Steve Ersinghaus's List: Common Issues

AND AGAIN, as we’re creating these iterative processes not only multi-play but also multi-option games are necessary. It is a truism of negotiation that the more things on the table, the better the parties can do. With more of what you want at stake and what you don’t want on offer, the effects of reactive devaluation can be minimized. The way to make a negotiation into a non-zero-sum game is to include items that the parties don’t care about equally. If I give in on A–D, he’ll give in on E–H. Since I don’t care so much about A–D, I’ll end up in a better position than that in which I started. Since he doesn’t care so much about E–H, so will he. The way to reach a mutually beneficial agreement is for each party to give in on the things that matter more to the other party than they do to him. The more things on the table, the more likely it is that some of them will be valued differently by the various parties. And what is true logically is also true empirically. In MBA-program negotiating exercises, students get higher scores when there are, say, eight items in play than when there are only four. The negotiators—both sides—do better.

But, alas, this recommendation comes with a caveat: what is true logically and empirically is not true psychologically. The participants may do better, but they feel worse, because they leave the negotiation thinking about all the things they gave up. As psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have captured with “prospect theory” (for which Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics), losses hurt more than wins help. “Sure, I gained on items A–D, but I lost on items E–H. Four losses. Disaster!” If each thing you give up hurts more than each thing you acquire, the feeling of loss multiplies more than the feeling of gain does. So you conduct a successful, complex deal and you feel like a failure. All you can think about is what you left on the table.

A focus on vivid particulars has another advantage as well. Though there is less disagreement among experts about our ecological future than some would claim, the problem is that the dire forecasts are still probabilistic rather than certain. People do not think well about uncertainty, especially in the midrange between “can’t happen” and “must happen.” However, if the events in question are vivid, probabilities recede in importance. As long as it “can happen,” and it involves a vivid particular, people respond to potential calamities as if they are certain. We can then leave the fight about probabilities to experts while citizens do what they can to save the beaches for their children.

It helps, too, to make the dialogue about welfare, not wealth. Kathleen Vohs, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues have shown in a series of experiments that when money is introduced into the picture, even in subtle ways (e.g., a computer screen saver with currency floating around), it makes people more individualistic, less social and less amenable. If cooperation is what saving the global commons needs, focus the arguments on welfare rather than wealth. Get money out of the picture. This might mean downplaying the economic consequences of threats to the global commons, and highlighting the human consequences. Doing this will not only suppress the tendency of people to go it alone but it will also moralize conserving the commons.