Let's think about how we deal with an angry counterpart. Imagine you walk into a negotiation and your counterpart is expressing anger. What should you do? Well, the first question to ask is, is this genuine or tactical? When somebody is angry, it could reflect the fact that they have an important issue or they feel as if their goal has been blocked, or they're anxious and they're just up-regulating their anger. Sometimes it could be genuine coming from something, we want to figure out what that is. In other cases, it could just be tactical. When people express anger, they project power and they're more likely to get people to concede as they're bullying people to just accommodate their requests. If you think that the anger might be tactical, then we want to deal with it very differently than if it's genuine. The first one to think about the nature of the negotiation, is this an opportunity, some deal making opportunity, or is it a dispute? Where in disputes angers far more common. In opportunities, anger is unusual unless there's some impasse or some impolite exchange, it is an odd thing to happen. We want to be on the lookout for anger that people are manufacturing just to try to extract concessions. If it's genuine, anger will subside after a break, after you address or consider the concerns, or acknowledged, the concerns of a counterpart and if you make a concession. If you do make one concession and people get even more angry, then it's probably tactical. Where they figured out hey, I can express anger and get a concession, I'm going to try doing it again. Where if it's genuine anger, where you say, hey, I'm really sorry about this outcome, and I want to understand why you're upset. I'm going to make a concession if it's genuine, then that anger really subside. If you do deduce that it's tactical, then you want to think about the relative power, and if you're equal or more powerful, you want to push back. If you have less power, you have to make a decision. In some cases you still want to push back to change the relationship, and you may have more power than you think. You might think you're low power but you might fail to appreciate how much their side needs you. If you do have low power, sometimes it's like the paralegal who's being yelled at by a boss in a law firm. They may be looking for another job, but in that moment may let things slide. I will suggest that being yelled at is unhealthy, so you do want to think about finding the other job, it's not a good long-term place to ever be. But the idea about pushing back is being firm. Saying things like yelling at me is unacceptable, or let's take a break for 20 minutes and see if we want to proceed, or there's no way we can meet that request, let me know if you want to keep talking. In some cases, even more forceful, you slam your hand down, you stand up, you look down the other party and say, hey, this is not acceptable, so we can push back. If it's tactical, you'll be surprised at how quick things can turn around. Now, if it is genuine anger, you want to remain calm, you want to demonstrate concern, take a break. When people are angry, you can shift the topic and that is surprisingly effective in changing how people feel. We talked about emotion regulation before, shifting our focus by shifting topic is surprisingly effective, and that's one way to change how other people feel. Ultimately, the broad goal in negotiation is to always get back to focus on underlying interests. What do we have in common? What concerns can be addressed? How can we advance those interests? Ultimately, that's where you want to constantly reshift the focus of the conversation. Now, the other thing to knows is that when someone expresses anger that's going to trigger us, that is, we can then feel angry ourselves, and become less trusting, more critical, more likely to engage in stereotype thinking. We put on perceptual blinders when we feel anger, our focus narrows and we think less carefully, less broadly, less interpretively. We want to be careful and constantly monitor how we're feeling, so like the emotion regulation ideas we were talking about before, we want recognize that, hey, somebody else's is emotion it's like catching a cold. We're going to be influenced by how they feel, and we're low power we might feel anxious, if we're equal or high power, we might feel anger. That anger is going to be something that we catch and will change how we begin to think. When people are targets of anger, they share less information, they might make concessions but they're less satisfied, they're less likely to deal with that person in the future. We know that anger decreases the efficiency of outcomes people get, people become less co-operative, they become more competitive, more often they reject offers. But expressing anger can cause people to make concessions, and so we to want to think about, in some limited cases, we might want to express anger, but we want to make sure it doesn't guide the way we make decisions in a negotiation.
