PDF Summary:Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

Never Split the Difference aims to provide a comprehensive guide to negotiating theory and strategy, giving you the tools you need to negotiate successfully. Voss’s thesis is that good negotiation happens on the emotional level of the brain, not the rational level. Your job as a negotiator, Voss argues, is to practice and display empathy toward your counterpart by understanding their emotions, learning to see the situation from their point of view—and, ultimately, getting them to feel comfortable enough with you to let their emotional guard down.

In this guide, we’ve supplemented Voss’s ideas with findings from outside research and incorporated insights from other key negotiation texts—like Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes and Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation—to give readers a more balanced and nuanced perspective on negotiation and evaluate how Voss’s findings square with those of other acknowledged experts on the field.

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Change Their Perspective

Voss writes that people’s behavior and thoughts in negotiations are primarily driven by their emotional needs for security and autonomy. As a negotiator, you need to know how to properly tap into those emotional needs and turn them to your advantage. You do this by switching up their perspective—showing them that by helping you achieve your desired solution, they will satisfy their own hidden wants.

Making Deadlines Work

Voss warns that your counterpart will often try to exploit your anxiety by using deadlines to trick you into suspending your rational judgement and pressuring you to make a deal. But Voss argues that deadlines are almost always arbitrary and flexible, and they rarely trigger the dreaded consequences people fear they will. As long as you’re committed to not negotiating against yourself to meet the deadline, this can work to your advantage—you can flip the table and force your counterpart to accommodate your deadline.

(Shortform note: Deadlines are important to negotiations in professional sports. In Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004), author Michael Lewis describes how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane skillfully exploited Major League Baseball’s trade deadline in 2002 to acquire top players from other teams, while giving up little in return. Every year, the trade deadline created a time crunch in which losing teams with star players would be desperate to trade off their stars in the hopes of recouping at least something of value. This lowered the asking price for stars and gave Beane the opportunity to acquire players that he could never afford at the beginning of the season.)

Understand Cognitive Biases

Voss writes that you also need to take advantage of the powerful cognitive biases that shape how we receive information and determine our best interests. The main cognitive biases Voss addresses are:

• The framing effect: People respond differently to identical choices based solely on how they’re presented. For example, the framing effect would make health-conscious consumers more likely to purchase milk when it’s marketed as being “99% fat-free” versus “1% fat.”

(Shortform note: A variant on the framing effect is what’s known as the valence-framing effect. Research has shown that people hold their negative opinions—i.e. what they’re against— much more strongly and confidently than their positive opinions—what they’re in favor of. In other words, we seem to dislike what we dislike more than we like what we like. In one social psychology experiment, participants who expressed a preference for fictional political candidate A over candidate B showed a notable division in how they responded to information that their preferred candidate had engaged in corruption. Those who supported candidate A because they were pro-candidate A were more willing to abandon their support in light of this information; those who favored A because they were anti-candidate B were far more likely to dismiss the corruption allegations and even double down on their support for A.)

• Loss aversion: People fear an equal loss more than they value an equal gain. Knowing this, you can put yourself in a strong negotiating position by framing your preferred solution as one that prevents your counterpart from incurring a loss. For example, if you’re making an offer on a house that needs some work, you might say something like, “The house is great but it definitely needs significant contracting work. Now, I’m willing to waive inspection, but if we take too long, I might have to start looking for other deals.”

(Shortform note: In Influence, Robert Cialdini argues that loss aversion is closely tied to an idea called the Scarcity Principle. The Scarcity Principle makes things with limited availability more appealing to us. Thus, rare goods are expensive and abundant items are cheap. We’re more compelled to buy these goods because we instinctively fear that we’ll lose our opportunity if we don’t act immediately. You can use this principle to your advantage when negotiating by making your counterpart feel your offer has an element of scarcity.)

Ensure Implementation

Even after you’ve gotten your counterpart to agree to your terms, there’s still one problem—how can you trust them to follow through? Beyond agreement, you need to lock in commitment and implementation.

Use Open-Ended Questions to Give Your Counterpart Skin in the Game

Voss writes that asking open-ended questions keeps your counterpart engaged, but off-balance. They also force your counterpart to consider your position. This is crucial when ensuring implementation. By asking questions like “How can I do that?” or “How can we ensure that we follow through on what we’ve agreed to today?” you transform your counterpart into a partner helping you solve a shared problem.

(Shortform note: In Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury take a more rationalistic, less emotion-based approach to implementation. They argue in favor of negotiating agreements with the success measured against objective standards and performance indicators. When you use objective standards, such as market value or average salaries, you’re basing the agreement on principle instead of succumbing to pressure tactics or threats.)

Watch the Pronouns

Voss writes that you can observe your counterpart’s language cues and speech patterns to see whether or not this person is truly integral to the decision-making process. Specifically, Voss warns, be on the lookout for their use of pronouns. The person really in charge seldom says “I” or “me.” Instead, they deflect to third-party pronouns, saying things like, “We’ll have to see if that’s a realistic path forward for us” or “We’ll have to review internally before we can commit to anything.”

(Shortform note: A recent study out of the University of San Diego surveying over 90,000 conference calls found that CEOs who used first-person singular pronouns received a better response from investors, who found that the use of these pronouns demonstrated honesty, responsibility, and empathy. Conversely, those CEOS who leaned heavily on pronouns like “us” or “we” were more likely to be found by investors as craven, weak, and trying to evade accountability. This points to a possible difference between how leaders speak and how people interpret them, and may indicate a limitation of Voss’s theory, since leaders who are aware of people’s preference for “I” pronouns may use them for that reason, nullifying Voss’s technique.)

Spotting a Liar

Sometimes, you’re going to come up against a dishonest or unscrupulous counterpart. Voss writes that liars tend to be more verbose and use more complicated, rambling sentences—hoping to draw your attention away from the web of dishonesty they’re weaving around you. He says they also use more distant, third-person pronouns like “they,” “them,” and “we.” They tend to avoid saying “I” or “me.” Psychologically, this helps the liar distance herself from the lie.

(Shortform note: Voss writes that liars rely heavily on third-person pronouns, but we’ve also seen that people in positions of power do the same thing to avoid being pinned down to a definite position. Both are examples of deflection, but they are not the same thing. If you’re talking to a CEO, for example, and you notice that she’s using a lot of third-person pronouns, you shouldn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that she’s lying or trying to mislead you. Instead, she may be trying to deflect in order to avoid being too tied down to any particular course of action—that’s her being strategic, not dishonest. In order to distinguish between the two scenarios, keep asking open-ended questions, watching for tonal and nonverbal cues, and listening for key bits of information that your counterpart might reveal.)

How to Bargain

Voss writes that, beneath the offers and counteroffers that are part of any negotiation, there is a swirl of deep psychological currents that drives our hidden wants, fears, and desires—and those of our counterpart. Your job as a good negotiator is to construct an accurate psychological profile of your counterpart so that you can be better attuned to what they’re really looking for.

The Three Types of Negotiator

Voss identifies three main types of negotiator:

• Givers: People-pleasers who tend to be highly sociable and agreeable—but also poor time managers. They’ll often agree to things that they can’t actually follow through on, since they’re so eager to make you happy.
• Calculators: Methodological and diligent people who want to assess all the facts before committing to a decision. As a result, they’re fairly unconcerned with time and less likely to be pressured by deadlines.
• Aggressives: Highly achievement-oriented people who prioritize getting things done. They hate wasted time and care a lot about meeting—and beating—deadlines.

(Shortform note: Other analysts of negotiation have identified different negotiation styles. At Harvard’s Program on Negotiation blog, they list four main styles—Individualists, Cooperators, Competitives, and Altruists. Individualists are purely transactional, focused on their own return on the deal, and show little interest in helping their counterparts achieve their goals. Cooperators are those who strive to help all parties to a negotiation accomplish their objectives. Competitives are primarily concerned with relative outcomes, wanting above all to do better than their counterparts—whom they often see as competitors and even enemies. Altruists are a rare breed who are most concerned with ensuring that their counterpart gets what they want, even if doing so comes at their own expense.)

Know Your Moves (and Your Counterpart’s)

Voss cautions that you need to be prepared before you head into a negotiation—regardless of which type of negotiator you’re dealing with. That means you need to think about your open-ended questions, how you’re going to reflect back, and your labels before you go in. You may not need a script—but you do need a plan.

There are some specific dodge-and-counterpunch moves you can use when you’re facing down a seasoned negotiator.

• Dodging Tactics: This is what you do to deflect your counterpart’s “punches.” You can use open-ended questions to say “no” without actually using the word or pivot to non-monetary terms. Ask questions like, “Let’s put price aside for now. What else can you offer that would make this a good deal for me?”

(Shortform note: Some negotiation analysts have written that switching the conversation to non-monetary considerations can be an effective technique for negotiators dealing with a larger and more powerful counterpart. They suggest that you can restore some balance to the negotiating environment by appealing to principles like your counterpart’s sense of fairness and reputation or by emphasizing the unique non-monetary advantages you can offer—like agility, knowledge, or personalized service.)

• Counterattack: You need to be prepared to hit back without getting angry. Voss champions a technique psychologists call “strategic umbrage.” This means being genuinely angry (not faking it), but in control of your emotions. The key to strategic umbrage is getting angry at the offer being made—not the person making it. Saying “I’m afraid there are no circumstances that would make what you just proposed work for me” in a displeased—but measured—tone is a good way to leverage a little bit of anger to your advantage.

(Shortform note: Many psychologists argue that anger itself is not a “positive” or “negative” emotion. When used appropriately, anger can power professional success and fuel personal creativity. Instead, the key is to harness that anger to serve useful purposes in situations where it can actually make a difference. This is another way to think of strategic umbrage—angry but in control.)

Unknown Unknowns

Finally, Voss stresses the primacy of having information. Indeed, he says that at their most fundamental level, all negotiations are exercises in information-gathering. But some pieces of information are easier to obtain than others. Voss writes that in every negotiation, there is some hidden piece of information that, if it were known, would completely transform the dynamic of the negotiation and the final outcome. He labels these Black Swans.

Unknown Unknowns: Black Swans

The most important pieces of information, according to Voss, are the unknown unknowns. These are the bits of information that we lack—and, crucially, don’t know that we lack. These are the Black Swans.

For example, let’s say you were looking to buy a house from someone. If, in the course of your negotiation with the seller, you discovered that they were facing some sort of external financial pressures (from a lawsuit or a job loss), you would have great leverage over them. This information would tell you that your counterpart was a highly motivated seller who would likely accept a heavily discounted offer from you. This is a Black Swan—something you didn’t know before, didn’t know that you didn’t know, and that completely reshapes the negotiating dynamic.

Voss highlights some important tactics for finding your counterpart’s Black Swan:

• Get face-time to pick up verbal and body language cues. Voss argues that too much is lost with impersonal media like email.

(Shortform note: Although Voss couldn’t have anticipated this when he published his book in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for businesspeople to conduct in-person meetings and negotiations, with such gatherings largely moving to virtual platforms like Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. Working with other people without the benefit of face-to-face interaction created a number of pitfalls, including inability to see the totality of a person’s body language (since they usually just appear as “talking heads’); difficulty of making direct eye contact, which inhibits trust-building; and a heightened awareness of racial, ethnic, age, and gender differences between ourselves and our counterparts, since videoconferencing enables us to simultaneously see ourselves and the other person—something that doesn’t happen with in-person interactions and that may subconsciously force us to lean back on stereotypes.

• Exploit the Similarity Principle. Voss writes that decades of social science research shows that we are more likely to trust people whom we see as similar to ourselves. This concept is known as the Similarity Principle. Voss advises you to look for what you have in common with your counterpart. Build a rapport with them and create a conversational—even confidential—atmosphere.

(Shortform note: The Similarity Principle can also be used for nefarious purposes, unfortunately. Con artists often practice a form of deception known as affinity fraud, in which they target and exploit members of their own age, racial, religious, or other identity group. Their exploitation is effective because their victims see the con artist as being someone like them, which causes them to feel a level of trust and let their guard down in a way they might not with someone they perceive to be an “outsider.”)

Speaking Your Counterpart’s Language

Voss writes that Black Swans also give us key insight into how our counterpart sees the world. Once you know this, you’ve cracked the code—you can speak to them fluently in a language they understand. This helps you avoid the mistake of thinking your counterpart is “crazy” just because you don’t understand their behavior.

(Shortform note: Voss’s argument that irrational or inexplicable behavior by a party in a negotiation is often the result of their poor information speaks to a concept known as information asymmetry. In Freakonomics, authors Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner write that information asymmetry occurs when information is unequally distributed between parties. This has major implications in a negotiation, in which experts will rely on knowing more than the other party to extract value from them.)