Prof. Jared Curhan has found that “breakthroughs in negotiations occurred nearly twice as frequently after a conversational lapse of between 3.5 and 9.5 seconds as they did at any other point in the conversation,” reports Heidi Mitchell for The Wall Street Journal.
WBUR host Peter O’Dowd speaks with MIT senior research associate Jim Walsh about the recent meeting between Russian and Ukrainian delegates. “I think both parties feel like they have to go through the motions, and both are, or at least the Ukrainians are, rightly skeptical,” says Walsh. “The way negotiations work is they work over a long period of time.”
Forbes reporter Nili Peretz spotlights MIT Sloan School of Management researchers who suggest that moments of silence in negotiations can lead to a better outcome for both parties. “We often perceive negotiation as a daunting task or fierce competition between two sides that always leaves one a winner and the other a loser,” says Peretz. “However, a brief pauses and silence can be incredibly effective in empowering negotiators to shift from a fixed pie mentality to a more reflective state of mind.”
A new study by Prof. Jared Curhan finds that there are positive benefits to pausing during negotiations, reports Monica Torres for HuffPost. “There is often this romantic view that great negotiators are these very slick people and they always know exactly what to say,” Curhan says. “But in fact, if someone uses a difficult tactic on you ... oftentimes it’s better to say, ‘I’ll get back to you on that.’”