Ask a bunch of parents why they have so much trouble negotiating with their kids, and one word comes up repeatedly: irrational. These may sometimes be valid points. But the truth is that parents are irrational too.
Parents do things they swore they would never do:
Stories from Home: I used to laugh at people who drove their kids around in cars to get them to go to sleep, until I met my eighteen-month-old who gave up napping unless he was in the car.
Parents do things that are in direct opposition to the facts:
Stories from Home: I knew it was perfectly safe to let her walk home alone from the bus stop (the chances of something dangerous happening were incredibly tiny), and every other kid her age was allowed, but it scared me so I met her at the bus stop anyway for an extra year.
Parents give in just to get out of a situation that they’re sick of:
Stories from Home: Yep, I caved and let her go on the sleepover even though I didn’t think it was a good idea.
But are these really irrational decisions? Or are they perfectly reasonable responses to difficult or exhausting interactions, even possibly effective ways to move the needle forward in the grand scheme? The question of what is or is not rational is much harder to assess in this setting than it might be in the professional world.
Stories from Home: When I was about four years old, I had a big fight with my grandfather over a donut. My grandfather, knowing that the donut was big and that I was small, offered me a half of the donut but promised me that if I finished that half and still wanted more, he would give me the other half immediately. I wanted the WHOLE donut all at once. He tried to reason with me that I would still get the whole donut if I wanted it and if I was able to eat it, but he got nowhere with me … I went to the mat over getting the whole donut until he just gave it to me out of pure frustration.
Who was being rational in this example? The word “rational” is defined as being in accordance with reason or logic, and the grandfather had solid logic on his side. His way would prevent the possible waste of any extra uneaten donut, and possibly prevent the child from getting a stomachache to boot. But to the child, two halves were not equivalent to a whole, and the chance to get a treat was diminished by having to get it in pieces. Is this irrational? On some level, yes, but it seems better to describe this as a clash of values. The grandfather valued efficiency (lack of waste), while the child valued maximizing the impressive moment of holding and biting into a whole donut. We might not agree with the value, but it doesn’t seem to warrant the label irrational.
Thus, aiming to be rational in some objective sense is not the goal. Instead, the research on biases—systematic errors in our thinking—can help us find out where we, as parents, predictably get stuck in the ways we think about things and the decisions that we make. Understanding these potential traps, for you and for your child, can help us recognize patterns in our behavior and suggest new ways to think about it.
THE SCIENCE OF DECISION MAKING
How do we make decisions? Do we carefully weigh evidence and options, make pro-and-con lists, seek outside opinions, and form conclusions? Sometimes we do. Many other times, though, we just have a sense of what feels like the right thing to do, and we do it instantaneously. This means that sometimes we end up deciding things for the wrong reasons. We might choose something because without meaning to, we’re more impressed by information that we just heard as opposed to older information. And as every advertiser knows, we’re also more likely to believe whatever we can easily remember, so the repetition of ideas makes them seem more valid in our minds even without any actual verification. We like information that’s consistent with what we already think—we remember it better and we believe it more. Finally, adding insult to injury, in a tendency called the bias blind spot, we’re much more likely to recognize that others have bias in their thinking but not to see it in ourselves!
There’s only so much energy we can put into considering any one decision, and though some decisions don’t require much thought, others can get short shrift as we take the shortcut of relying on our gut feelings instead of truly considering the situation on its merits. If your child asks for a banana at snack time, you can probably say yes without much thought, and without much fear of the ramifications (barring serious allergies) if for some reason it was the wrong decision, as neither option is probably very consequential. If, however, our teenager asks to open a social media account on a new platform we’re not familiar with, this may require more energy. Bias can emerge when we make overly quick decisions without having systematically thought things through. But even if we have the time and patience to give a decision our full attention, bias can still creep in.
In the world of decision-making science, the assumption is that biased thinking is irrational and is leading you to the objectively wrong answer. The goal of understanding bias, to these researchers, is to help people recognize when the drive for rationality is unintentionally (even subconsciously) thwarted by the mind’s tendency to overly focus on particular pieces of information at the expense of others. For example, the base rate fallacy explains why most people feel comfortable with the logic that a car accident is more likely to happen on a long road trip than within one minute of your home, when that’s not correct—we actually spend much more time inside the one-minute-from-home zone and thus are more likely to have an accident there. The short trips leave a less vivid impression on us, though, and so we picture the long trip when we think of the odds of having an accident. The bias in our thinking can lead us to the wrong conclusion.
But how often do assumptions and thinking like this play a role in our interactions with our kids? Even in the realm of parenting, there are bits of information that can derail our thinking by becoming more important than they deserve. We get stuck by remembering things incorrectly, by being trapped by what we already said, by looking too far into the future, by looking too far back at what might have been, and by paying too much attention to the first thing that happens.
MISREMEMBERING THE ORIGINS: GETTING STUCK ON BLAME
Who started it? It’s very natural to want to go back to the beginning for some sense of who or what launched the problem. In truth, most of our discussions, disagreements, and negotiations with our kids are not one-time events. Instead, they tend to be long, ongoing conversations with many rounds and many different interactions. So, when we think about these discussions after the fact, we may not be as accurate in remembering what happened as we’d like to think. It’s much harder to trace back to the “beginning” because the beginning of one conversation may not really be the true beginning of the whole ongoing discussion between you.
In general, people’s memories of events are far less precise than they feel. We think of our memories as being like recorded scenes, able to be played back with reasonable certainty. Instead, our brains store different bits of information, even about the same memory, in different places. So when we try to recall something, it pulls the various pieces from here and there and strings together something that seems like a unified whole that can be played back like a video clip. But the information in it may well be changed, a little or a lot, from the original events without our awareness.
With respect to conflicts in particular, we tend to remember disagreements in a systematically changed way that’s referred to as biased punctuation,1 which has to do with how we remember who started it. For example, imagine that you’re thinking back to how a particular squabble with your child started. Were you the one who said something first, to which your teenager reacted (perhaps badly), and then you reacted to their reaction, and then a disagreement ensued? Or did they begin by bringing something up first that you responded to? Research shows that we pretty consistently think that the other person started it. This may be true in some of the cases, but clearly can’t be true in all of them, especially if both sides think that the other person was the one at fault! This is related to the psychological concept of projection, in which we try to protect ourselves by denying our unwanted feelings or behaviors and instead attributing them to someone else.
Stories from Home: It regularly happens that my daughter will shout, “WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME?” at me, when she’s most definitely the one doing the yelling. Even though I get it that she really feels yelled at when she’s saying that, it’s hard to not react, and before long, I am usually yelling, too.
Few things fuel our anger more than feeling unjustly treated, and anger makes us even more likely to want to blame the other person. This creates a negative spiral of resentment and blame. But most of the time, it probably doesn’t even matter who started it. It’s much more important to think forward about how to uncover true interests and come to agreements that feel reasonable for both sides than to get hung up on what happened before anyway.
Key Point: Remember that you too were potentially at fault for getting into it with your kids. The more important thing is moving forward.
We also think about information differently depending on who says it. Reactive devaluation describes our natural tendency to treat ideas or potential solutions offered by the other person in a negotiation much more skeptically than we do for our own ideas (or ones presented by someone else on our “side”).
It takes time to carefully think through ideas and potential solutions and to separate them from the assumption that everyone is always, and only, working toward their own best interest in proposing solutions to problems.
Key Point: There’s a natural tendency to think that other people’s ideas are slanted against you. Make sure you listen with an open mind to the ideas of your kids.
ESCALATION OF COMMITMENT: GETTING STUCK WITH OUR PREVIOUS DECISIONS
People hate feeling inconsistent. Once we make a decision, there can be incredible (even irrational) reluctance to reconsider the choice, even when we can see that the initial decision might have been something of a mistake. We are more likely to spend energy, whether consciously or not, convincing ourselves that the decision remains the right one even in the face of other evidence. This is the escalation of commitment at work. This tendency can be seen with business decisions, with political campaigns, with engineering and product design issues, and of course with parenting decisions as well.
Stories from Home: My daughter didn’t want to invite some of the girls from school to hang out, but I had decided that it would be good for her to build these friendships, and I kept insisting despite her protests. It wasn’t until I saw them all together and noticed how unkind they were to her that I realized that I had been the one who was wrong, and I should have stopped, but I hadn’t been willing to change my mind about whether this was the right choice.
The phrase “throwing good money after bad” aptly describes this phenomenon as it reflects the common tendency to doggedly follow a decision even past the point where it’s clear that it’s not the best choice.
In the parenting realm, escalation of commitment generally ends up looking like trying to remain consistent with decisions that were previously made. Sometimes this can even lead to getting trapped behind a decision you no longer necessarily want to support.
Stories from Home: I told my young daughter that she was old enough to brush her own teeth, but it turned out that she really wasn’t … she was making a giant mess and getting herself soaking wet and now I needed to change her an extra time before bed. But since I was the one who brought this up, I didn’t feel like I could change my mind on it.
Other times, the escalation of commitment is subtler and involves convincing yourself that a decision remains the right one, even in the face of other evidence. For a long list of psychological reasons, it’s so much easier and more satisfying to think that you were right all along than to realize you had gotten it wrong.5 Imagine a parent feeling stuck with having a child sleeping on the floor of their room because they said yes once. They may end up justifying this decision to themselves because of these kinds of reasons:
•We are more comfortable with the status quo than with change. This tendency is so strong it even has its own name: the status quo bias. Doing something differently requires so much more thought, energy, and explanation than sticking to the previously set course of action. (“It’s really fine having them in here, no need to make a fuss and kick them out.”)
•We prefer certainty, and change brings more uncertainty to any situation. Who knows if the new decision is going to work out any better than the old one anyway? (“I can’t imagine what kind of bedtimes we’ll be in for if we try and insist they leave.”)
•We tend to be quite overconfident that our first decision was the right one. Study after study indicates that we think our judgments are more accurate, more insightful, and more precise than they actually are. (“My instincts are usually right on this kind of thing.”)
•Even when we do suspect that we were wrong, it’s hard to admit this out loud. We worry about the poor impression that it will give to others if we flip-flop on a decision. Internally, we also don’t like the feeling of saying yes to something one time and then no to it the next. (“How could I ever maintain credibility going forward if I change my mind?”)
•We think we can turn it all around. The “try, try again” logic for turning failures into successes encourages us to believe that if we keep at it, we will prevail—sometimes by sheer force of will alone. However, this logic can bind you to past mistakes more firmly than is wise. It’s difficult to find the line between abandonment at the first sign of trouble and over-commitment to unsuccessful ideas, but it seems that of the two, there is a stronger tendency toward holding on too long. (“If I let them stay, it’ll work itself out eventually in a gentler way than my forcing the issue.”)
•Because we prefer information that agrees with what we already think, we’re more likely to only listen to those who think we did the right thing in the first place. (“Lots of experts think being close in the night is good for kids anyway.”)
•We’re scared of making a mistake, so we’d rather do nothing than the wrong thing. Many people hold the “no regrets” idea close to their hearts, which points to supporting the original decision. Changing our minds means we have to admit that our original logic was faulty. (“I definitely needed to say yes when they were scared, so this makes sense for a while.”)
It’s no wonder we defend our initial decisions so fiercely given the strength of the escalation of commitment effect. It’s hard work to be open to change in any area of life, but it can be the right path forward. Kids may be even more resistant to change than are adults, as their commitment to getting their way can become a goal in and of itself. One particularly useful tool for avoiding this problem of escalation is to include more people from the outside.6 Having another person involved increases your chances of having perspective brought back into the situation and a better evaluation of the right path forward.
Key Point: Don’t be afraid to reverse course when necessary. Yes, consistency is a good thing in parenting overall, but our tendency to prefer it shouldn’t serve as handcuffs or limit your ability to negotiate effectively. Sometimes the right choice is to change your mind.
ARTIFICIALLY HIGH STAKES: GETTING STUCK ON FEARS FOR THE FUTURE
Each decision you make involving your kids can feel like a slippery slope toward some miserable outcome that will have big consequences for the type of adult that your child grows into.
Stories from Home: At about age four, my daughter and I were having standoffs constantly. For instance, I would say “last time down the slide and then we need to go home,” and she would agree but then ask for “just one more?” after that turn. To me, giving in felt like I was giving her all the control, and teaching her that her word didn’t have to mean anything. If I gave in, I was afraid she’d grow up to be a spoiled brat who couldn’t respect rules and authority. So I said no, and she threw fit after fit. One time I decided to let her have her way on it, and I was sure she would just keep asking for “just one more.” But to my surprise, she happily left after the next “last time” because it was of her own choosing. She outgrew the whole thing soon after, and so all the long-term consequences I had feared came to nothing. Turns out it was just a phase.
In this example, the two sides were having entirely different negotiations without realizing it. Perhaps neither side actually cared about the last trip down the slide, but they were instead fighting for control. Maybe the child really did just need one last time to come to closure about leaving the playground on her own terms. From the parent’s perspective, it might not even matter what the reason was because the stakes felt too high that any precedent set here would lead to irreversible consequences for how the child would grow up (spoiled and unable to respect rules). In truth, not every interaction needs to be fraught with the too-high-stakes bias in this way.
Key Point: Remind yourself that the scale and scope of any one interaction is probably smaller than it feels. Precedent does matter, but later situations will be different too, as children also grow and change. The right resolution for right now is the primary goal.
THE WINNER’S CURSE: GETTING STUCK ON WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Ironically, getting the thing we wanted can sometimes make us feel like we made a mistake. Especially if the other side agrees too quickly, we can suddenly feel like we did it all wrong, and should have asked for more.7 This is, of course, irrational in the sense that, if your side of the deal is objectively reasonable for you, that should not change regardless of how the negotiation unfolded or what the other side did, or said, or signaled throughout, including how fast the deal was accepted. Yet, we generally anticipate some back and forth in negotiations, and a quick end can feel unsatisfying.
Stories from Home: One time I told my daughter she couldn’t go out until she finished cleaning her room. She agreed and finished up in less than ten minutes. Afterward I was mad at myself for not asking her to clean her bathroom too, since it was also a big mess and it obviously wasn’t that big a deal for her to just clean her bedroom.
For your children too, an immediate yes may not be as satisfying as one that followed some back-and-forth discussion, and possibly some necessary concessions on their side. While it isn’t practical to drag out every interaction, it is worth noting that for bigger or more important ones, a careful and slower process of concessions and agreement can lead to more satisfaction on both sides than a quicker resolution, even if a positive one. Counterintuitively, your child may be happier promising to feed your pets for a week and getting a video game as a result, rather than simply getting the video game.
Key Point: Quick acceptance of a proposal is often less satisfying than making a counterproposal asking for a little bit more. For yourself, remember that even if a better deal could have been achieved, the deal you sought and received still has value.
ANCHORING AND CONCESSIONS: GETTING STUCK ON THE FIRST THING YOU HEAR
What happens first matters. The chance to speak first, to make the first offer, and to set the agenda and the tone are all moments of potential power because of the exaggerated effect that the first set of ideas can have on the rest of the discussion and the final outcome. For example, if you were asked to estimate how many stop signs there were in the entire state you live in, you would probably be at a bit of a loss. If you heard someone else’s guess first, you are likely to use that number as a starting point and then adjust up or down from there, depending on some combination of your gut feel and some “back of the envelope” calculations that you might be able to come up with. Even if you knew that the other person was also just making a wild guess, research tells us that that number will still influence your own sense of what number to guess. The anchoring and insufficient adjustment bias describes the outsized importance of one piece of information over others that may get discussed.8 Often, this is driven by the first piece of information shared on a topic, but it can also be based on something with a strong emotional weight on it, or even based on something vivid but irrelevant.
Let’s take a simple example in a professional context. Imagine you’re about to negotiate for a software package. You prepare for the negotiation by doing some research into the kinds of features and specifications that you’ll need, and decide that a reasonable budget for your purchase is $2500. Because this is a relatively unique tool, you don’t have a direct point of comparison in the market, but you intend to first offer $1500 in the hopes that that will satisfy the developer. At your first meeting, the developer describes the features in detail, and provides an impressive demonstration of the tool’s capabilities. They explain the work that went into its creation, and remind you that nothing else like it exists on the market. They then jump in and state $3000 as the price before you had a chance to make the offer of $1500 as you had planned. Clearly, $3000 is more than you were planning on spending, but suddenly $1500 seems too low, so you decide to start your offer at $2000 instead.
What happened in this exchange? The seller was able to bias your thinking using several reliable tools. First, the seller was able to anchor the exchange by being the one to say the first number. When you decided to raise your first offer from the originally intended one of $1500, you did that because the anchor (like the heavy object that holds a boat in place) has held your thinking near this higher number. In this case, the seller also relied on the scarcity tactic by introducing the idea that this product is totally unique and a one-of-a-kind opportunity for you, which makes jumping on the purchase that much more tempting, and the authority tactic by impressing you with expertise on the technical details of the tool.
In negotiations with children, the anchoring effect is every bit as powerful as it is in other settings.
Stories from Home: My daughter asked me for a treat after dinner, and I asked her what she wanted. She said, eight cookies. I laughed and said she could have two (they were pretty small, but so was she). She said, how about six? I said that four was the absolute most (and was more than I had originally intended to give her), so she had them but she didn’t seem that happy.
In this situation, the child got to anchor first with not just the large number of cookies but also with the mental image of a big stack of them. Imagine if the next time dessert came up, the parent decided to preemptively offer a single scoop of ice-cream instead of asking the child what she had in mind. Even if the child then countered with a giant sundae instead (with two scoops, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and sprinkles), the parent now has the advantage of having gotten their offer in first. A small concession (maybe sprinkles on the single scoop) is more likely to be well received as the initial anchor set the expectations. If the child had gotten to speak first and started with the image of that big beautiful sundae, she might have gone with “sundae or tantrum” as the only choices, instead of being open to the single-with-sprinkles agreement. Anchors pull us toward their location.
But anchoring can work against you if you get too stuck on your own first image. Even the child in the story seems to have felt some disappointment at moving the stack of proposed cookies from eight down to four, despite the fact that four was much better than the parent’s initial offer of two. Order matters and affects not only what gets agreed to but also how both sides feel about the final outcome.
On top of the power to create that first reference point, anchoring also gives you the opportunity to “begin as you wish to proceed” and introduce your tone of voice, your level of seriousness, and your choices about what needs to be discussed. Our kids are very sensitive to the cues that we send about whether something is a big deal, about whether we’re upset and angry or are light and casual about something, and about how flexible we feel on the point. Kids are quick to mirror our approach. Just like the toddler who falls and then looks to you to see how you’re going to react before deciding whether to cry, older kids also look to us to get a handle on a situation. This is an opportunity for you to use those first moments to create the discussion that you want.
It pays to speak first if you can, and to get your ideas and tone on the table initially. This isn’t magic, of course, and it is certainly possible that the other side will counter your offer with something that’s either unrelated or quite far from your initial proposal. But the more uncertainty there is in the situation, the more likely it is that the other person will adjust what they might have offered first in the direction of what you have already offered. Often, this is not even a conscious process, but research shows that final offers are related to initial offers in as many as 85% of negotiated outcomes, indicating that taking advantage of anchoring with the first offer is indeed worth it.9
Key Point: Make the first offer whenever possible. This is good advice in many negotiation situations, but is especially true with your kids where you know a lot about where they’re coming from, and who are looking to you to set the tone.
Of course, choosing the right first offer is important. Offering too many options can overwhelm the child and makes it hard to make a decision, and reduces satisfaction in the final outcome to boot.10 But some choice can make your anchor even firmer and give control back to a child to avoid a power struggle (“You need to hold my hand to cross the street, would you like to hold my left hand or my right hand?”). If your first offer is too extreme, you lose credibility as being ridiculous, or worse, prompt the other side to offer something equally unreasonable, setting you at odds right off the bat. If it’s too modest, you lose out on any chance of getting a good deal for yourself. The right first offer is reasonable but still leaves you room to make at least some concessions before settling.
First offers are almost never accepted at face value in negotiations, and making concessions is an important part of the process. Concessions are an opportunity to give in on the issues of less importance to you and more importance to your child, in the hopes of achieving your top priorities in exchange.
In practice, the use of concessions can be complicated. Sometimes people end up offering a unilateral concession, which means lowering your request without a counter offer from the other side. This can unfold in two different ways—reactively and preemptively. Imagine that you’re negotiating with your spouse over chores that need to get done, and you ask for a commitment from them to handle five different tasks. Perhaps your spouse just remains silent in return, and looks shocked at the request. Before another word is spoken, you might reactively self-edit and say that really, these three tasks alone would be fine—forget about the other two. The other person’s silence and expression prompted your concession in this case.
Alternatively, you may talk yourself out of even asking for what you really want preemptively, for fear that it will make you seem greedy or unreasonable. While it may be a fine decision to make a more modest request, doing this by thinking silently serves as a limitation for you overall. Imagine that in the example above, although ideally, you’d like to hand over all five tasks on the list, instead of saying so to your spouse you decided to only ask for three instead of ever mentioning all five, to be more reasonable. Because generally in life you never get more than you ask for, you have effectively limited the amount of chores that are going to get done by your spouse, even if they might have been willing to do more.
Stories from Home: My older child is not a good negotiator. Like with his book fair at school, if I ask him how much money he needs, even if he was thinking $10, he will only say $5. By contrast, my younger one will always start by asking for more than he really wants!
Without having made it clear that a concession has been made, the other side does not feel the same pressure to reciprocate and be similarly more reasonable in what is being offered or requested.
Stories from Home: At some point I noticed a pattern when negotiating with my kids. I would say yes to thing after thing, and then finally something would come up that I would have to say no to. They always took that no very hard, and whined and wailed as if they were being denied their only wish on earth. Eventually, I realized that all my yesses were not being given “credit,” and that if I wanted them to count as more meaningful, I had to point them out along the way.
In this case, the children seemed to view every situation as an entirely independent negotiation in which they expected to get their way. Having gotten what they wanted, they never even registered the negotiation at all, let alone the concessions that were made on their behalf. To the parent, this was a series of related negotiations in which numerous concessions had already been made.
Key Point: Ask for what you want, offer to concede on the issues of lesser importance to you, and don’t make either preemptive or reactive unilateral concessions. Make clear what concessions you have made to trigger the sense of fairness in your child that comes from having already gotten some of what they wanted.
•Biases slant our thinking. Through subtle and unconscious cues, we are pushed toward some conclusions over others (for example, we tend to blame others for causing problems). We need to pay attention to what might be influencing us and how, and to make sure we’re not getting stuck on particular ideas or approaches in our negotiations.
•First offers matter. We overweigh information that we hear first. This makes first offers more powerful as they shape how we perceive what follows.
•Consistency can be limiting. It is certainly possible to reverse decisions later on if circumstances change. Don’t become a slave to the idea of total consistency in your negotiations.
•Negotiate this moment, not the next one. We get overwhelmed by the precedent-setting nature of our decisions about our kids, but the priority should be figuring out the right next step.
•Hard-won agreements feel better. We need to be willing to make concessions. It’s wise to play up the concessions you make, to avoid making unspoken concessions, and to resist giving in too quickly. In terms of outcomes, remember that a good deal’s a good deal no matter who proposed it or whether you could possibly have gotten a better one.
NOTES
1. Thompson, L. L. (2015). The mind and heart of the negotiator (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
2. Ross, L., & Stillinger, C. (1991). Barriers to conflict resolution. Negotiation Journal, 7(4), 389–404. doi:10.1111/j.1571-9979.1991.tb00634.x.
3. Staw, B. M., & Hoang, H. (1995). Sunk costs in the NBA: Why draft order affects playing time and survival in professional basketball. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40, 474–493. doi:10.2307/2393794.
4. Sweis, B. M., Abram, S. V., Schmidt, B. J., Seeland, K. D., MacDonald, A. W., Thomas, M. J., & Redish, A. D. (2018). Sensitivity to “sunk costs” in mice, rats, and humans. Science, 13(361), 178–181. doi: 10.1126/science.aar8644.
5. Bazerman, M. H. (2006). Judgment in managerial decision making (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons; Kelly, T. F., & Milkman, K. L. (2013). Escalation of commitment. In E. H. Kessler (Ed.), Encyclopedia of management theory (pp. 256–260). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
6. Bazerman, M. H., Giuliano, T., & Appleman, A. (1984). Escalation in individual and group decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 33, 141–152. doi: 10.1016/0030-5073(84)90017-5.
7. Lewicki, R. L., Barry, B., & Saunders, D. M. (2016). Essentials of negotiation (6th ed.). New York: McGraw–Hill.
8. Thompson, L. (2008). The truth about negotiations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
9. Galinsky, A., & Mussweiler, T. (2001). First offers as anchors: The role of perspective-taking and negotiator focus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4), 657–669. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.657.
10. Naquin, C. E. (2003). The agony of opportunity in negotiation: Number of negotiable issues, counterfactual thinking, and feelings of satisfaction. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 91(1), 97–107.