inventive solutions to the problem of how to allow a white man to play the role of a ‘moor’ without resorting to stereotypes and caricatures which have typified some of the famous performances of the last century (a New York Times critic said of Olivier’s film performance that :“You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out or start banging a tambourine.”)
If there is a moral to this story, it is surely that more black actors need to be seen major Shakespearean roles, but the let’s hope that this can be achieved without typecasting. Black actors don’t need to be confined to having Othello as their only opportunity at a leading Shakespearean role any more than Jewish actors would appreciate only playing Shylock, or Scottish actors being limited to Macbeth. Similarly, the theatre will suffer if, for reasons of political correctness totally inconsistent with the flexibility associated with casting other Shakespearean roles, Othello becomes the exclusive property of black actors.
