CHAPTER THREE
Not Reason Able
We’re now a lot clearer on why social animals would like to have some way to come to a compromise when there’s a disagreement: to avoid the dreaded, truth-determining fight always in the offing. The dead-eyed likes of Nigel and Butch had no choice but to look truth straight in the eyes, day after day after day. Fights were their only option. And even if Butch could express himself, one gets the impression he isn’t much into that sort of thing.
How can languageless social animals find a compromise between their differing beliefs about the truth without discovering the truth via actually fighting?
There are some really simple ways to compromise. For example, an even split, or flipping a coin to decide who gets it all. The trouble with such ways of coming to a compromise is that I may have better reasons—greater justification or a stronger hand—for my belief than you do for your belief. I’m not about to accept an even split or a coin flip if I have strong reason to believe I’m right (i.e., if I have strong reason to believe that I would win in a fight).
People generally have reasons for why they believe things, at least implicitly, and, in light of this, a compromise solution immediately suggests itself: If each party’s reasons were mutually known, they could settle on the compromise that balances those reasons. Intuitively, it would be an estimate of the truth based on the totality of their reasons. “Look, how about you and I just write down all our reasons for why we think we’re right? Once we do that, we’ll have a much clearer idea who’s got superior reasons.” The party with stronger reasons would thereby get a better compromise.
That, however, is completely unreasonable.
Weighing reasons is very complicated. It requires an understanding of logic, science, statistics, and experimental controls, among other factors. Even we humans are notoriously bad at such things. We fudge our way through arguments, get sidelined, miss implications, and remain irrevocably biased and unbudgingly hardheaded.
We can hardly expect wild social animals to weigh reasons. Neither can we expect them to articulate their reasons like a seasoned debater. At any rate, even if there were a seasoned debater inside each wild social animal, without language there’s no way to debate and weigh reasons.
Certain Hills
Forget about reasons, then, and concentrate on something simpler. How about the level of justification a reason provides for a belief, or, equivalently, the certainty level conferred by one’s reasons? It’s really these certainty levels, not the reasons themselves, that we would like to balance to get a fair compromise. The zucchini bread should be apportioned so that the party who is more certain gets more.
In fact, even when humans use language to communicate our reasons, we’re mostly trying to communicate our level of certainty. “Here are my reasons for why I’m this certain . . . But here are some caveats that prevent me from being much more certain than that.”
This simple observation—that of balancing levels of certainty to find a fair compromise—is crucial for understanding compromise, so let’s linger on it a bit.
If Mark and Tim are both equally certain about their beliefs, then a fair compromise would obviously be the one splitting the difference between those beliefs. If, instead, Mark were less certain than Tim, then a fair compromise would be one favoring Tim to some extent. That’s easy!
Here’s the tricky part. What sort of signaling system can languageless creatures actually use that allows each to communicate their level of certainty?
That might sound easy, but it’s not (thus the reason for this book!). But it’s also not so hard! And not nearly as hard as trying to balance reasons. Whereas reasons are immensely complicated, must be communicated via a proper language, and require a huge corpus of knowledge to compare and weigh, levels of certainty are just numbers, something that languageless social animals just might be able to communicate.
But what exactly is a strength of reason, or level of certainty, for a belief?
In our earlier diagrams, Tim’s and Mark’s beliefs were simply dots on an axis of compromise. But when we say that Mark believes Tim should get one-third of the loaf, we’re not saying that Mark is 100 percent certain that “one-third of a loaf” is the truth. One-third is just the loaf fraction Mark believes has the greatest probability of being the truth. But he knows it might well be higher or lower.
Mark’s belief is really more like a hill, with a peak at one-third. Then the hill tapers off on either side. Same for Tim. If a belief is strongly justified (has good reasons), then this curve will be tight around the center; that’s high certainty. And if the belief is weakly justified (has poor reasons), the curve will be wide at the center; that’s low certainty (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Beliefs are not simply points. Instead, a belief is a distribution, often shaped like a bell curve. The single belief point is just some representative value in the middle (like the average or highest point). The person’s level of certainty is characterized by the tightness of this distribution, tighter meaning more certain (by virtue of better reasons). For the zucchini situation, because the curve for Tim is tighter than for Mark, it means Tim is more certain about his belief than Mark is about his. A fair compromise is one that balances these levels of certainty, so that the party who is more certain gets a greater share. The compromise-signaling system we’re building over this and the upcoming chapters is all about somehow allowing two animals to communicate their levels of certainty, and thereby finding the fair compromise at some balance point.
So, the idea we’re putting out there as a starting point for how to find a compromise is that social animals can just express their level of certainty and altogether skip the reasons. If Mark and Tim could express their respective levels of certainty, for instance, they’d realize that Tim is more certain, and so he should get an accordingly larger share of the loaf.
Dramatic Statisticians
If our claim is that emotional expressions involve conveying our respective certainties to one another, then an immediate worry becomes that “level of certainty in my belief” doesn’t sound much like expressing an emotion. Again, we find ourselves worried that our idea might be much too sterile to even be in the right ballpark. Remember, we’re looking for the sorts of things social animals need to express in order to be able to negotiate fair compromises. And “level of certainty” doesn’t sound close if our target is emotional expressions! It sounds like something a statistician might say, and no one to this day is even sure if statisticians have emotions.
However, one of the surprising things about the boring word “certainty” is that it actually is deeply related to emotional expressions. In fact, as we’ll slowly come to see, all the emotional expressions are related to certainty.
To begin to smell that certainty is just stinking with emotion, imagine if Mark were to say to Tim, “I definitely, unquestionably, and indubitably should get two-thirds of the loaf.”
We don’t know what Mark is trying to get across by being so redundant and long-winded, but he does seem to be evincing some . . . passion. Imagine hearing Mark say that sentence. You can almost hear his emotionally expressive intonation. But if Mark is somehow thereby expressing an emotion, what emotional expression might that be?
Easy. It’s confidence. To have certainty is to be confident. To say that Susie is a confident person is close to saying that she’s often certain of herself. And to express certainty is to express the emotion of confidence. Even in mathematics (and statistics!), we often use the term “confidence” for certainty, as in “confidence intervals,” for example.
And, really, we mean justifiably certain, or justifiably confident (although we’ll often drop the “justifiable” for brevity). If Tim expresses high confidence that he should get two-thirds of the loaf, he’s implicitly saying that he is justified in that level of confidence. He’s definitely not intending to convey “I am certain for no good reason!”
Certainty, after all, is connected to emotional expressions because it’s just a more sterile way of talking about confidence, and that’s an emotion.
We can’t expect languageless social animals to communicate reasons and arguments and data and logic and so on. Instead, maybe there is some way to skip to the chase and just express certainties about their respective beliefs—so that they can weigh them and find a compromise. If so, then perhaps that’s what the emotional expression of confidence is all about.
My-Confidence Dimension
We do indeed have the ability to express confidence. That is to say, confidence in my belief—or self-confidence—is something we do emotionally express.
And we also have its opposite. Whereas Mark signaled high (self-) confidence when he said earlier, “I definitely, unquestionably, and indubitably should get two-thirds of the loaf,” Mark might have instead (were he not so insufferable) said, “I’m somewhat sure that I should get two-thirds of the loaf.” In this case, Mark would be expressing that he’s not too confident.
We have, then, our first pair of emotional expressions! Confident and not-confident, opposite ends of a my-confidence dimension. These are emotional expressions we’re constantly signaling. Having the ability to express such things must somehow be crucial for negotiation.
Now, we have already hinted several times that a single dimension won’t be enough; the steering wheel has two dimensions, not one. Our point in this chapter is that social animals have to at least be able to signal their own confidence level in order to negotiate. So let’s agree to temporarily forget that the my-confidence dimension we’re focusing on in this chapter won’t be the whole story.
Pride and Humility
As we begin introducing emotional expressions in this and the next couple of chapters, we’ll really be introducing dimensions of emotional expressions. At the moment we’re simply pointing out that, because the two parties’ certainty levels must surely somehow be a big factor in coming to a compromise, and certainties are the kind of thing that maybe social animals could (and do!) actually express (as a quantitative level), social animals should have the ability to express certainty, or confidence, levels. That’s just to say there should be a my-confidence dimension to emotional expressions.
Rather than talking about the opposite ends of this my-confidence dimension as “confident versus not confident,” it would be nice to have simpler terms, a distinct one for each of the opposite ends. Terms like pride and humility do fairly well.
Pride: I definitely should get two-thirds of the loaf.
Humility: I’m somewhat sure I should get two-thirds of the loaf.
Well, look at that! We now have the beginnings of an emotional expression system. Pride-humility stand as opposite expressions along a (self-) confidence (or my-confidence) dimension. We’ll even give them faces, as seen in Figure 4, which will be visually helpful as we go along.
Figure 4. In order for social animals to negotiate, they need to be able to express their own confidence level in their belief via some emotional expression, like pride, and another when they are not confident, like humility. For the purposes of illustration in our diagram, we’ll show pride with V-shaped eyebrows, and humility with upside-down, V-shaped brows. A neutral expression would correspond to some baseline, typical confidence level.
Pushy People
But what exactly is the point of having emotional expressions like pride and humility?
We haven’t quite gotten there yet, but we’re getting closer. At this stage, we’re only making the observation that each party’s self-confidence level is surely hugely important in a disagreement. If I’m more confident, then I’ll negotiate harder, and I’m more willing to abandon discussion and fight about it. If these quantitative confidence levels could somehow be conveyed, and weighed, then the parties could just settle on the compromise, giving the more confident party accordingly more. Something along those lines would seem to be fair. And that sounds like a potential start to a compromise.
In order to flesh out this idea, in the upcoming sections we’ll describe how, within disagreements, there’s much more to the shape of a belief than the hills we just discussed. As we proceed, we’ll find that beliefs actually reach out and touch one another. They even “push” against one another! And the more confident a party is in their belief, the harder the belief “pushes.” Much like the Jedi in Star Wars, our wills really do push.
And it’s crucial that we address the issue of force. If after around 250 pages we have a supposed signaling system that social animals can use to negotiate, but nothing prevents one party from flouting all those signals and just doing whatever they want, then we wouldn’t really have a compromise-signaling system that works for social animals at all. Something about how the expression system works has to, in some sense, actually “force” the negotiators to do some particular thing, namely adhere to whatever compromise the negotiation arrived at. There needs to be some oomph in all this, lest it’s all talk.
But if the whole point, after all, of a negotiation is to avoid physical force, then how can there be anything pushy in negotiations? People who are pushy aren’t physically pushy at all. Pushy people are demanding. They keep griping for more, asking to get their way, and demanding more for themselves. They’re usually a bit of a pain in the ass, but notice that they’re rarely actually a literal pain in the literal ass. How, then, can people be pushy without ever pushing?
Rubber and Road Rarely Meet
You get forced to do all sorts of things. Your boss forces you to go to boring meetings. Your husband forces you to sit down and relax while he cleans the bathroom this time. (We jest!) The police force you to pull over by their sirens and loudspeaker demands. The Mafia forces you to pay your protection money.
Yet, one thing you’ll fail to see in most instances of force is actual, literal, grab-by-the-hair, kicking-and-screaming, dragging-along-the-blacktop force. Your boss never throws you over her shoulder and ties you to the comfy swivel chair in the meeting room. Your husband rarely actually wrestles you down to stop you from cleaning the toilet. The police get you to the side of the road without ever employing the Mad Max style of harpoons with which all interstate trooper police vehicles are secretly equipped. And your local Mafia representative almost never actually has to break your legs to get past you to the cash register; you just hand it over. A lot of the supposed “forcing” that seems to go on in society doesn’t seem very force-like at all.
Perhaps they’d seem a lot more like cases of force if someone were actually brandishing a tool of force, like whips, chains, that sort of thing. But even if we imagine that your boss pulled out a stapler and threatened to staple your ear to your head, prompting you to obediently sit yourself down in the swivel chair, your boss never actually stapled your ear to your head in this scenario; you sat yourself down in the chair. When the local Mafia representative shows you the new tire iron he just bought online and tells you he’s eager to try it out if you don’t pay up, which in turn forces you to open the register and hand over the weekly payment, he never actually got to use his shiny new leg breaker. You opened the cash register, and you handed it over; Vito just stood there checking his Instagram messages.
Even when the force gets much more force-like in the sociopolitical sense—with guns and staplers and tire irons brandished, but not actually used—there’s still no actual force in the sense we might use the term in a physics course. You know, with mass, acceleration, and so on.
Yet, the local Mafia representative really does force you to hand over the weekly payment. And it’s by force whether he brandishes his tire iron with the price tag still dangling from it, or whether he just casually mentions what a shame it would be if something were to happen to your handsome legs.
Fight Non-Club
All this talk about staplers and tire irons and harpoons suggests that maybe the “force” that occurs in social situations such as these occurs because the fight that could happen (if the negotiation fails) contains real, live physical force. Your boss may not actually physically force you into the meeting room, but the stapler she keeps waving around amounts to a threat of physical force. The intuition that there’s a “force of wills” among social animals who are merely signaling, and not actually oomphing, would come from the fact that there’s real oomph in the fight that might happen.
But remember that the fight need not involve broken legs at all. A fight, more generally, can occur in loads of ways, most of which have no oomph in the physics sense. A fight might well involve looking up the capital of Oklahoma on Wikipedia or checking whether the orange juice in the refrigerator is twelve or sixteen ounces, or any number of other kinds of fights where Vito’s special skills would be underutilized. If you abandon negotiating on the house you’re trying to buy, the fight becomes about checking how much the seller eventually manages to sell it for; no one physically pushed anyone in that fight. And, for the zucchini situation, Judy simply declares how to divvy up the loaf. Judy may want to wallop each of us over the head, but walloping isn’t actually part of the zucchini situation’s fight.
Although we’re using the word “force” in social scenarios, it isn’t about mass and acceleration. It’s about the other party having such a strong negotiating position that you feel you basically have little or no choice but to agree to what they demand . . . no matter how abstract and wispy the fight would be.
In what sense, then, is it accurate to say that our wills can “make” others do things? Why does it make sense to use the word “pushy” for someone who never actually pushes? How does “force” get into social disagreements and negotiations? And how does it make sense to use the term “force” even if a (possibly non-oomphy) fight does not happen?
By understanding the force our wills can produce, we’ll get a better appreciation of social relationships, and a more precise grasp of how it is that two opposing confidences can find a fair balance.
Vito the Drama Queen
Before uncovering the forces of our wills, notice something interesting in sentences like “It would be a shame if something were to happen to your handsome legs.”
Sure, it’s a threat. But, more than that, it seems downright . . . aggressive. One might even say that it serves to express an emotion of sorts. Vito basically emotionally expressed aggression via those words. He could have expressed the same basic point through an actual aggressive emotional expression on his face.
We may not yet understand the role of emotional expressions, nor how wills can exert non-physical social forces (whatever that even means!), but we can already see that the sorts of expressions folks make that might “force” others to do stuff are steeped with emotion.
As we’ll see, emotional expressions are the key to understanding how force in the social sense is actually worthy of being called a force.
Can Confidences Balance?
Back to the zucchini tribulations.
Recall that Mark and Tim both have some (justifiable) confidence level in their respective selfish zucchini-loaf beliefs. Our idea thus far for defusing this grave vegetable predicament is that Mark and Tim just tell each other their confidence level. Tim can express pride, and Mark—who is less confident—can express a mild version of humility. Once they each know both confidence levels, they can just agree on the fair compromise, giving more of the loaf to the more confident party, which is Tim.
But how much more should Tim get? Maybe the appropriate, fair solution is that Tim should just win the argument completely, getting the two-thirds he claims he should get—he is more confident, after all, and there can be only one truth. Or maybe Tim should only get a crumb more than Mark, amounting to more of a symbolic victory, but a victory Tim can relish later, nonetheless. Or perhaps the fair balance point is somewhere in between the two. But where?
It’s fine to say that by knowing their confidence levels, Tim and Mark can find a single fair compromise that balances those levels. But is there really such a thing? And if it is a thing, what is it?
As we’ll see, Tim’s and Mark’s beliefs (and their respective confidence levels) really do lead to one particular compromise being the fair one. This will give us greater conviction that it might be a good idea for Tim and Mark to emotionally express their confidence level.
Making sense of this fair compromise happens to require making sense of how our minds can “push.”
Yes, I Can Live with More Than I Should Get
As we saw in Figure 1, Mark believes that “Tim should get one-third.” So, Mark would totally love it if Tim were to agree to a one-third portion. “That’s exactly how much I claimed you should get!” Mark would gaily announce in response.
But you know what Mark would love even more than Tim agreeing to Mark’s belief? More freakin’ zucchini bread!
Imagine if Tim instead were to say, “Fine. I’ll take even less than one-third. Just give me a thin slice; we gotta go.”
Woo-hoo for Mark! Tim just agreed to a compromise that Mark didn’t even suggest. In a sense, then, Tim didn’t agree with Mark.
But Mark can totally live with that because Tim offered Mark even more than what Mark believes he should get. The point is, Mark may believe that Tim should get only one-third of the zucchini loaf, but he might well not make a fuss if Tim asks for even less. “I’m happy to agree to the non-truth if it means more sugary, kitchen-gardeny goodness for me!”
With this in mind, rather than imagining each party as a truth seeker, or imagining that they want the agreement to match their belief, it’s much better to simply imagine each party as “pushing” in their favored direction. Mark is pushing leftward (to less zucchini bread for Tim), and Tim is pushing rightward (to more for himself). And each is totally willing to push the compromise far beyond their actual claimed belief.
Neither of these guys is truly interested in having their belief agreed to, per se. Rather, each just wants the best deal they can get. For any given offer, what they really want to know is the probability that “it’s a good deal for them.”
Good Deal
We shouldn’t be at all surprised that what social animals are truly interested in is a good deal. The only reason I bother having a belief about what I should get (i.e., what I would get in a fight) is because I’m interested in getting as much as I can of whatever we’re negotiating over.
But, in this light, the belief hills shown in Figure 3 don’t much help to illustrate the true nature of the negotiation. “How good a deal it is for me” isn’t a hill shape at all. Instead, the curve for this just keeps going up as the deal gets better for me. It’s an ever-rising slope (or one side of a hill).
If I’m offered only a mere third of the zucchini loaf, the probability (according to my belief hill or distribution) that it’s a good deal is very low. If I’m offered two-thirds—which is what I believe I should get—then it’s fifty-fifty as to whether it’s a good deal. And if I’m offered, say, three-fourths of the loaf—even more than I believe I should get—then there’s a high probability it’s a good deal. “Unfair to you, but I graciously accept!”
The more you offer me, the higher the probability that it’s a good deal for me. That’s an ever-rising, one-sided hill, something very different than the belief hills of Figure 3.
Disbelief
Rather than thinking in terms of “how good a deal it is for me,” it turns out to be much more useful to think about the inverse of how good a deal is for you (i.e., one divided by the probability that it’s a good deal for me).1 This is “my disbelief that it’s a good deal for me.” Figure 5 shows how Mark’s disbelief rises higher and higher as the possible compromise gets worse and worse for him.
Figure 5. When you negotiate to buy a house, you often tell your realtor to convey more than just your next offered amount. With phrases like “and this is my client’s final offer,” we realize a second dimension to negotiation. Joining our horizontal compromise axis is a vertical axis representative of this second dimension. To understand it, we have to understand the notion of disbelief that an offer is a good deal. Remember that Mark favors compromises that are more to the left. For our purposes in this book, rather than thinking about the probability that something is a good deal for Mark, it will be more helpful to think about the inverse. The curve here shows Mark’s level of disbelief that it’s a good deal. You can see that it starts low at the left (which Mark favors) and rises higher as the compromises move rightward in Tim’s favor. The more a compromise moves rightward, the more Mark disbelieves it’s a good deal.
The more confident Mark is—the tighter his certainty hill from Figure 3 is—the steeper his disbelief curve. Intuitively, if Mark is super confident, then even a slight shift toward a worse deal leads to a huge increase in how much Mark disbelieves it’s a good deal for him.
Disbelief (that it’s a good deal for me) will be important in everything we discuss moving forward, so let’s pause for a moment and consider its importance.
Recall from the previous chapter that your realtor might have been conveying more than just your price demands. You might also ask your realtor to let the seller know that “this is my client’s final offer.” Or maybe you instead asked your realtor to say something like, “and my client wants you to know that she really loves the house and is open to suggestions.” Whatever this “extra” stuff is, it isn’t on the horizontal compromise axis of our diagrams. It’s a second dimension to negotiation, one we employ instinctively.
In fact, the vertical disbelief dimension in Figure 5 is just the “and this is my final offer” dimension we were hinting at. The more Mark disbelieves that a compromise is a good deal for him (i.e., the more upward one moves in the diagram), the more he’s likely to “walk” and not buy the house at all (which initiates the fight in this case).
As we move forward, we’ll point out a number of different interpretations for this vertical dimension, but they’re all really about the same thing. Each interpretation just helps us better grasp its meaning. At this point we already have two interpretations: (1) disbelief that it’s a good deal for me, and (2) the extent to which I am saying “and this is my final offer.”
Opposing Disbeliefs
In Figure 5 we saw Mark’s disbelief curve. Now let’s look at both his and Tim’s disbelief curves in the same diagram, which you can see in Figure 6. Whereas Mark’s curve rises as one moves rightward toward less loaf for him, Tim’s falls as one moves rightward toward more loaf for him. Rather than two belief hills as we saw earlier in Figure 3, we now have two sloping cliffs. And because Tim actually knows Judy, and Mark doesn’t, Tim’s greater certainty is shown via his steeper cliff.
One key observation about these disbelief “cliffs” is that they’re the opposite of one another. That’s because whatever is in Mark’s favor is not in Tim’s favor. The diagram nicely serves to indicate that Mark and Tim have opposing wants and that they’re “pushing” in opposite directions. Having the cliffs look like the opposite of one another is perceptually very nice because it helps communicate the sense of opposition occurring in a disagreement. You can see in Figure 6 that Mark’s leftward “pushing” arrow is under his “rising” disbelief curve, and Tim’s rightward “pushing” arrow is under his own “falling” disbelief curve.
Figure 6. The disbelief curves are now shown for both Mark and Tim. Tim’s curve, pushing rightward rather than leftward, is the opposite of Mark’s. We have also zoomed in a bit compared to Figure 5, focusing on the range of compromises between Mark’s compromise belief (on the far left) and Tim’s (on the far right). These guys are looking for a compromise between their differing beliefs. In all future graphs, the left end of the diagram will be Mark’s belief and the right end will be Tim’s. The vertical axis will be their disbelief, although it has many other interpretations, including the degree to which the party is threatening to abandon the negotiation and fight instead (the “and this is my final offer” dimension).
End Zones
In our new kind of disbelief diagram, we’ve also made another change from the earlier two-hills belief diagram. Here we’ve put Mark’s belief about what the compromise should be at the far left end, and Tim’s at the far right end.
Intuitively, they’re the end zones of the game (in American football terms), with Mark wanting to push the “ball” (ahem, compromise) into (or even beyond) the left-side end zone, where he gets more loaf, and Tim wanting to push the “ball” into the right-side end zone, where he gets more loaf.
All of our future graphs will have the same structure we see in this diagram: the compromise axis extends horizontally from Mark’s belief to Tim’s belief, and the vertical axis is disbelief (about the compromise being a good deal).
In fact, even our emotional expression diagrams—which will have little emotionally expressive faces inside—will be embedded in the same space. The tug-of-war is always going on horizontally, and greater elevations within the diagram always mean more serious, or greater, disbelief.
What Even Is a Force?
As we mentioned earlier, one of the advantages of these little disbelief diagrams is that, because the curves are opposite in shape, they help to perceptually illustrate that the two parties have opposite interests. We might say that their interests are opposed, which seems to be getting in the realm of oomphs. Going from “opposite” to “opposed” seems to be bringing us toward some of the pushiness we were on the lookout for. But that’s just a word trick.
Is there any real sense in which we can say that Mark and Tim might be “pushing” in their zucchini disagreement? Some sort of psychosocial notion of force that would allow us to make sense of Vito, your boss, and all the other cases in society where we’re “forced” to do stuff even though there’s no physical force involved, and often not even a threat of physical force?
Despite disagreements not having actual forces in the physical sense, there is a perfectly sensible notion of force at sway. Force is ultimately a theoretical construct, and we should believe in it to the extent it helps us make sense of things. A standard definition of force goes something like this: A force is a push upon an object resulting from the object’s interaction with another object.
For disagreements, there is a clear intuitive notion that seems force-like; it’s just that the “object” happens to be the will of a social creature, and the “push” a psychological one concerning the creature’s desire and inclination to strive to get compromises in their favored direction.
Forces of Disbelief
If there is some kind of legitimate use of the term “force” in disagreements, then it would seem fair to ask: How much force is a social animal’s will actually pushing, given his level of confidence?
Is this even a sensible question? We believe so. Earlier we introduced a fundamental, intuitive connection between this weird psychosocial notion of force and the notion of disbelief (that it’s a good deal for me). The tenet underlying the connection is simply this: I am opposed to a suggested compromise to the extent that I disbelieve that it’s a good deal for me.
Or another way to say it: I push against a suggested compromise with a force proportional to my level of disbelief that it’s a good deal for me.
That’s the real reason we introduced you to “disbelief curves.” How much I disbelieve an offer is a good deal for me will be key to how forcefully I push (no scare quotes) against the offer within the negotiation.
With this equivalence between disbelief and force in hand, we can now treat these disbelief curves we showed you in Figure 6 as force curves quantifying how strongly the two parties are psychosocially pushing in their preferred directions. Since Tim’s curve is steeper, he’s pushier.
Spring to Mind
We now have the beginnings of an understanding of how it can be that someone can be pushy without actually pushing. And we even have a reasonable handle on what quantifies this psychosocial notion of force: disbelief. The disbelief curve is determined directly from one’s belief hill, and so, really, one’s belief within the disagreement entails a specific force curve, a curve that describes how forcibly one is pushing, depending on the compromise.
The disbelief curves, or “cliffs,” we saw in Figure 6 not only quantify how strongly a party pushes but are actually exactly like something we’re all already quite familiar with: springs.
A spring has an associated force curve (or “sloping cliff”) showing how strongly it pushes back depending on how compressed it is. The more you push a spring, the harder it pushes back. For springs, the steepness of the curve is determined by the spring’s stiffness: stiffer springs have steeper curves (more dangerous cliffs), as if they have “stronger reasons” for (and are thus more confidently) pushing in their direction.
Disagreements, as we saw in Figure 6, consist of two disbelief curves “facing off” against one another. But, in light of the observation that these curves are just like the force curves of a spring, we can think of disagreements as two springs pushing against one another, shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7. Disbelief acts like a psychological “force” and will in fact be treatable as a force. Recall from Figure 6 that each person’s disbelief curve rises the farther they get from their desired compromise. This figure is not about Tim and Mark in the zucchini situation, but instead about two metal springs pushing upon a mass in between them. There’s Tim the Spring on the left side, pushing rightward. It “wants” to push the mass all the way to the right side of the chamber. On the right side, Mark the Spring is pushing leftward. The two curves here are the two springs’ force curves. Springs push more strongly the more they are compressed (but here the key feature is that the curves rise, not that they accelerate upward). The stiffer the spring, the steeper its curve. Beliefs with greater certainty are thus like stiffer springs.
There you have it. Minds in disagreement are like springs! Each party pushes back more forcefully based on how compromising they’re asked to be. Wills are getting “bent” and pushing back harder.
We see, then, that disagreements have a lot more structure, and the two beliefs a lot more interaction, than was initially apparent. From the simplicity of having differing beliefs comes springlike psychological forces opposing one another. Beliefs can push with force, force that comes from certainty levels, not biceps.
And, bringing in our earlier first connection to emotions, that means that force comes from confidence! To be more confident in one’s belief amounts to something like a force, a real one within the psychosocial domain. More carefully, if I am more confident, my force curve is steeper, as if my will is a stiffer spring.
Uncompromising Weight
Fine. Forces can be real forces without being the sort of force covered in a physics book. And the sort of force that wills can bring about is springy. So what? What do we gain by noting that beliefs push like springs do? What does it matter that one’s confidence level is akin to spring stiffness? What’s so special about a springy force at all?
First, note that not all forces have this special springy feature. For example, tie a banana to one end of a rope and a watermelon to the other end. Now lay the rope over a table so that the fruits hang off opposite sides. If it’s a supermassive steroid banana—or a micro watermelon unworthy of the name “melon”—and the fruits happen to weigh the same, then each fruit will pull with equal force. The entire banana-rope-watermelon assembly therefore will be balanced. It will just sit there, absolutely still.
But what happens if one fruit is heavier than the other? A typical watermelon will just fall, pulling a typical banana upward and eventually flinging it across the table.
In this little fruit-and-ropes scenario, there are no springs involved. And there’s nothing springlike either. Instead, at the beginning, the watermelon pulls with a force equal to its weight. Because it’s heavier than the banana, the total force is in the melon’s favored direction. The melon accordingly lowers, and the banana rises.
A moment later, after the melon has lowered a few inches and the banana has risen a few inches, what are the forces? They’re the same! The fruits are still pulling exactly as they were the moment before—each is still pulling with a force equal to its weight. The watermelon accordingly falls more, and the banana rises more. And so it continues, the banana continually losing ground (and gaining height) with no hope of its fortunes turning around.
For two fruits in a tug-of-war, there is no compromise. Instead, it’s heavier fruit takes all.
Equilibrispring
Springy forces are quite another thing. Springs are smarter than weights.
The fact that the banana got budged and began losing ground (i.e., rising) gave the banana no advantage at all. Our poor little yellow friend could only lose, lose, and lose until the jig was up and he was unceremoniously catapulted across the table onto the other side.
But for two springs in a pushing battle, the more a spring gets pushed, the more it pushes back. Even a weak, little, yellow banana-sized spring that’s occasionally friendly with our loser banana friend might look pathetic, but if you push it, it “rears up” and pushes back with more force.
Two springs in a tug-of-war find a compromise, the point where they push with equal force. And—this part is crucial—any deviation from that point brings them back to that point. It truly is a balance point. Unlike our fruity weights in a tug-of-war that don’t compromise, springs find a balance: the equilibrium compromise. The compromise favors the stiffer, overall stronger spring. That is, whichever spring is stiffer (has a greater “spring constant”) will end up less squished, thereby having had to “give in” less than the weaker, loosey-goosier spring.
Fair Compromise
We intuitively understand springs. This “smart spring” stuff really is nothing fancy. The harder you push one, the harder it pushes back. You get it. But it’s the fact that you do “get it” that will allow you to better appreciate how our wills push in disagreements, and where the fair compromise comes from.
Earlier we saw that wills push with force. But now we have a better appreciation of the way they push. They push not merely with force, but with springy force.
The more confident I am in my belief, the stiffer my “will spring.” My internal emotion of confidence is the source behind these psychosocial forces. Because it’s springy, the worse the deal you offer me, the more and harder I push back in the negotiation, and the less forcefully you push.
Consequently, there’s one point (the spot where the two disbelief, or force, curves cross one another) where their beliefs push with equal and opposite force. Thus, the horizontal position of the crossover point of the disbelief curves is the equilibrium compromise. It’s the compromise where their forces are balanced. Neither party has any justification for budging the compromise from that point. And any slight change from that equilibrium compromise would mean one party has greater justification for shifting it in their preferred direction back toward the equilibrium.
This equilibrium compromise is therefore the fair compromise, in the sense that neither party can fuss that they have reasons for it being more in their favor. So, just as two springs lead inexorably to an equilibrium balancing their forces, with a position biased in favor of the stronger (stiffer) spring, two creatures with confidence levels for their beliefs lead inexorably to a fair compromise, one biased in favor of the person with greater certainty (the steeper disbelief curve).
Aha! We now can see that there is a specific compromise that’s the fair one given the two parties’ beliefs.
Sounds of Spring
That’s great to know, but there’s still one key difference between real boingy springs and our wills. Real springs are physically connected to one another, but our springlike wills are bundled up and hidden within our skulls. Said differently, real springs find the balance point by butting heads, but social animals in a disagreement are trying to avoid butting heads!
If Mark and Tim really can wield springy forces via their wills, then how do those wills actually interact? They can’t touch each other, after all. That’s not even a possibility for something non-physical, like a will.
We’re asking too much if we’re hoping for wills to actually physically touch, since that’s not even sensible. What matters for springs isn’t that they physically touch each other per se, though, but that they’re able to “signal” their force to the other. It happens that springs do this through physical contact. (Or by touching the mass that’s in between them.) But it’s this ability to “signal” to one another that’s important.
For Mark’s and Tim’s wills to do their pushy, balancing work, they must signal one another in the appropriate way. And for incorporeal things like wills, signaling is accordingly done in incorporeal fashion, rather than via physical contact. Wills “communicate” their forces to one another employing social signals, or emotional expressions, especially using sight and sound.
Mark and Tim need to be able to somehow express their confidence levels. It’s the emotional expressions of confidence that undergird the mechanisms of force in the psychosocial domain.
If Mark and Tim can indeed signal their respective confidence levels, then—because each confidence level is associated with a disbelief curve of a particular steepness—they can therefore know where those curves cross. Voilà, they’ll each know what the fair compromise is! Even better, a touchless compromise.
And the compromise happens because it’s forced there by their wills.
Tense Affair
The horizontal position of the crossover point of the two disbelief curves is exceedingly important because it’s the fair compromise, as we just mentioned. But what does the vertical level of the crossover point tell us?
It’s the level of disbelief each party has for that compromise.
But now we can also view it as equal forces pushing in opposite directions. The word for that in physics is “tension,” which fits well for disagreements, too.. The higher the tension of the equilibrium compromise, the more the parties do not believe it’s a good deal for themselves. It’s a tense situation indeed!
Just as a wire under high tension can snap, so can a disagreement. The higher the tension of the equilibrium compromise, the greater the chance one or both parties will not agree to the compromise and instead settle it the old-fashioned way, via a fight.
This vertical dimension is the realm of the extra information your realtor conveys: your level of disbelief that it’s a good deal for you. Or how strongly you’re pushing back. Or how likely you are to abandon the negotiation and fight about it instead (which would be to walk, and let the market decide who was correct).
Figure 8 is just a repeat of our earlier Figure 6 but now employing the more intuitive “tension” concept, rather than disbelief (that it’s a good deal for me). All the diagrams throughout the book will use this same two-dimensional space, even the diagrams with emotional faces within them. The horizontal axis will always be the compromise axis, with compromises more rightward being more in Tim’s favor and compromises more leftward being more in Mark’s favor. The vertical axis will always be the tension.
Figure 8. In the text we learned that we can think of Mark and Tim as pushing in springlike fashion according to their curves. But it’s a psychosocial sort of force rather than a physical one. We might say two springs pushing against each other are under tension. From here on we’ll use that term for our vertical axis. It has the advantage of being a strong analogy to the notion in the springy physics situation in Figure 7. More importantly, it nicely conveys the correct meaning within the psychosocial emotional context.
Disagreedients
Truth, fights, certainty, disbelief, force, springiness, fairness, tension, and compromise. These are some of the main ingredients of disagreements.
But a disagreement is much simpler than this. It’s just two social animals with differing beliefs, and an understanding about what a fight would be to decide the matter if a compromise can’t be found.
Now you know what “disagree” means in a much more detailed and rigorous fashion. But it’s what “disagree” meant all along.
We’ve seen that if the two parties can just emotionally express a confidence level along a continuum from pride to humility, the fair compromise immediately suggests itself in exactly the way that two springs pushing against each other find a “fair” balance point where their forces match.
This is a start. The two parties’ self-confidence levels have to be crucial to coming to a compromise, because, ultimately, the fair compromise really is the one fairly balancing their (justified) confidence levels. So, the two parties need to be able to convey their confidence levels using emotional expressions along a pride-humility axis.
Alas, those two emotional expressions aren’t enough to get negotiation up and running appropriately. That is, it simply won’t be enough for Tim and Mark to simultaneously flash the emotional expressions of their confidence (Tim’s pride and Mark’s mild humility), find the fair compromise, split the loaf, and get on with life.
For their wills to reach out and touch one another (and actually do some oomphing), they have to communicate in some appropriate, non-physical manner. That appropriate sort of communication manifests as our emotional expressions.
But the emotional expressions we have introduced thus far—pride and humility, opposite ends of a my-confidence dimension—are, we’ll see, not enough to undergird the forces wills can exert.
There’s an obvious issue we’ve skirted around. It’s simply that Mark, or Tim, or both might be incorrect, knowingly or unknowingly. Each therefore needs to be able to correct the other, and that means—as we will see—that they’ll need some further emotional expressions. And we’re intentionally setting aside the whole issue of lying, which won’t come up until chapter six.
If Mark and Tim were always correct (and never lying), then the lone signals of their levels of self-confidence in their beliefs would be all they’d need to signal and convey their force of will. But they’re not always correct (and not always being truthful). So, as we’ll see, we’re going to need more emotional expressions, something to handle the issue that we’re sometimes incorrect.
So, we’re not done, and that’s not so unfortunate at all because we kind of knew going into this that our emotionally expressive lives couldn’t be handled by a single dimension or two emotional expressions. We have lots of emotional expressions. How many there might be is a complicated question. There are certainly more than two, but probably fewer than a couple hundred. We’ve made some headway, but we need to break out beyond the single dimension to reach the forces that must be up and running to get negotiation going.
As a hint of where we’re headed in the next chapter, notice that in this chapter we introduced the my-confidence dimension of emotional expressions. The emotional expressions of pride and humility of varying magnitudes allow me to express any level of confidence in my own belief.
But I might also have an opinion about your belief, and about how confident you really can be about your belief. The very fact that we called our first dimension my confidence gives the game away somewhat. The next dimension of emotional expression we’ll set out to uncover concerns your confidence, which is to say when I express an opinion about how certain you can be of your belief.
By the end of the upcoming chapter, we’ll have a good grasp of both dimensions, and we’ll understand how, together, they’re the steering wheel of negotiation, allowing social animals to shift the negotiation in any direction and have the needed features to let their wills be pushy.
1“How good a deal it is for me” can be understood as something called the “cumulative probability distribution,” which just keeps rising as the deal gets more and more in my favor. “Disbelief that it’s a good deal for me” is just the inverse of that (i.e., one divided by that).