What, in your view, has changed most dramatically human behavior, negotiation context, or the environments in, in which negotiations now occur?

Yeah.

Z-- Um, so first, thanks, uh, for inviting me to On the Cusp.

I'm happy to be with you.

Um, and, um, I, you know, I think that the context has changed dramatically.

So, um, lots of things have changed, but, uh, I think, uh, organizing it in terms of how the context has changed is absolutely critical.

Um, the book was published in early twenty twenty-five, um, which means that I sent it off to the publisher in twenty twenty-four.

So could you elaborate on these cognitive mistakes, uh, um, the ones that are most persistent?

What, in your view, has changed most dramatically human behavior, negotiation context, or the environments in, in which negotiations now occur?

Yeah.

Z-- Um, so first, thanks, uh, for inviting me to On the Cusp.

I'm happy to be with you.

Um, and, um, I, you know, I think that the context has changed dramatically.

So, um, lots of things have changed, but, uh, I think, uh, organizing it in terms of how the context has changed is absolutely critical.

Um, the book was published in early twenty twenty-five, um, which means that I sent it off to the publisher in twenty twenty-four.

So could you elaborate on these cognitive mistakes, e- um, the ones that are most persistent?

What, in your view, has changed most dramatically, human behavior, negotiation context, or the environments in which negotiations now occur?

Yeah.

So first, thanks for inviting me, Tom.

I'm happy to be with you.

And I think that the Context has changed dramatically.

So lots of things have changed, but I think organizing it in terms of how the context has changed is absolutely critical.

The book was published in early 2025, which means that I sent it off to the publisher in 2024.

What about teaching negotiations in a world of AI? How does that change?

What, in your view, has changed most dramatically, human behavior, negotiation context, or the environments in which negotiations now occur?

Yeah.

So first, thanks for inviting me, Tom, because I'm happy to be with you.

And I think that the Context has changed dramatically.

So lots of things have changed, but I think organizing it in terms of how the context has changed is absolutely critical.

The book was published in early 2025, which means that I sent it off to the publisher in 2024.

So if you had asked me this question as I was sending the book off to the publisher, my answer, quite honestly, would have been different than it is today.

What about teaching negotiations in a world of AI? How does that change?

Um, can you explain what anchoring is?

Sure.

50 years ago, Kahneman and Tversky, well-known, um, uh, psychologists who created the field of behavioral economics in many ways, did an experiment where they, um, basically asked people how many... what percent of the, um, uh, countries in the United Nations were from Africa, and they said, "Wait, before you give me your estimate, let's get an estimate from a roulette wheel." And the roulette wheel either stops at 65 or 10, and people are asked, "Is the number higher or lower, um, than, than 10 or 65?" And people who see 65 say, "Lower," and they reduce the 65 to 45 on average.

The people who see, see 10 come all the way up to 24.

Um, and while both parties rejected th- these unreasonable anchors, you get a dramatic difference based on, "Did I start high and come down, or start low and come up?" And the same is true in negotiations.

Um, if you're selling, you're much better off starting with a high price and coming down to something, um, uh, viable but favorable to you within the zone of possible agreement.

If you're buying, just the opposite.

Um, when you're living in a haggling-averse culture like Rose is, how should she proceed?

Um, can you explain what you mean by this, uh, Max?

Sure.

So, John Rawls basically argues if you want to think about what a just society should look like, you need to put on a veil of ignorance.

You need to forget about whether you're male or female.

You need to forget about whether you're American or, um, from Lithuania.

You need to sort of, uh, drop all of your own identity to try to imagine how the world should operate if you didn't know what role you had in society.

And, um, uh, across number, a number of studies, we find that getting people to try to put on a veil of ignorance allows them to think about what would be just in a much fairer and more objective way.

Um, as you mentioned, Max, uh, you used to teach the art of negotiation to students there, but I understand that your students would challenge you on your own negotiation skills when it came to hiring taxi cabs.

In the end, I wasn't even on the road at all." What struck me about that, and I think about that with Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino as well, which is that the people who have been accused of having committed academic fraud are really successful already, and I'm curious what that tells you about either the stakes or the incentives or maybe the psychology of how this happens, because honestly, it, it surprises me.

I would say we don't know that much about why the fraudsters do what they do, and the most interesting source you just mentioned.

So Stapel wrote a book in Dutch called Uitsporing, which means something like Derailed, where he provides his information, and he goes on from the material you talked about to describing that he became like an alcoholic or a heroin addict, and he got used to the easy successes, and he began to believe that he wasn't doing any harm.

After all, he was just making it easier to publish information that was undoubtedly true.

So this aspect of sort of being lured onto the path of unethical behavior followed by addictive-like behavior becomes part of the story.

And Stapel goes on to talk about lots of other aspects like the need to score, ambition, laziness, wanting power, status.

So he provides this good insight, but most of the admitted fraudsters or the people who have lost their university positions based on allegations of fraud have simply disappeared and have never talked about it.

Twelve years ago, my default was to believe anything that was surprising." Here again is Max Bazerman, who was a colleague and friend of Kahneman's.