
So it’s important to thoroughly analyze the benefits you might expect from a negotiation that could allow you to honor your principles. Bazerman-that is, the issues are only off-limits under certain conditions.

But many of the issues negotiators consider sacred are actually pseudo-sacred, notes Harvard Business School professor Max H. We tend to err on the side of not negotiating when sacred principles and values are at stake, writes Program on Negotiation Chair Robert Mnookin in his book Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight. Take the case of two siblings who disagree about whether to sell their deceased parents’ farm, with one of them insisting the land must remain in the family and the other arguing that the parents would want them to sell it. Conflict management can be particularly intractable when core values that negotiators believe are sacred, or nonnegotiable, are involved, such as their family bonds, religious beliefs, political views, or personal moral code.


When we feel we’re being ignored or steamrolled, we often try to capture the other party’s attention by making a threat, such as saying we’ll take a dispute to court or try to ruin the other party’s business reputation. Conflict resolution strategy #2: Avoid escalating tensions with threats and provocative moves.We might do this by jointly hiring a mediator who can help us see one another’s point of view, or by enlisting another type of unbiased expert, such as an appraiser, to offer their view of the “facts.” When embroiled in a conflict, we need to try to overcome our self-centered fairness perceptions. Our sense of what would constitute a fair conflict resolution is biased by egocentrism, or the tendency to have difficulty seeing a situation from another person’s perspective, research by Carnegie Mellon University professors Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein and their colleagues’ shows. Both parties to a conflict typically think they’re right (and the other side is wrong) because they quite literally can’t get out of our own heads. Conflict resolution strategy #1: Recognize that all of us have biased fairness perceptions.
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