Lawyers are frequent targets for humor, the butt of countless stale jokes. With the exception perhaps of “Wedding Crashers“, conflict resolution professionals so far have been spared the ribbing that comedians, cartoonists, and screenwriters so often heap on our brothers and sisters at the bar.
Is this a sign of the impending apocalypse? Hardly. As one anonymous commenter on Tom’s site observed, “Just getting the word ombudsman in cartoons raises awareness of our profession.” Or, as Oscar Wilde once put it, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
Now, stepping into the marital fray is comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who will be hosting “The Marriage Ref“, a game/reality TV show in which bickering couples will submit their disputes to nonbinding arbitration before celebrity guests who will “comment, judge and decide who’s right and who’s wrong in real-life disputes between real-life spouses.”
Of course if you’d rather resolve your dispute anonymously, try the web site Sidetaker (“Let The World Decide Who’s At Fault”) and let the hive be the judge.
Optical illusions make ideal teaching tools in negotiation and conflict resolution training. They serve as humbling reminders of the unreliability of our senses and the conclusions we draw from the data we perceive. One of my favorite illusions is “Shepard’s Turning the Tables“, which you can view at the web site of Professor Michael Bach of Universitäts-Augenklinik, Freiburg, Germany.
This illusion depicts two tables standing near each other. The tables appear to be of different sizes, one apparently longer and narrower than the other. When you click “Run”, one table top lifts and floats, coming to rest on top of the second table, allowing you to see that the surface areas of the tables are in fact identical and match perfectly. You can reset and replay the illusion again and again.
Amazingly, despite knowing the truth about the dimensions of the table tops, your eyes still see differing sizes and shapes. I invite you to see for yourself. (I must caution those of you whose time is limited: visiting Professor Bach’s site, a collection of 86 jaw-dropping illusions, for only a minute is simply not possible. You’ll find yourself irresistibly drawn from one illusion to the next.)
For those of you interested in influences on perception and cognition, I recommend one article and two videos, all thought-provoking (for those of you viewing at work, please note that a certain four-letter word appears in both videos):
Via The Boston Globe, “Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel“. Globe staff writer Drake Bennett describes cognitive fluency as “[o]ne of the hottest topics in psychology today”. He reports that cognitive fluency is “simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.” Studies suggest that factors such as rhyming words or font style and legibility of text influence the way we process information, enhancing or hampering our ability to perform tasks or make judgments.
The outstanding blog Sociological Images posted “Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization,” a presentation by political consultant Alex Lundry, which offers a salutary lesson in “graphical literacy” and warns against the ways in which depictions of visual data can mislead or distort. View it here:
From Colin Rule’s blog, “The template for every news story you’ve ever seen“. Watch in awe to see how, in Colin’s words, “a couple edits and on-the-street interviews can transform fuzzy thinking into something that seems insightful”:
A quote attributed to author Anais Nin declares, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
The truth of these words is apparent in the following anecdotes, which I invite you to consider.
Anecdote 1
When my son was tested for a coveted spot in a private prekindergarten, he was asked, ”What color is a banana?”
”White,” he answered.
”A banana isn’t white!” he was told.
Fortunately, my son was not intimidated. He replied: ”Yes, it is. The peel is yellow, but the banana is white.”
He was accepted.
Anecdote 2:
When people say there’s no real difference between the way men and women in public life approach the issues, I am reminded of a pop quiz my seventh-grade biology teacher thought up, which I flunked. The quiz was simple: match the parts of the human body to the parts of a car. So the lungs were matched with the carburetor, the spark plugs were the nervous system, joints were like shock absorbers – or something. I am sure I still have it wrong.
The point is that almost all of the 13-year-old boys in the class aced the test and the girls – even ones who knew the functions of the human body cold – failed. Most of us had never looked under the hood of a car. We had a different reference for understanding the material, which the teacher (male, of course) never considered.
The anecdotes may differ as to the events that each describes but the moral is the same.
In the first anecdote, the adult posing the question assumed that the child understood that “banana” signified “unpeeled and ripe but not overly ripe banana”. It was the question that was wrong, not the child’s answer. The question also rested upon a cultural assumption: that children taking such tests are familiar with yellow bananas. Children from other cultures may be familiar with bananas of a different hue. As Zwicky points out,
Note that there are red and purple varieties of banana, and that naturally ripened yellow bananas go from green to greenish yellow to brownish yellow (not a “good” yellow) as they ripen. The bananas of commerce in the U.S. are almost all yellow varieties; in fact, they are almost all artificially ripened Cavendish bananas. The ripening process produces vivid yellow bananas. So unless a child taking the test is accustomed to eating red bananas — say, in a Central American neighborhood — the child will give the expected answer, “yellow”.
In the second anecdote, the test-giver assumed that every student in his biology class shared his frame of reference and that the analogy of the car would be readily accessible to all. In that instance, gender played a significant role in the test scores that resulted. But in other situations, the car analogy would be just as incomprehensible regardless of gender but as a matter of economics and class – for example, among students whose parents don’t own a car or in schools located in neighborhoods where public transit not personal motor vehicles is the primary mode of transportation.
Each of these anecdotes reminds us that who we are shapes how we see the world. We are susceptible to influences of which we are often unaware, affecting our perception and our ability to judge. Until they are pointed out to us, our biases remain hidden from us, like the fruit concealed within the peel.
Chris’s firm was negotiating with a small European company to purchase an ingredient for a new health-care product. The two firms agreed on a price but became deadlocked over the question of exclusivity – the American firm did not want to invest in a product containing an ingredient to which its competitors would have access, and the European company refused to sell the ingredient exclusively to the American firm. The American firm, surprised by the stubborn refusal of their European counterparts to agree to an exclusive arrangement, offered more money and other incentives, but the European firm wouldn’t budge. Malhotra and Bazerman describe what happened next:
As a last resort the U.S. team called Chris and asked him to fly to Europe to join them.
When Chris arrived and took a seat at the bargaining table, the argument over exclusivity continued. After listening briefly to the two sides, he interjected one simple word that changed the outcome of the negotiation. With it, he was able to structure a deal that both firms found agreeable. The word was “why”.
Chris simply asked the supplier why he would not provide exclusivity to a major corporation that was offering to buy as much of the ingredient as he could produce. The supplier’s answer was unexpected: exclusivity would require him to violate an agreement with his cousin, who current purchased 250 pounds of the ingredient each year to make a locally sold product. With this information in hand, Chris proposed a solution that helped the two firms quickly wrap up an agreement: the supplier would provide exclusivity with the exception of a few hundred pounds annually for the supplier’s cousin…
Why didn’t the other U.S. negotiators ask this simple question? Because, based on their prior business experience, they assumed they already knew the answer…
Other factors, I suspect, may have been in play here, working against the U.S. negotiators. Etiquette and social pressures inhibit inquiry. From a young age we learn that “it’s not polite to ask questions”. As we grow older, we worry that asking questions will make us look stupid, singling us out for unwelcome notice by the group.
In defiance of these deep-rooted social and cultural taboos on question-asking, virtually every best-selling negotiation text urges negotiators to “get curious”. G. Richard Shell, author of Bargaining for Advantage, prescribes a process that he calls “Information-Based Bargaining”, which emphasizes the importance of question-asking and careful listening, lauding the “relentless curiosity” skilled negotiators bring to the table. Mediation trainers also encourage curiosity in their students, so that they can delve deep into the needs and motivations of parties locked in conflict. In their classic work, The Making of a Mediator: Developing Artistry in Practice, Bernard Mayer and Alison Taylor define such artistry as “a commitment to curiosity and exploration”.
If curiosity is so essential to effective negotiation and conflict resolution, can educators and trainers teach curiosity? That’s a question that Vanderbilt University Law School Professor Chris Guthrie considers and answers in “I’m Curious: Can We Teach Curiosity?” (PDF) (copyright 2009 DRI Press, Hamline University School of Law). Determined to go beyond the “glib references to the need for curiosity” in negotiation literature, Professor Guthrie offers a short primer on the scientific study of curiosity and proposes some curiosity-enhancing teaching strategies. He concludes with a link to an article that appeared in Psychology Today in September 2006, “Cultivating Curiosity“, by Elizabeth Svoboda, which recommends three tips on how to “flex your curiosity muscle“, whether you’re negotiating, mediating, or doing something else entirely.
I often find myself wishing I lived in California, if only to be able to regularly attend the magnificent events the Southern California Mediation Association plans and presents each year. These programs showcase the talents and intellectual achievements of some of the greatest thinkers and leaders that the field of conflict resolution can boast.
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Lawyers are frequent targets for humor, the butt of countless stale jokes. With the exception perhaps of “Wedding Crashers“, conflict resolution professionals so far have been spared the ribbing that comedians, cartoonists, and screenwriters so often heap on our brothers and sisters at the bar.
