Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

by Chris Voss

looking at everything from economics to negotiation from a far different angle. They were the economist Amos Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Together, the two launched the field of behavioral economics—and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize—by showing that man is a very irrational beast. Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking. As you’ve seen, when business schools like Harvard’s began teaching negotiation in the 1980s, the process was presented as a straightforward economic analysis. It was a period when the world’s top academic economists declared that we were all “rational actors.” And so it went in negotiation classes: assuming the other side was acting rationally and selfishly in trying to maximize its position, the goal was to figure out how to respond in various scenarios to maximize one’s own value. This mentality baffled Kahneman, who from years in psychology knew that, in his words, “[I]t is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable.”