You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hidden Brain]] - Full Title: You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/f7acfd75-7fbe-4056-9d53-21aa5d8cd1c0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Leon Fleischer's Career Reinvention** - Leon Fleischer lost his concert pianist career due to a sudden hand condition. - He later reinvented himself as a conductor and teacher, returning triumphantly decades later. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Leon Fleischer was a small child, his older brother took piano lessons. The brother didn't much care for them. But afterwards, little Leon would climb onto the piano bench and play, note for note, the pieces his brother had practiced. That's when his mother realized Leon was the one who should study the instrument. Leon Fleischer made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1944. He was just 16 years old. A New York Times music critic said this performance established him as one of the most remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists. He went on to perform with the world's top orchestras throughout the 1950s and early 60s. Pause his story here, and Leon Fleischer's life is a triumph. But then, something unexpected happened. He started to notice an odd stiffness in his right index finger. His fourth and fifth finger started curling under. The pain and stiffness grew steadily worse. Within a matter of months, his career as a concert pianist was virtually over. Max Bazerman As you can well imagine, without becoming melodramatic, I was in a very despairing state of depression for about two years. Shankar Vendantam If we were to take stock of Leon Fleischer's life at this point, we might say it was a tragedy. But Leon Fleischer still had so much music in him, so he reinvented himself, becoming a much-admired conductor and teacher. Meanwhile, he continued to try every available measure to heal his right hand. Eventually, a combination of Botox injections and deep tissue massage started to help. In 2003, Leon Fleischer made a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall. He was 75 years old. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc7b9493-71a6-4a7b-8719-aadcdb6a3aab)) - **Jonathan Adler's Australia Misadventure** - Jonathan Adler went to Australia hoping to reinvent himself but found loneliness instead. - His starring role in a chaotic play was stressful and not the liberation he sought. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Jonathan, I want to take you back to your college days in Maine. You were a capable and hardworking student, but you were also struggling with a secret. What were you going through? Jonathan Adler Yeah, like you said, I was a good student. I was curious and took classes in a ton of different departments. But socially, I was more reserved. I had a really tight group of friends in high school. And I was sort of angry that that chapter of my life had closed just because high school had ended. And I was also struggling with my sexuality, though that's not something I was necessarily conscious of for a big chunk of college. Shankar Vendantam So you came up with a solution to these challenges, and it was something of a radical solution. What was the plan you devised? Jonathan Adler Yeah. Well, so a lot of students at the college spent part of their junior year studying abroad, and that seemed to me like a rare opportunity to take a break from my regular life and figure out Some things about myself. So I ended up in Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia. Wow. Which it's literally as far away from my life as you could get. I mean, if you draw a line from New England through the center of the earth, you end up off the coast of Perth. Shankar Vendantam And this was your way of reinventing yourself? Jonathan Adler Well, it felt like an opportunity to step outside my life and sort of explore who I was in a context that wouldn't then have any ramifications for the life that I was living. Uh-huh. Shankar Vendantam So, okay. So you fly all the way to Australia. What happens? Did you find that your social life improved, that you found deep connections with other people? Jonathan Adler No. When I arrived, I knew that I was going to need to find some friends. So I auditioned for the theater department's play. I was studying psychology and theater in college, and I knew that being involved in a show was a surefire way to make fast friends, and that it also was a place where there might be opportunities To date. And so the play that the department was doing that semester was this weird postmodern adaptation of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya by the admittedly brilliant British playwright Howard Barker. And there's this relatively minor character in the original play, Astrov, who's this brooding intellectual who just thinks but never does anything. And I figured, oh, that's perfect for me. But much to my astonishment, I got cast as Vanya, which is one of the only leading roles that I'd ever had. Wow. Yeah. So most of Chekhov's plays are about people who are stuck in their lives and sort of consumed with what might have been the joke about Chekhov is that nothing ever happens. And so this playwright, Barker, took this play and decided to imagine what would happen if the same characters just did whatever their impulses told them to do. So in this version, there are gun battles and unconstrained sex and a whole lot of chaos. It's total liberation. And I was an anxious actor. And so having to carry this play in a role that was deeply unsuited to my natural tendencies was all consuming. I had gone looking for the kind of liberation that these characters were given by their playwright, but in finding it in this fictional world, it completely shut down my own world. I felt I had to spend my time mastering this incredibly complex and unnatural language. I mean, the first line of the play is just the word uncle repeated over and over. And I just lost all the bandwidth for everything else. It ended up being one of the loneliest periods of my life with me actually starting to count down the days until I could come home. ([Time 0:05:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ca20c16-948f-4ab8-b9e5-cf5153575682)) - **Memory Shapes Life Stories** - We don't remember life events objectively; our memory's reconstructive nature is functional. - Stories help us find meaning by connecting events, shaping our life narrative and wellbeing. Transcript: Jonathan Adler You can't totally control the things that happen to you in your life. You have some more say about how you make sense of it. And it's important to remember we're talking about stories here. So we know from research on memory that we're not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience. For a long time, that frustrated cognitive scientists. But in more recent years, it's become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason. So if you think about why we have memory in the first place, it's not so we can hold on to every single thing that's happened to us in some veridical way. We have memories so that we can make sense of what's happening to us right now and anticipate what might happen next. So if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out, you don't necessarily need to remember that cave and that bear, but you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places. So the slippery, reconstructive nature of memory is a feature of the system. It's not a bug. And stories are an amazing tool for holding on to the meaning of our past experiences. So the objective facts of our lives are what they are, but the stories are about where we draw connections between things, where we parse the chapter breaks of our lives. And those are narrative acts, not historical acts. ([Time 0:14:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66bb902f-d59a-40a2-8bb7-afc06ff42975)) - **Narrative Arcs Impact Well-being** - Where we start and stop life chapters creates either upward (redemptive) or downward (contamination) story arcs. - These narrative choices significantly affect how we feel about our lives. Transcript: Jonathan Adler All lives have good and bad in it. And so stories that start bad and end bad don't feel great. And stories that start good and end good, those feel good. But what we find in the research is that where we draw connections between the negative and the positive matters a lot. So stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good, we call that a redemption sequence. And stories that start good and end bad, we call that a contamination sequence. I see. Shankar Vendantam So a redemption sequence is in some ways something bad happens to you, but in some ways you're rising from the ashes, so redemption. And a contamination sequence is things are going pretty well, but then something bad happens to you, and then everything is downhill from there. So one basically has an upward trajectory, the other one has a downward trajectory. That's right. Jonathan Adler And again, we're remembering these are stories. So this is how we narrate the experience, not necessarily the objective facts of our lives, because all lives have good and bad. Shankar Vendantam I mean, your story about going to Australia, for example, you know, you go to Australia with high hopes. You get the starring role in a play. We know many people would say that's a very good thing to have happened to you. And then the play turns out to not be quite what was best for you or the role turns out to be not what was best for you. And you end up being very lonely. And then you can sort of see a downward sort of spiral in some ways. And in some ways, it becomes a contamination story, a story where something good turned bad, and then you come back to the United States. And now it feels like the bad thing that happened in Australia is with you even now. ([Time 0:16:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23cc969e-77e1-4255-aca7-565f5362f706)) - **Redemption Stories Boost Well-being** - Redemption stories correlate with higher well-being and self-esteem. - Contamination stories link to lower life satisfaction and more depression. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam What's the difference on our mental well-being and happiness of redemption stories versus contamination stories? Jonathan Adler I have a nice short example of this from a participant in one of my earliest studies. Briefly, this was a little middle-aged man. He's recounting the story of the first date that he went on with the woman that he ultimately goes on to marry. And the facts of the story are they go out. When he brings her home, they're standing on her front porch, and he leans in for a kiss, and then her dad opens the front door and interrupts them. So in the version that this man narrated when he shared his life story as part of participating in our research, he frames the experience as a redemption sequence. He says, it really brought us close right at the very start of our relationship, and we stayed that way ever since. So this embarrassing moment had given them something to laugh about on their second date, and maybe it accelerated their connection. But he might have narrated the exact same sequence of events by concluding that it was this stain on the beginning of their relationship that could have contaminated the relationship In a way that they moved on from, but never could erase. So neither version is more accurate in the historical sense. These are narrative interpretations that take on different thematic arcs, redemption and contamination. ([Time 0:18:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0d411451-62df-44f6-95d7-d2133fc5e63d)) - **Framing Awkward Dates Positively** - A man framed a first-date awkward moment as a positive bonding experience. - This redemption narrative helped sustain his long-term relationship. Transcript: Jonathan Adler Example of this from a participant in one of my earliest studies. Briefly, this was a little middle-aged man. He's recounting the story of the first date that he went on with the woman that he ultimately goes on to marry. And the facts of the story are they go out. When he brings her home, they're standing on her front porch, and he leans in for a kiss, and then her dad opens the front door and interrupts them. So in the version that this man narrated when he shared his life story as part of participating in our research, he frames the experience as a redemption sequence. He says, it really brought us close right at the very start of our relationship, and we stayed that way ever since. So this embarrassing moment had given them something to laugh about on their second date, and maybe it accelerated their connection. But he might have narrated the exact same sequence of events by concluding that it was this stain on the beginning of their relationship that could have contaminated the relationship In a way that they moved on from, but never could erase. ([Time 0:18:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/53d9ab1e-72b5-48b8-b522-e7a3b056c8ce)) - **Jonathan's Redemption Through Connection** - Jonathan's unexpected graduate school acceptance led to an email connection that blossomed into love. - This experience transformed his life story into one of redemption and fulfillment. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Next and how it becomes a redemption story. Jonathan Adler As I neared the end of college, I largely dealt with my internal turmoil by just throwing myself into my work. So I was one of the top students in my class and I got some awards and I took a research job after college at Harvard, which was, you know, my plan was going to graduate school. And I felt like I had done everything expected of me. And I didn't really seek out any mentorship as I applied to 10 very competitive PhD programs. And then when the whole process was done, I only got into one program. So I always tell students, you only go to one school. So it only takes one. And that is true. But at the time, it felt like a shock. Don't get me wrong. I was actually really excited by the one option in front of me. But I had sort of imagined that I might have more choice when approaching this next big chapter of my life. And as you said, the one school I got into was in the Midwest, a place that I had never been for more than a few days. And so I was thinking a lot about what it would mean to be a gay man living in this different part of the country than I was used to. Shankar Vendantam So how does this become a redemption story? It sounds actually the contamination is getting worse here because you apply to all these colleges and you don't get into them. Right. So here's what happened. Jonathan Adler So I went to campus for my interview and it was spring break week. So no one was really around. But after the formal stuff was done, I sort of casually walked by the LGBT student group's office and there was this little yellow envelope of business cards tacked to the bulletin board Outside that said something like, questions? Email us at, and then, you know, some generic email address. So when I got home, I sent this email saying, I'm thinking of coming here for graduate school. I've never lived in the Midwest. What's it like to be there and be a gay person, both on campus and in the surrounding community? And we didn't even have internet at the house that I was renting with some friends. So I had to sneak into the computer lab at the nearby college to check my email. So a few days later, I got a perfectly nice and very thorough email reassuring me from a senior undergrad about what it was like to go to school there and live in the town. And I'm sure it was a copy and paste of an email that he had sent many times before, but I appreciated how clear it was and the bits of humor sprinkled in. And I wrote back to say, you know, thanks. That was so super helpful. And then this student said, I'm actually graduating early, but I'm going to be hanging around. I'm handing off the listserv, but if you have questions, you know, just send me an email. And so quite a bit of time goes by and I did commit to going to school there. And when it was time for me to start looking for an apartment, I reached out again. And more than 20 years later, we are now married and have two kids and a dog. So those first emails weren't even remotely flirty, but they were attuned and connected and kind and funny. And eventually they did get flirty, as did my responses. And so I look back at this turning point in my life with a profound sense of, first of all, gratitude, but also redemption, right? What at the time felt like close to failure, right? That all my work in college and all my ignoring of my personal life for the sake of my intellectual life had presented me with only one option. Now feels like the universe trying to make sure that I found my way. And within a year, I was having a more gratifying intellectual experience than I had ever imagined. ([Time 0:20:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0348beb-f5c6-4544-adf0-49a775e12930)) - **Integrated Stories Slow Aging** - Narratives that integrate challenging experiences reduce psychological stress. - Integrated stories also slow biological aging, shown by less telomere shortening. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam In one study, Jonathan tracked a group of parents experiencing chronic stress. His co-author on the study, Ashley Mason, was interested in the science of telomeres. Jonathan Adler So telomeres are the end caps on our chromosomes that protect them from getting frayed or tangled each time a cell divides. Because each time the cell divides, they get shorter and shorter, and eventually the cell is left unprotected and it dies. So some scientists see telomere length as a biological marker of aging. And we know that under conditions of chronic stress, telomeres wear down faster. So in this study, we had a group of chronically stressed participants. These were parents who had children with quite severe autism spectrum disorders. And we compared them to parents of neurotypical kids, which as a parent of neurotypical kids is still a stressful experience, but the degree of chronic stress is different. So we had their stories at the beginning of the study, and then we had measures of their well-being and also data about their telomere length at that first time point. And then again, 18 months later. And what we found was that among these chronically stressed parents, their stories mattered a lot. What was interesting was that the key narrative theme in this study was not redemption. It was a theme of integration, where we think about the extent to which participants were able to make sense of having had this challenging kid and integrating that into their own life Story. So we found that among the chronically stressed parents, stories of integration were associated not only with their self-report of lower levels of psychological stress, but also With significantly less telomere shortening over 18 months. ([Time 0:28:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3ca01046-a1a2-4458-a1d5-59f5e3a3e119)) - **Narrative Change Drives Well-being** - Changes in personal narratives during therapy precede improvements in well-being. - Narrating new life stories enables mental health recovery. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam What did you find, Jonathan? Jonathan Adler Yeah, I became obsessed with that directionality question. In that study, I enrolled a bunch of people, adults ranging from ages 18 to 92. They were seeking individual therapy for a huge range of problems. So there were folks with really significant psychopathology, like depression, anxiety, eating disorders. But there were also people just wanting to do some work on themselves. There was a woman who wanted to think through her own childhood as she was about to become a parent. There was a woman who was feeling lonely in retirement. So before they started with their therapist, we collected their stories and we measured their well-being using standard measures. And so then on the other side, we had nearly 600 narratives from across all these participants. And what we found was, first, people got better over the course of treatment, which is good because decades of research on psychotherapy suggests that it works. And we found that people's stories changed in meaningful ways over the course of treatment. And then the changes in the story actually came before changes in well-being and not the other way around. ([Time 0:31:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b5cf4e0-8f0d-41fd-b901-e973e871ab39)) - **Leila's Empowering Disability Story** - Leila became blind but reframed her disability as a source of identity and growth. - She embraces challenges to understand and appreciate herself more deeply. Transcript: Jonathan Adler Agency is a theme in people's stories. We assess it along a continuum from sort of being able to direct your life and then down at the other end of the continuum, you're sort of batted around by the whims of fate. And again, these are themes in stories. No one is completely in control of their lives. So it's the way you portray the main character in the story, i.e. You. Shankar Vendantam Jonathan cites the remarkable story of a woman named Leila. Jonathan Adler So in the last five years, I've been doing a lot of research focused on identity development among people who acquire physical disabilities. And Leila was a participant in one of my studies. She tells this story of having these horrible headaches, which gradually intensified to the point where she couldn't function. She spends time in three different hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives, and no one can figure out what's going on. She decides to fly to India to see a specialist, and he sends her right into surgery. And when she wakes up, the pain is gone. But she also can't see. And the surgeon had been able to alleviate the unexplained swelling in her head that had been pressing on her optic nerves. But the nerve was also irreparably damaged. So for a few months, everyone held out hope that her vision might return. But Layla was actually the first one to accept that it wouldn't. She said, I realized as soon as I started accepting it, I started becoming less frustrated and sad. And though it was incredibly difficult and scary for her, Layla gradually threw herself into the task of becoming a blind person. So she shifts careers. She moves to the United States to get training in computer science, where she starts working on adaptive technology for other blind and low vision people. Shankar Vendantam I want to play a clip of Leila talking about her experience. Here she is. Max Bazerman I think my blindness is the best thing that ever happened to me. Like even right now, if a doctor came here and told me they have a cure, I would not take it. ([Time 0:39:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dcd8380a-11c1-413c-a3e1-279cde419637)) - **Agency Enhances Life Narratives** - Stories that portray us as active agents increase well-being. - Viewing ourselves as victims leads to narratives of powerlessness and decreased happiness. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam And Leila is clearly choosing to be in the driver's seat. That's right. Jonathan Adler Traditional models of disability in the United States have this medical approach where disability is a problem to be solved or eradicated. And social models of disability or relational models really push back on that and say, disability is in the interaction between my body and the built and social environment around Us. In Layla's story, like you said, there's also this of agency. Now that this is part of who I am, what am I going to do with it? ([Time 0:42:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1ac327f2-1372-4970-9b85-4a5eaff0c612)) - **Antonio Finds Connection and Purpose** - Antonio, a first-generation Latino student, found connection amid isolation through shared experiences. - This communion theme empowered him to pursue education and belonging. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam And in advance of one year slam, you worked with a student named Antonio. What was his story, Jonathan? Jonathan Adler Yeah, so Antonio was really interested in thinking through what it meant to him to be a first-generation Latino student at this small engineering college. And he described feeling isolated during his weekend on campus as a prospective student. It wasn't the conversations about science that made him feel left out. It really was the small talk. So he has this great line in the story where he says, I'm definitely not fluent in cheese. And what he means is that disconnection gets coded into even the most mundane experiences, not just the grand low points of our lives. Shankar Vendantam But as isolated as he was feeling, Antonia homed in, not on his isolation, but on a moment of connection. I think I finally found somebody who understood. Jonathan Adler Diego was a person who had also danced at Quintiangueras, who had also brought lunch in a repurposed sour cream container and applied to the same college scholarships for low-income Students. One would even think we had done all these things side by side. Shankar Vendantam So I can hear the theme of positive communion here, Jonathan. Antonio is telling a story that says, I'm not alone. Exactly. Jonathan Adler In this room full of people who did not look like him, Antonio found someone who did, and they really connected. And he says, you know, Diego threw down this challenge. If you think there should be more people like us here, then come and fix it. And Antonio says, you know, I'm a competitive guy. And the next fall, I was on a one-way bus trip to Olin College. ([Time 0:44:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fdc7a769-0456-4fda-87ce-ae18cb0f9f72)) - **Meaning vs. Happiness in Well-being** - Well-being splits into feeling good (hedonic) and feeling meaningful (eudaimonic). - Meaningful stories can bring fulfillment even without happiness. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam You say we're not always able to tell a happy story about what happens to us, but we can try and tell a meaningful story, and there are benefits to telling such stories. Can you explain what you mean? Jonathan Adler Yeah. So to pan back for just a second, when we think about the broad study of well-being, it tends to cluster in sort of two domains, which get their cumbersome names from Aristotle. So on the one hand, we have what's called hedonic well-being, which means it feels good. And on the other hand, we have a kind of well-being called eudaimonic well-being, which means it feels meaningful. And these two domains of well-being are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other. And if we think about our lives for a second, that makes sense, right? We all do plenty of things that feel good, but don't feel particularly meaningful, like we might binge watch TV or something. And we can all think about experiences that feel meaningful, but don't feel particularly good. So in my work with Health Story Collaborative in particular, we find that feeling good is not always an option for people. Telling redemptive stories or stories high in the theme of agency and communion, that's not always possible. And in those situations, we're often interested in the ways in which people can really think through the hard parts of their lives and find some meaning out of that. ([Time 0:46:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/348d2cac-d5bb-4c69-a77f-fcc0adec5abd)) - **Allow Authentic Stories in Hard Times** - Acknowledge hardship and avoid forcing yourself into idealized stories. - Seek different narrative themes that foster meaning even if they don't increase happiness. Transcript: Jonathan Adler Want to say three things to that person. The first thing is, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that things are so hard for you right now. Of course, they're hard, and of course, you're not feeling good. The second thing I want to say is, there are all kinds of ways of making meaning of these experiences. And so we might think about exploring themes of agency or communion. So if you lost your job, are you feeling connected to your spouse or your kids? Or, you know, if something challenging has happened, might there be some growth that comes from it? So we might explore those themes. But the third thing I want to say is our personal stories exist in a broader narrative ecosystem. And in the United States, there is an expectation that we can narrate challenging experiences in our lives with a redemptive spin. We Americans love the theme of redemption, and we expect people to be able to do it. And I call this the press for redemption. And in my work with Health Story Collaborative, we often find that people feel like they're having this double whammy experience where, you know, I'm sick and I'm not telling the right Kind of story about it. So my cancer didn't teach me that I'm such a fighter or that people love me more than I ever would have realized if I never had cancer. No, some people say, you know, this just sucks. And I think in those instances, we want to acknowledge that and not try to convince them that it doesn't just suck. Let them know that there's a reason they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story because our culture puts a particular premium on a particular kind of story. And then to help them find other kinds of narrative roots that might lead towards a sense of meaningfulness, even if they can't make you feel better. ([Time 0:48:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b35ae8c-ef8f-45dd-802d-f9e9d1a651c0)) - **Master Narratives Shape Societies** - Societal master narratives shape individuals' personal stories. - National narratives reflect and influence collective identity and culture. Transcript: Jonathan Adler Talk to themselves? I do. And this is really at the forefront of the field. So my colleagues, Kate McLean and Moin Syed, have written really compellingly about what they call master narratives. So these are the dominant storylines in our culture that tend to be invisible, but also ubiquitous and sort of rigid and powerful. And we are always in a constant dialogue with the master narratives in our particular cultural contexts. You know, families have narratives that guide the way relationships unfold. And as you said, countries certainly do. So again, narratives are not all good or all bad at the individual level, and they're not all good or all bad at the national level either. But these national narratives are emergent from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell. So ([Time 0:50:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ae447a61-85fa-48a0-a60a-8b0f151c9a3f)) - **Obama's Speech and Redemption Narrative** - Barack Obama's 2004 speech invoked the American redemption narrative to inspire hope. - Leaders use shared stories strategically to shape public sentiment. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam I want to play you a clip from the speech that first put Barack Obama in the national spotlight. Max Bazerman I'm not talking about blind optimism here. The almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't think about it. Or health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores. The hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta. The hope of a mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope. In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us. The bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead. I'm ([Time 0:51:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5dbd97e3-acde-4e70-b6d1-1f7ae4c99b4f)) - **See Other Perspectives in Negotiations** - Consider the other party's perspective to avoid biased and ineffective negotiation. - Empathy helps craft offers acceptable to both sides. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam We recently talked with Max on Hidden Brain. Those episodes are titled Relationships 2.0, Become a Better Negotiator, and for our Hidden Brain Plus subscribers, Relationships 2.0, Win-Win. Today, as part of our ongoing series, Your Questions Answered, we asked Max to come back on the show to answer your questions about negotiation. Max Bazeman, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Max Bazerman I'm delighted to be back, and I look forward to hearing the questions that are in the minds of your listeners. Shankar Vendantam So Max, it's understandable that we're often immersed in our own perspectives during a negotiation. But in doing so, you say that we can become biased in our own perspectives, biased by our own needs. Max Bazerman How so, Max? So once we know what role we're in, what side we're playing, what our interests are, our ability to be objective largely disappears. So if we have, let's say, a plaintiff and a defendant in a lawsuit, and we ask them to reveal to us what they think that the case is worth, plaintiffs naturally think that the case is worth More than the defendants. It's not just that they're making that claim to convince the jury or the judge, but they actually come to believe that. And similarly, lots of salespeople think that what they're selling is worth more than what the buyer thinks that they're buying. So you have this kind of bias to see the world in the way that would favor your side. Shankar Vendantam So at one level, of course, when we want something very badly, it makes sense that we spend a lot of time thinking about what we want. Why does this make us less effective as negotiators? Because negotiation is not one person decision making. Max Bazerman If you were the dictator and you could make the decision, it wouldn't be a negotiation. The fact that you need to work with another person or many other people requires that you take their perspective to imagine what the world looks like from their side so that you aren't Putting things on the table that they're never going to accept under any circumstance. ([Time 0:57:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b597a2a-85fc-4e91-8e15-a9de14afc6ed)) - **Effective Use of Anchoring** - Use anchoring by starting offers near your preferred range to influence negotiations. - Ensure anchors are reasonable to gain attention and steer outcomes. Transcript: Max Bazerman Sure. 50 years ago, Kahneman and Tversky, well-known psychologists who created the field of behavioral economics in many ways, did an experiment where they basically asked people what Percent of the 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 than 10 or 65? And people who see 65 say lower, and they reduce the 65 to 45 on average. The people who see 10 come all the way up to 24. And while both parties rejected 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. If you're selling, you're much better off starting with a high price and coming down to something viable but favorable to you within the zone of possible agreement. If you're buying, just the opposite, better to start with a low number and come up into the zone of possible agreement. So as a negotiator, anchoring can be very, very effective. On the other hand, you want to anchor with a number that's reasonable enough to get their attention. If they're not paying attention to you, then that's not very helpful. So if you look at a house that's on the market for $499,000 and you read anchors have a dramatic influence, you might offer them $100,000, but they're simply going to ignore you. That's not going to anchor the discussion. But it might be the case that if you've done your homework, that you can anchor, you can respond with 460 rather than 470 and anchor them at a lower number, and that that could tilt you in A favorable direction in terms of what the ultimate price will be. So the general advice is to identify what is a viable range of agreements, and then anchor near your preferred end of that zone. ([Time 1:02:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/170992e4-d3da-4719-bd4b-a132940b5ccf))