Negotiation: Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz (video)
Stan Christensen, partner at investment banking firm, Arbor Advisors interviews former Secretary of State George P. Shultz on negotation. Christensen teaches a course on negotiation at Stanford University and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
My take
I haven’t watched the entire video yet. The speaking is a bit slow and you’ll have to work to take away usable lessons. Nonetheless, it almost always interesting to listen to how major events unfolded and what the players perceived as being the critical factors involved.
RESEARCH: Listening to smart people makes you dumb.
I confess I’m skeptical of “brain studies”, but this one seems to match common experience: When an expert starts talking, people stop thinking (critically).
The study entitled “Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk” and summarized by Robert Cialdini claims that
“Our results demonstrate that financial advice from an expert economist, provided during decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, had a significant impact on both behavior and brain responses…these results provide significant support for the hypothesis that one effect of expert advice is to ‘offload’’ the calculation of expected utility from the individual’s brain. “
In short, when someone you perceive as an expert starts talking, the part of your brain where critical thinking takes place shuts down (or at least activity in that region decreases). Once you understand this phenomenon you see it play out almost everywhere–work, home, the news. The problem of course is that many times those perceived as experts aren’t, or being an expert experiences what I call “expert blindness” where their deep knowledge of a particular area causes them to mis-perceive or just miss critical changes or opportunties.
In any event, it’s an intersting paper well worth reading. Just don’t buy everything is says just because the authors are “experts”. :)
Citation: Engelmann JB, Capra CM, Noussair C, Berns GS (2009) Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically ‘‘Offloads’’ Financial Decision-Making under Risk. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4957. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004957