CHAPTER FOUR
Missing Volley: The Case of Threennis to Tennis
Tennis is a product of centuries of change, having gone through nine major evolutionary transitions. You might be surprised to learn that for one of its early ancestors, “threennis,” the players didn’t even face each other, but instead stood side by side, each with a canoe paddle and a fish from last week’s catch.
At the count of three by the lead judge, each player would throw their fish up in the air and use their paddle to hit the fish as hard, far, and close to the village pillory as they possibly could. Players were awarded points by the judges for distance, accuracy, spin, and splattiness. When the exhausting, weeklong bout of fish paddling was over, the judges delivered their scores to the prize distributor, and the party with more points got to take home proportionately more of the fish used in the contest. You just don’t find games like that anymore!
For our purposes here, what makes threennis so strange as a variant on tennis isn’t the fish, the paddles, or the grumbling targets, but, rather, that the players were performing separately, in parallel, rather than against one another per se. In this sense, threennis was really a lot closer to today’s golf than to today’s tennis (and you don’t even want to know what golf was like back then!).
What was missing in threennis was the volley (or rally) of back-and-forth shots that we love about modern tennis. And that’s probably why in the next evolutionary iteration of the game, called “fournnis,” a decision was made for one player to hit the fish over the pillory (and the prisoners shackled upon it) and toward the other player, who then had to hit it back over the pillory, and so on. What better way to judge whether my splat is a good splat than checking if you have trouble splatting it back, they reasoned.
Fournnis was still a long way from tennis, with unreasonably unpredictable and slimy bounces, but at least it had the back-and-forth we now take for granted as part of the game. In fact, it’s that back-and-forth that makes it a game at all.
The point of telling you about this improbable and false history of tennis is that it helps us more clearly see what’s missing in our signaling system to this point.
Our idea was that each party would simply express their own confidence level (akin to each player in threennis splatting their fish). Based on that information, there would be clear rules determining how to fairly split the zucchini loaf (akin to the judges scoring the players’ splats and apportioning the prized pile of last week’s fish).
Figure 9. As discussed in the first chapter, we already know that negotiations have two dimensions, not just one. And, we know that they’re volleys, going back and forth until they come to agreement. In this chapter, we’ll see why negotiations are like this, and why such volleys are the stuff of emotional expressions.
But we know that negotiation has a back-and-forth, like that shown in Figure 9. So, it’s exceedingly fishy that our signaling system thus far looks disturbingly like volley-less threennis. Our task in this chapter is to figure out how to evolve our signaling system to its next level. How do we get, and navigate, the volley our human exchanges so desperately need?
Athletic Force
Before fully diving in, notice something about how allowing volleys in tennis enables two players’ tennis acumen to “push” up against one another. When two tennis players are simply standing side by side, you can’t really tell anything about their game.
Instead, they communicate their tennis prowess (our forces in this example) by actually playing tennis. And that means a lot of rallies and volleys. By virtue of those many back-and-forths, their tennis abilities push on one another, and they learn who has stronger overall “tennis force.”
After a game or two of this with you, I might even say that the “pressure you put on me was too much.” “You overwhelmed me with your capabilities.” “You conquered me.” “Beat me.” “Clobbered me.” “Bashed me.” “Overcame me.” “Walloped me.” All of these phrases could apply to how you outpushed me in tennis.
But the push was never one particular force you exerted against some force I exerted. It was a complex sequence of “signals,” in this case the game play we each expressed in a tennis conversation of sorts.
To flesh out the rest of the steering wheel of negotiation, we need to explore why negotiations, like tennis, have a volley of compromise offers. That, in turn, is the key to understanding how our wills can reach out and oomph.
Our wills need to be allowed to express themselves in the sport of negotiation, lest they’re impotent. Our first step in that direction is uncovering the second dimension of emotional expressions, the yang to the yin of the my-confidence dimension: your confidence.
What I Think About You
Arguments between Tim and Mark tend to be dripping with pomposity and pretension. Only rarely might one see a small crumb of self-abasing modesty (not likely!). And that’s for disagreements they’re not even invested in. So, you can only imagine how things go when their holy grail breakfast dessert is at issue.
Expressions of pretension and modesty are variants on the two emotional expressions we talked about in chapter three—they’re expressions concerning my confidence and related to pride and humility.
But disagreements between these two guys about their favorite things—whether zucchini loaves, warm apple strudel, or schnitzel with noodles—are even worse than we’ve thus far admitted to. If there might be zucchini bread in that brown paper package tied up with strings, they become truly master-class-level unpleasant—like, seriously, unabashedly mean!
Mark might begin by calling Tim a “foolish stupid head,” and Tim might counter with “Oh, yeah? You’re a moronic donkey-wipe with rancid dishwater between your ears.” After that, Mark is likely to brilliantly retort, “No, you are!” Absolutely savage!
This petty and callous stupid-headish stuff we just mentioned conveys “information”—such as it may be—about what we think of the other party (your confidence). And nothing thus far in our development gives us a clue as to the emotional expressions that might convey this sort of unkind thing.
We knew the emotional expressive system we built thus far wasn’t enough. And now we see that we’re missing something fairly obvious: we’re in need of emotional expressions that talk about the other party.
On Being Wrong
But first let’s catch our tail and remind ourselves of the primitive idea we started with for Tim and Mark negotiating. It was simply to have each of them emotionally express his own confidence level in his belief. Because these confidence levels amount to psychosocial springs, there’s exactly one compromise value balancing them—that’s the fair compromise. And because Tim is, recall, more certain than is Mark, we would accordingly divvy up the loaf more in Tim’s favor—maybe it ends up at 55 percent for Tim. We would then have our much-needed fair-zucchini compromise.
So, why isn’t it enough for Tim and Mark to simply express their respective confidence levels using their pride and humility emotional expressions and to split the zucchini loaf according to the fair compromise? Because, as we hinted at earlier, sometimes folks are wrong, whether unintentionally or intentionally. Tim may mistakenly think he’s more certain than he actually is, and Mark may need to correct him. “The waitress nodded to me when she approached, meaning it’s mostly for me,” Tim might say. “Oh, yeah,” Mark might reply contemptuously, “actually, you weren’t even looking in her direction when she approached.” And so on.
This simple point—that folks are sometimes wrong—amounts to a crucial observation worth recording:
Any route to a fair compromise needs to allow the parties to correct the other’s claims.
Rather than each party expressing only their own confidence level, each party must also say their opinion about the other’s confidence level (which, recall, is what Mark and Tim are known for). Each party ends up having to say two things, not just one.
So, if I’m correcting you, I’m making a counterclaim to your own about how confident you are. “Dude, you cannot be as certain as that!” Or, more carefully, “Dude, I believe that whatever information you have, it doesn’t justify the level of confidence you just evinced.”
Why, you might ask, don’t Tim and Mark just correct each other’s beliefs about how much zucchini loaf each should get? Remember, the entire idea here is that the way languageless creatures can discuss whose belief is better, or more justified, is to discuss their confidence levels. It’s via balancing confidence levels—something that languageless creatures can convey—that there is a glimmer of a solution. And, as we’ll see as we continue in this chapter, by signaling confidence levels back and forth, each can convey how much zucchini bread he believes he should get. That is, each party may be signaling confidence levels, but we’ll see that it’s equivalent to making corrections about how the loaf should be split.
On Confidences
There are, then, two kinds (two dimensions) of emotional expressions social animals must be able to convey.
1.My confidence: What I claim is my confidence level in my belief (with pride and humility at opponent ends). But also
2.Your confidence: What I claim is your confidence level in your belief.
These two dimensions of confidence-related expressions are super central to emotional expressions, and they’re important enough to get a name. Because expressing both of these emotions amounts to a “move” in a negotiation, one fairly intuitive everyday term for that is response, like when you say to your realtor, “How should we respond to the seller’s offer?” See Figure 10.
Figure 10. A response in a discussion is just an expression stating my claim about two justifiable confidence levels—mine and yours. Expressions about my confidence are served by emotional expression opposites such as pride-humility.
Let’s see what this exchange looks like in our diagrams. Imagine that Tim has already expressed a claim about his confidence and Mark’s. In Figure 11, these confidence curves are shown as dotted lines and labeled with “Tim” where they intersect.
But Mark has his own opinion. He responds by correcting Tim’s utterly ridiculous view, expressing that his own confidence is higher, and Tim’s is lower. In Figure 11, these new confidence curves are solid lines labeled with “Mark” where they intersect.
Figure 11. Once we realize that each party must correct the other, each is no longer making a single claim about their own confidence level. Instead, each is making two claims: one about his own confidence level and one about the other’s confidence level. In this diagram, Tim’s earlier response (dashed curves intersecting at “Tim” in the oval) is shown and consists of a claim about each party’s confidence level (each dashed curve is labeled with the name of the person whose confidence it is about). Mark then gives his response (solid curves intersecting at “Mark” in the rectangle), consisting of his own claim about their respective confidence levels. Mark is expressing that his own confidence is much higher and that Tim’s is a bit lower than claimed.
If each party only had to express their own confidence, they could do so in parallel as in the ancient fish-splatting game of threennis. “At the count of three, let’s scream out our confidence level. One . . . Two . . . Three!”
But if I am to correct you, I obviously can’t correct you until after you have actually made your claim. You claim. Then I supply a response. And then you counter my counter. And so it goes.
Once corrections are allowed, it becomes a back-and-forth, where the parties take turns. It becomes a conversation. A discussion. Now we have the “volley” part that we all kind of knew beforehand had to be a big part of a negotiation.
Not Talking Past
The need to correct led to the promised volley, something crucial in a negotiation and crucial in a discussion more generally.
But volleys make it a discussion in another sense.
If I were repeatedly expressing my confidence level, and you were repeatedly expressing your own confidence level, then we wouldn’t even be talking about the same thing. For instance, I say, “I’m super confident.” You say, “Well, I’m super-duper confident.” I say, “So what; I’m ridiculously confident!” And so on. It would be like two tennis players hitting great shots with two separate balls on two separate courts; it would be like threennis.
But with the enrichment to the conversation by virtue of the need to correct the other, now we’re each talking about the same two things—your and my confidences—and that makes it a discussion about those two things. We’re no longer talking past each other. It’s a discussion not just in the back-and-forth sense, but also in the substantive, or content, sense.
Sample Zucchini
Negotiations, then, have to be back-and-forth discussions, and our two confidence dimensions allow social animals to engage in negotiations. But what would a negotiation in these terms actually look like with the volleys?
Here’s an example with a few volleys for the zucchini situation, minus the schoolyard barbs . . .
Mark: I’m really confident I should get two-thirds of the loaf, and you’re not at all confident that you should.
Tim: I’m actually quite confident I’m supposed to get two-thirds of it, and you’re not nearly as confident as you just claimed.
Mark: Okay, I’m a bit less confident than I claimed, but you are as well.
And so on.
This example excerpt from a negotiation about how to split the zucchini loaf might sound a bit strange. And boring. It doesn’t sound much like a human conversation at all! I mean, who talks like that?!
In real life, our sentences might be more colorful, like the following.
Mark: Dude, I know Judy wanted me to have two-thirds of the loaf (I’m really confident). And you’re simply confused, as usual (you’re not at all confident).
Tim: I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to get two-thirds of the loaf, Mark (I’m actually quite confident). And you’re exaggerating, as usual (you’re not nearly as confident as you just claimed).
Mark: Okay, I may have overstated things a bit (I’m a bit less confident than I claimed), but I think you are as well (you’re a bit less confident than you claimed as well).
That’s much closer to what two people might actually say in a negotiation when confined to words alone. Not weird at all.1
Correction to Corrections
This is a big step forward for the compromise signaling system we’re looking for—of course social creatures need to be able to correct one another!—but there’s one remaining, ahem, correction we need to make in regard to corrections.
In order for me to correct you, note that I do not need to actually state my claim about our respective levels of confidence. Rather, and much more efficiently, I just need to point out what was wrong in what you just said. That’s the very nature of a “correction.”
My response isn’t, then, a claim about both our confidence levels per se. It’s equivalent to that, but, instead, my response is my claim about the manner in which your claim is incorrect. “I’m this much more confident than you claimed I am, and you’re that much less confident than you claimed.”
Or, in numerical form, “My confidence is 3.7 higher than what you just claimed, and your confidence 4.2 lower than what you just claimed.” In fact, when we did the more realistic rendition of Mark and Tim’s little conversation earlier, words like “exaggerated” and “overstated” were used, words that concern a claim about a difference.2
Conveying a difference is a much more efficient way to signal one’s viewpoint, as it concentrates on the nub of the current disagreement. Expressions with lower amplitude are signals with less of a correction, which is just good sense for the design of expressions. And this means no expression suggests no change to what was last suggested.
Quiver of Arrows
Diagrammatically, a response is therefore an arrow pointing from the previous crossover point that you suggested (where the two curves you signaled intersect one another) to the new one that I am now suggesting. The smaller the signal (the smaller the arrow), the smaller my current correction. See Figure 12.
That arrow is the correction—or the amount I claim is wrong about what you said. It’s also the response. And recall from Figure 9 at the start of this section that that’s exactly what we were expecting—that arrow is a volley.
Figure 12. In order for Mark to express his response to Tim, he doesn’t need to fully state his claim about his own and Tim’s levels of confidence. Instead, Mark just needs to correct Tim and tell him how his own claim differs from what Tim just claimed. That’s much more effective at getting to the nub of the disagreement. Here we’ve highlighted just the difference between Mark’s new claim and Tim’s most recent claim. That difference is a vector, the arrow in the middle going up and to the left. It’s as if Mark says, “I’m actually much more confident than what you claimed, and you’re a bit less confident than what you claimed.”
As you can see in Figure 12, the discussion diagrams can now be considerably simplified. This figure is a simplification of Figure 11 that now concentrates only on Mark’s response arrow (rather than the four force curves). Its starting point (at the oval) is the place where Tim had pushed the negotiation via his most recent response expression. The arrowhead (at the rectangle) is where Mark has just now pushed the negotiation via his response expression. An entire negotiation can now be visualized in these diagrams as a sequence of arrows, as shown in Figure 13, and as we foreshad-owed in our earlier Figure 9.
Figure 13. Each response emotional expression has a unique cross point (of its two curves) that tells us exactly which certainty levels were claimed about the two parties. A negotiation, or discussion, can then be viewed elegantly as a back-and-forth sequence of points in this two-dimensional negotiation (tension-compromise) space.
Respect and Disdain
We already saw in chapter three our emotional expressions for my confidence: pride and humility. But we haven’t discussed what emotional expressions we might possess that convey this needed new dimension about your confidence.
These are, however, not at all difficult to find.
The emotional expression of respect says that I think you’re confident in your belief. My show of respect conveys that, whatever you may know that I might not know, I believe it supports a positive level of confidence in your belief.
What about the opposite of respect? Is there an emotional expression we possess that conveys that I think you’re not (justifiably) very confident in your belief? Something like disdain does exactly that. Disdain represents the domain of the mean and spiteful words (like “stupid head”) dominating the zucchini negotiation.
If I am going to be able to correct your emotional expression of self-confidence, I need to have emotional expressions like respect and disdain to do that. These expressions occupy opposite ends of a your-confidence dimension of emotional expressions, allow me to disagree with you, and enable me to correct what you just claimed about your own confidence.
And just like that we now have four—up from two—emotional expressions in our negotiation-finding expression system.
My confidence: pride-humility
Your confidence: respect-disdain
We may just be getting somewhere!
Volley of Offers
Response emotional expressions, as summarized in our earlier Figure 10, are all about my confidence and your confidence. But how do all these “me so smart and you so stupid” sorts of expressions line up with the more run-of-the-mill negotiations we do with, for example, our realtor, which are mostly about the offer? How does a claim about my and your confidence levels relate to what I am actually suggesting we do about our disagreement? What compromise am I actually asking for by virtue of my response?
Earlier we learned that negotiations need to have a volley, but the volley we were led to was a volley of confidences, not the volley of offers that describes a typical real estate negotiation.
So where’s the volley of offers?
Recall from chapter three that if both parties’ confidence curves are known, then the fair compromise follows immediately. Namely it’s the compromise where each party is pushing with equal force.
So far in this chapter, we have suggested that people locked in negotiation must state a two-pronged response, claiming what they think both parties’ confidence levels are. In doing so, it follows that we are also thereby suggesting a compromise, namely at the horizontal position where the two signaled curves cross.
Intuitively, this horizontal component of my response is simply telling you what I want, or what I think I should get. My response is basically saying, “Your belief and my belief are pushing at these stiffnesses, leading to a fair compromise at the horizontal position where they cross” (see Figure 14). Your response to that, in addition to your claim about our respective confidences, is also a consequent claim about the resulting compromise you believe is fair. And so on.
Figure 14. A response also has the consequence of making a compromise offer, namely at wherever those two claimed disbelief curves cross. Tim’s response amounts to a compromise offer just below the oval crossover point for “Tim.” Mark’s response to that amounts to a new compromise more in his own favor (and at a higher tension), as shown by the horizontal left-pointing arrow. Stated in offer-and-tension terms, we get something along the lines of, “I should get a better deal, and I’m serious about it.”
Figure 15 summarizes that there are two different, but equivalent, ways to think about a “move”—or response—in a negotiation. When we first introduced responses back in Figure 10, we used the “confidence” interpretation: I can move the negotiation anywhere in our two-dimensional diagrams by talking about my confidence and your confidence. But I can also move the negotiation anywhere in the more obvious house-purchase fashion by talking about my offer and the tension that offer might carry (“and this is my final offer!”).
Figure 15. You can think of responses in two ways. The first way concerns my opinion about your and my confidence levels. The second way is more explicitly in line with our starting intuitions about negotiations, that they’re about making an offer, but also sneaking in the extra “and this is my final offer” sort of information. The neat thing is that the right side of the illustration is a more negotiation-like way of describing a response, which doesn’t seem so related to emotion. Yet, it’s equivalent to the confidence-based description of a response on the left side. And confidence reeks with emotion . . . which means negotiations are the stuff of emotional expressions (as this book claims).
The moves you made when negotiating for a house didn’t initially seem to be the sorts of things that could have anything emotional about them. They were just a volley of offers. But then we explored that hidden “and this is my final offer” dimension, which intuitively did sound vaguely emotional.
Now we’ve seen that we can talk about negotiations in an altogether different manner. Rather than explicitly mentioning the offer (the price) and the tension (such as “and this is my final offer!”), I can mention just my and your levels of confidence. The offer and tension come for free, as we saw in the earlier Figure 14. If offer-and-tension talk is equivalent to my-and-your-confidence talk, then the former must also be steaming with emotion.
The Confidences Inside Negotiations
It turns out that every time we engage in negotiations, even in the typical realtoresque offer-and-tension fashion, we’re implicitly making claims about both parties’ confidences.
Is that right?
As an example, suppose you see my skateboard and say, “Nice board. I’ll give you twenty-five dollars for it.”
In response, I say, “No. This board is worth one hundred times that.”
I haven’t added any tension to the discussion—there was nothing about “final offers” and so forth. I just made a big horizontal shift in the offer.
But think about what I’m also implying—that I know a lot more than you about this skateboard’s value (perhaps it’s the skateboard used in the 1985 movie Back to the Future). I’m basically saying, “I have high confidence that it’s worth a lot, and your confidence level is very low that it’s a typical cheap board.”
Upon hearing me respond with my $2,500 counteroffer, if you believe me, then you might think, Gosh, it seems I was wrong about its value. And he sure seems to know something I don’t! That is, if you actually believe me, you would agree with my (implicit) claim that I have high confidence that it’s worth a lot, and that you have low confidence that it’s cheap.
Negotiations are always implicitly about the parties’ confidences. And claims about the parties’ confidences are always a negotiation. They’re just two ways of looking at the same thing.
This Is Your Negotiation on Pride and Humility
Let’s make sure we grasp how these emotional expressions—built from the diagonal-shifting, confidence emotional expressions pride, humility, respect, and disdain—are related to house-buying-style negotiation and its horizontally shifting offers and vertically shifting tensions. Let’s take these four emotional expressions one at a time, starting with pride.
Recall from Figure 14 that when Mark emotionally expresses himself via a response, he’s correcting two claimed confidence curves by Tim. If Mark corrects Tim about Mark’s own confidence (pride), that moves the crossover position up and left. If Mark instead expresses humility and lowers his own curve, that then shifts the discussion diagonally down and right. See Figure 16.
Figure 16. This illustration shows how expressions of pride and humility shift the negotiation. The two curves intersecting the “Tim” circle are where Tim had previously shifted the negotiation. If Mark were to express pride, he is saying he (himself) is more confident than Tim claimed, and that raises the negotiation up and to the left to the new intersection point with “Mark” in the rectangle. If Mark were instead to express humility, he is saying his confidence is lower than what Tim just suggested, and that shifts the negotiation down and to the right, as shown.
Is my expression of pride really the same as a horizontal shift in my favor and a rise in tension? And is humility really the opposite? If I emotionally express pride, I might say something along the lines of, “I know Judy intended two-thirds of the loaf for me because she said so the last time we spoke.” I have thereby said I’m more confident. Let’s note the two things happening in the negotiation diagram in Figure 16.
Horizontally, I’m asking for more of the zucchini loaf (because the negotiation shifts in my favored direction), and that sounds exactly right. If you make an offer and I react with pride, that certainly does not suggest I’m asking for less! “I know Judy intended two-thirds for me because she said so the last time we spoke . . . and so I should get more than what you just offered.” That is to say, the italicized add-on is implied in what was already said.
Vertically, note that if I express pride, the discussion has moved higher in the space; the point where the two confidence curves intersect is raised above where it had been. My new offer is under greater tension. If I’m correct about my claimed confidence for each of us, then we each become more skeptical that it’s a good deal. That means I’m claiming the discussion has moved closer to a fight. This movement also fits nicely with pride: if I show pride, the discussion becomes more formal, a little more on edge. “I know Judy intended two-thirds for me because she said so the last time we spoke, so I should get more than what you just offered . . . and so I’d be more than happy to call her and show you I’m right!” That is to say, I’d be more than happy to fight about it.
Humility, as we’ve discussed, is the opposite of pride, and I might express it as, “I’m not entirely sure that Judy wanted me to get two-thirds of the loaf.”
Horizontally, if I express humility, I’m saying you should get more of the loaf, which is why the negotiation shifts in your favored direction. “I’m not entirely sure that Judy wanted me to get two-thirds of the loaf . . . so you should have more of it.”
Vertically, unlike pride, which raises the height of the discussion, humility lowers it, reducing the tension and making a fight less likely because, if my claim is right, my new offer is more likely a good deal for both of us. “I’m not entirely sure that Judy wanted me to get two-thirds of the loaf, so you should have more of it . . . and so there’s no need to call her.”
This Is Your Negotiation on Respect and Disdain
Now let’s look at how emotional expressions concerning your confidence change the negotiation.
If Mark signals that Tim is more confident than Tim suggested, then Mark is emotionally expressing respect. This shifts Tim’s curve up, and the intersection point shifts up and to the right. See Figure 17. If instead Mark suggests Tim is less justifiably confident (i.e., Mark expresses disdain), then he shifts the discussion down and to the left. Do these diagonal shifts intuitively make sense?
Figure 17. This figure shows how expressions of respect and disdain shift the negotiation. The two curves intersecting the “Tim” circle are where Tim shifted the negotiation. If Mark were to express respect, he is saying Tim is more confident than Tim claimed, and that raises the negotiation up and to the right to the new intersection point with “Mark” in the rectangle. If Mark were instead to express disdain, he is saying Tim’s confidence is lower than what Tim just suggested, and that shifts the negotiation down and to the left, as shown.
Suppose Mark emotionally expresses respect, raising Tim’s confidence curve higher than what he’d claimed it to be. Perhaps Mark says, “I trust you when you say you spoke with Judy and she wanted you to have more of the loaf.”
As you can see in Figure 17, this horizontally shifts the compromise rightward in Tim’s favored direction. That seems absolutely correct! To show respect is to give one a better offer, not to demand more for oneself. “I trust you when you say you spoke with Judy and she wanted you to have more of the loaf . . . and so you should get more of the loaf.”
In Figure 17, note that expressing respect also vertically raises the negotiation upward. By emotionally expressing respect, this suggests that I am not only offering you a better deal but am raising the tension. Things are more serious because a fight is more in the realm of possibility. That also sounds right: respectful circumstances are more formal circumstances. “I trust you when you say you spoke with Judy and she wanted you to have more of the loaf, and so you should get more of the loaf . . . and so you really must accept my offer or I’ll get Judy on the phone to ensure that you do.”
Suppose instead I express disdain, which I might do by saying, “You have a history of misreading Judy, so I suspect you’re less certain than you realize about her supposedly wanting you to get two-thirds of the loaf.” You can see in Figure 17 that this shifts the negotiation down and to the left.
Horizontally, the leftward horizontal shift is more in my favor, and that’s certainly in line with disdain entering the arena. By expressing disdain I’m claiming you’re less confident than you claimed and that I should get more. “You have a history of misreading Judy, so I suspect you’re less certain than you realize about her supposedly wanting you to get two-thirds of the loaf . . . and so I should get more.”
Vertically, disdain also lowers the tension. By claiming there’s a potentially good deal for you even though it’s more in my favor, I’ve made things less formal. Intuitively, I’m not even taking you seriously. “You have a history of misreading Judy, so I suspect you’re less certain than you realize about her supposedly wanting you to get two-thirds of the loaf, so I should get more . . . and therefore I think my offer is actually still a good deal for both of us.”
You might have the intuition that, after I say this to you, you might become tense. Maybe! After all, I did just criticize you, and perhaps you’re offended and react with pride, thereby raising the tension. But that doesn’t mean that my expression of disdain itself raised the tension. My show of disdain signaled that I myself am claiming to be intuitively casual and content to chat about things more. How you react is another story.
Confident Steering
Let’s tie it all together now.
Figure 18 shows all four of these diagonally shifting, confidence emotional expressions (pride-humility and respect-disdain) within the negotiation space and summarizes how each expression modifies a negotiation. These two confidence dimensions of emotional expression, expressions we all possess and grasp, are enough to carry out negotiation!
As we already saw, shifts within negotiation space are just arrows. And now we can see that combinations of pride-humility and respect-disdain are exactly what’s needed to shift the negotiation around, moving both the offer and the more enigmatic second vertical tension dimension.
Figure 18. The two-dimensional space of confidence emotional expressions, or response space, is shown. These expressions are Mark’s, who favors leftward directions, and the descriptions are from his perspective, something that will be the case in all our diagrams. The central circle indicates where Tim’s most recent offer was within this two-dimensional space. The surrounding faces indicate expressions that allow Mark to respond to Tim’s last offer, and the direction away from the center indicates how Mark shifts the negotiation within response space. For example, if Mark signals pride, he’s saying he should get a better compromise, and that he has raised the tension.
Figure 19 shows an example negotiation, with Mark’s and Tim’s response emotional expressions labeled next to each shift. Remember that everything is horizontally flipped for Tim, because Tim favors rightward directions, which is why his pride points up and to the right.
Figure 19. This illustration depicts an example negotiation between Tim and Mark. It is the same negotiation we saw earlier in Figure 13, but now each arrow is labeled with the appropriate emotional expression.
Horizontal Response Expressions
These four diagonally shifting confidence emotional expressions are very important, but as we’re often most interested in the horizontal, volley-of-offers axis, do we have emotional expressions for that, for conveying horizontal shifts?
Already we could describe a horizontal shift in my own favored direction as pride and disdain. But that’s not what we’re asking for now. Now we’d like a single emotion term expressing this. Is there one? In particular, is there one expressing “I should get a better deal (than what you just offered)”? (For instance, one term that expresses “My skateboard is worth one hundred times that.”)
Sure. Aggression. That’s certainly an inner emotion. And we can definitely express it. And it seems to fit the meaning of “I should get a better deal.” Furthermore, someone showing aggression does seem to be expressing both pride and disdain. Or said another way, pride and disdain each seem to be, in part, aggressive.
What emotional expression signals “You should get a better deal”?
Before getting to this, it’s useful to remind ourselves that negotiations aren’t always aggressive. We tend to stereotype negotiations as aggressive because we usually employ the term “negotiation” for coming to a deal on a house or haggling at a bazaar. But, as we mentioned in chapter one, negotiation is much more general than that, and even in those more boring buy-sell cases, sometimes we’re not aggressive. “Tell you what, bub. I like you. Your three-dollar offer for my blender is nice, but I’m happy with one dollar.”
This happens all the time in our daily social interactions with friends, guests, family, colleagues, service people, employees, and staff we regularly interact with. For most of our day, we’re actively avoiding aggression. Instead, we spend much of our life like the Disney chipmunks:
“You go first.”
“By no means. You go first.”
“Please, be my guest. You really just must go first.”
And so on.
Cooperation, sharing, and working together account for the lion’s share of our interactions, and they are not aggressive. Most of the time we’re downright friendly!
That’s the true, full nature of negotiation. Not only does it have a hidden second dimension—the vertical one having to do with how eager I am to abandon discussion and fight—it also includes the opposite of aggression.
So, while we’re looking for emotion terms for the horizontal compromise axis, having found that aggression fits the “I should get a better deal” expression very well, is there an emotional expression that sums up its opposite? It would mean, “You should get a better deal (than the one you just offered).”
The term conciliatory comes close to the opposite of aggressive. If aggressive means “I should get a better deal,” then conciliatory would mean “You should get a better deal (than the one you just offered).” It’s an internal emotion, one where I am inclined to give ground to you. And it’s an emotional expression as well—something we can signal via a combination of respect and humility. In fact, each of those two emotional expressions certainly conveys a degree of conciliation, or giving in.
Vertical Response Expressions
Negotiation is, first and foremost, about the offer. But, as we’ve noted, most don’t consciously recognize this second, vertical dimension that relates to how tense the negotiation is getting and how close the parties are to giving up and fighting. Are there emotional expression terms that get specifically at this vertical, “my final offer” dimension?
If I raise the tension, tense is not a bad term! But even better might be serious, which we hinted at some time back. If I emotionally express that I’m serious, I’m conveying that I’m getting close to abandoning discussion. Both pride and respect, which raise the tension, also have components of serious.
If an expression of serious raises the negotiation upward, without any implication in terms of whether the offer is better or worse for me, is there an opposite emotional expression, one that lowers the tension? Something like casual comes very close to this and can certainly be emotionally expressed. “Look. Neither of us are too sure here,” or, “Why don’t we relax.”
Take the Wheel
The diagram below (Figure 20) is the steering wheel of negotiation.
It puts all eight emotional expressions we’ve unpacked up to this point into one diagram. Thus it has all the covered response emotional expressions, each of which shifts the negotiation in some direction. It possesses all the qualitatively distinct compass directions within the space and puts an emotional expression name to every way one can move the ball in a negotiation.
A response emotional expression not only amounts to moving the “ball” in a negotiation in some direction, though. The back-and-forth volley of these response expressions is the “contact” needed by our wills to communicate their strengths (remember our springs from chapter three); that’s how wills “touch” to exert force upon one another.
In short: negotiation is to our wills what a tennis game is to tennis skill.
All this assumes that we’re playing the game fairly—that when we express aggressive, we honestly believe that we are more confident and the other person is less confident, and we should fairly get more. This is obviously not the case! People lie—through emotional expression as in words—all the time! We’ll talk about this more in chapter six.
Figure 20. This faceful figure depicts all eight response emotional expressions, which Mark can use to negotiate in response to Tim’s offer. The earlier “diagonal” four from Figure 18 are still here, but now four more have been added, for pure horizontal and vertical directions. (Being more tense, recall, means one is closer to abandoning discussion and fighting about it.)
For the remainder of this chapter, we begin to address how internal emotions relate to these expressions.
Emotional Expressions
At the start of this book, we talked about how internal emotions have been around for an inordinately long time. It was only recently, relatively speaking, that some of the animals started signaling emotional expressions. And, as we discussed, emotional expressions can often occur without the corresponding internal emotion. Emotions happen without their expression, and expressions can often occur without the corresponding underlying emotion. That means they’re different objects of study. Explaining one won’t explain the other.
That said, it’s widely understood that they’re at least connected. Emotional expressions sometimes do occur with the associated internal emotion (surely when you smile upon being given bacon, you’re inwardly happy), and that’s why we’re all intuitively comfortable calling our suite of compromise signals “emotional expressions” in the first place.
But what is the connection, exactly? If social animals evolved a technologically advanced language of negotiation, something their dead-eyed ancestors never benefited from, why bother to tangle up their newfangled signals with all those old-fashioned internal emotions? Why are emotional expressions emotional at all?
The Fight Connection
To help begin to understand how internal emotions link to emotional expressions, consider what it means if I emotionally express aggressive. Our claim earlier in this chapter is that aggressive means “I should get a better deal.” More carefully, it means “I should get a better deal than what you just offered me.” So, if you offered me half the loaf, I might now say, “I should get ten percent more than what you just offered (or sixty percent).”
Now it’s your move. Your turn to respond.
The key to grasping the connection between internal emotions and outward emotional expressions is realizing that you might choose not to respond at all. You might instead rip off your gloves and initiate a fight. Remember, although negotiations are all signaling and no action, they’re about how to avoid the action. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla sitting nearby in every negotiation is the possibility of a fight, and so it’s action that’s looming over the whole affair.
It’s this possibility of imminent action that explains why our expressions are often inwardly emotional.
Preparatory States
We have no special theory about internal emotions. All that we need to rely on is that internal emotions are the sorts of states we get into in order to prepare us for potential actions, i.e., that internal emotions are preparatory states (among other things). Recall Nigel from chapter one? Even though he was dead-eyed, he was brimming with internal emotions, each appropriate for the situation.
Back to the example negotiation where I just signaled aggressive to you. What action might I end up having to engage in if you were to initiate a fight?
Well, you already offered me 50 percent on your previous offer, so it seems you’re OK with me getting that much. I just now asked for 60 percent (10 percent more of the loaf), and so if you were now to initiate a fight after I make my offer, I would need to engage in aggressive acts, not just aggressive expressions, to secure that extra 10 percent.
If I might have to be aggressive (to get that extra 10 percent), I need to be prepared now for it. My internal emotion needs to be one of aggression, because that internal emotion is what prepares me for being aggressive in action. In this particular case, because you previously offered me 50 percent, and I now asked for 10 percent more, I would need a level of internal aggression high enough to secure that additional 10 percent in a fight, if it were to happen. Maybe that’s an intermediate level of internal aggression, akin to my intermediate-level expression of aggressive.
The same is the case for the opposite of an aggressive expression, which, recall, is conciliatory, and means “You should get a better deal (than you just suggested).” For specificity, suppose I were to say, “Nah, you should get ten percent more than the fifty percent you just offered me” (i.e., sixty percent for you).
What would happen if, after I express this, you were to fight about it?
Unlike before, in this case I’d be trying to give you an extra slice. I’d be being nice. Any preparatory internal emotional state for this is a giving, friendly one, totally different from being aggressive. This would be an internal emotion that is conciliatory, one preparing me to act in a conciliatory (giving) fashion. (Remember, fights can be about me wanting to get more, but they can also be about me wanting to give you more.)
Not an Expression of an Emotion
Does this then mean my emotional expression of aggressive is an expression of my internal emotion of aggression?
No. My expression of aggressive should be thought of as a symbol, one that animals of the same species know means a particular thing within a negotiation, namely “I should get more.” That’s what the aggressive expression means.
An emotional expression is not “an expression of an emotion” for the simple reason that there is, at most, an association between an emotional expression and the corresponding internal emotion. I might signal aggressive without feeling the emotion, or perhaps possess a different internal emotion altogether. For example, maybe I’m actually wetting-my-pants afraid, but I still manage to express aggressive hoping to get my way by bluff.
And neither does an emotional expression mean that I’m expressing the corresponding inward emotion. The meaning of aggressive is just “I should get more.”
That said, one implication of signaling aggressive is that I have the internal emotion of aggression. If I were to signal aggressive but also somehow tell you that I’m not having that internal emotion, you would rightly wonder whether I really mean it. In this sense, when I emotionally express aggressive, I’m implicitly also claiming that I’m in the corresponding emotional state.
That’s why these negotiation signals we social animals use end up being named as they are. They’re named by virtue of the action they are, in a sense, threatening to carry out in a fight, or the name of the emotion that prepares them internally for that action.
But don’t confuse an implication with meaning. Being a bachelor might have the implication that the person is male, but that’s not its meaning. Or being a dog might imply it’s furry, but that’s not its meaning.
Here’s the general idea behind the association between internal emotions and outward emotional expressions:
My emotional expression X is associated with my internal emotion X because my expression implies that I am currently having that emotion since that is exactly the needed internal emotion that prepares me to do what needs to be done if we fight.
Serious Inside
Our examples of the association between an emotional expression and the corresponding internal emotion have thus far entirely concerned aggressive and conciliatory: opposite ends of the horizontal dimension of responses. Does the same idea hold up for the vertical dimension of responses, with its opposites, serious and casual?
As a signal, we said earlier that serious conveys that “extra” dimension in everyday negotiation many of us know in our bones but don’t consciously realize is there. It signals, “I’m getting closer to giving up on negotiating with you.” In expressing this, I’m not saying I should get more, or that you should either. I’m just saying things are getting more heated, closer to a fight, if you’re not careful.
What internal emotion should tend to be associated with an expression of serious, then, if any?
As we just saw, I’m saying a fight is now more likely. So, supposing I mean what I say (which I might well not!), then I need to be more ready for a fight. More ready to act. More . . . might we say “serious.”
And the response emotional expression casual would accordingly be associated with an internal emotion that is the opposite of serious. Casual implies an internal emotion less ready to act.
The internal emotion of aggression (or its opposite, conciliation) tends to associate with the expression of aggressive (conciliatory), and the internal emotion of serious (casual) tends to associate with the expression of serious (casual), because those are the internal emotions that best prepare the bearer to potentially take whatever action is needed.
Confident, In and Out
How does this simple, straightforward connection between internal emotions and emotional expressions fare for the four diagonal (confidence-related) responses?
Let’s try it with pride, which is an expressive combination of aggressive and serious. If I signal pride, I’m saying, “I’m more confident than you suggested.” In volley-of-offers (i.e., horizontal and vertical) terms, I’m saying, “I should get a better deal, and I’m serious.” So, my internal emotion needs to be aggressive and serious.
It needs to be aggressive because, if a fight happens, I’ll need to behave with aggression (to hope to get what I claimed I should get). And it needs to be serious—i.e., an internal emotion more ready for action (intuitively, itching to act)—because a fight may now be more likely. And, if my internal emotion is both one of aggression and seriousness, that sounds close to having an internal emotion along the lines of pride.
Humble expressions do just the opposite and are therefore associated with internal emotions that are conciliatory and less ready.
Offense
We see, now, how the response emotional expressions for negotiation (the steering wheel) have an association, albeit sometimes loose, to the underlying emotions of the same name. If I signal X, then having my internal emotion be X tends to prepare me for acting in an X manner if you initiate a fight.
But there’s something about all this action, and preparing for action, that we haven’t yet pointed out: these actions are inherently about offense. They’re about me acting to get what I claimed I should get. The actions associated with response emotional expressions are offensive actions. And the internal emotions that prepare me for offensive actions are what one might therefore call offensive internal emotions.
Is that right?
Aggression is obviously an offense. But even conciliation is on the offensive spectrum in the sense that it’s along the same offense dimension; it’s just negative offense. Intuitively, whereas my aggression is acting against your interest and is aimed at getting more for me, conciliation is me acting in your interest and is aimed at getting more for you.
And being serious (casual) is just a raised (lowered) level of readiness to act, either aggressively (offensively) or in a conciliatory fashion (anti-offensively). It’s a variety of “arousal level”—specifically an arousal level to act (whether offensively or anti-offensively).
Now that we see that the internal emotions associated with response emotional expressions are offensive in nature, we can describe these internal emotions in terms of offense.
1.The level of offense [horizontal]: Response emotional expressions along the aggressive-conciliatory dimension are associated with internal emotions preparing me for some level of offense.
2.The degree of readiness to do offense [vertical]: Response emotional expressions along the serious-casual dimension are associated with internal emotions determining my level of readiness for that offense.
The difference between these two dimensions of offense can seem subtle at first, but it’s just the difference between indicating to a criminal that I have a holstered gun (that’s the high level of positive aggression that I am at some level of readiness to fulfill), and actually pointing the gun in his face (which would be a very high degree of readiness to act on it). It’s simply “what I’m prepared for” versus “how ready I am for it.”
Response emotional expressions may have a meaning concerning the steering wheel direction within a negotiation, but they’re not, then, without an action side. Folks who signal a response have committed themselves to potentially having to enact certain offensive behavior. Therefore they generally need to be internally emotionally prepared for that offensive behavior.
Visualizing Offensive Emotions
To illustrate these offensive emotions and actions connected to the emotional expressions, we can create a new diagram (Figure 21). Because responses concern offensive action, we use a sword in our illustrations, pointed in the bearer’s favored direction for offense, and pointed in the opposite direction for anti-offense. A higher raised sword suggests that the bearer has a higher level of readiness for offense; the inverse is true for a lower sword. These little-dude-with-sword diagrams depict the sort of offensive behavior he might have to engage in if there’s a fight, given the emotional expression he just signaled.
Additionally, the diagrams help communicate the nature of the invisible internal emotion, the one that would tend to prepare the little dude for actually doing that offensive behavior. While we can’t illustrate internal emotions, which are preparatory states for action, the diagram depicts the two key dimensions of an offensive preparatory state: the left-versus-right direction of the sword (offense versus anti-offense), and its vertical level (ready versus not ready).
Figure 21. Here we have the response emotional expressions, their meaning, and a visualization of the sort of action one should be prepared for if the other party chooses to fight. In this case, the little rectangle dude is facing the other party (not shown), who is on the left, indicating that the little dude prefers compromises more leftward. Therefore, a sword facing left indicates potential aggressive action (and an accordingly aggressive internal emotion). A sword to the right indicates potential conciliatory action (and an accordingly conciliatory internal emotion). The more the sword is raised, the more it indicates readiness to act offensively to secure what it signaled it should get.
For example, in the spot for pride we see a drawing of the little dude pointing his sword in his favored direction (and pointed toward his opponent, who is not shown). His sword is also raised, indicating he’s ready to engage in offense.
Disdain, on the other hand, is similar in that the little dude is pointing his sword in his favored direction, but now it is lowered and thus not ready. This helps illustrate the internal emotion of disdain, conveying that the emotional state, although aggressive, is relaxed and unconcerned.
And in the upper right spot for respect, the drawing shows the little dude with his sword pointed backward (in his opponent’s favored direction), indicating he’s preparing for conciliatory behavior. And the sword is raised, indicating he’s very ready to actually engage in that conciliatory behavior.
This diagram is not only useful at communicating the space of offensive internal emotional states tending to associate with the response emotions, but is also useful at helping convey the expressions themselves. Up to now in this book, we have been using our own little emoticon faces to represent the emotional expressions. Such emoticons help us humans make sense of the diagrams because they rely on our natural human sense of facial expressions. But they wouldn’t be very useful for any other sort of creature. These little-dude drawings, however, manage to somewhat wear their meaning on their sleeves so that even an alien might gather the meaning (assuming they also don’t like being at the sharp end of a stick).
Eight Is Not Enough
In this chapter we introduced the steering wheel of negotiation, established the two-dimensional array of directions one can move a negotiation, and showed how each of these directions corresponds to a well-known emotional expression. Those emotional expressions are exactly what’s needed to engage in a back-and-forth volley in a negotiation.
We also have seen, over the last several sections, why emotional expressions are connected to our internal emotions. While emotional expressions aren’t expressions of emotions, they are deeply connected to emotions. An associated internal emotion is what you might reasonably expect an animal’s internal emotion to be if they were truthfully signaling an expression (a wolf’s outward aggression is often a good sign that it’s inwardly aggressive).
There’s still one fairly urgent issue that we need to address. Where are all the other emotional expressions? Where’s happy, for example? And where are angry and afraid? And how about the loads of others, like smug, earnest, submissive, insulting, sorry, and more?
The eight emotional expressions in the steering wheel of negotiation have us on the right track in our argument that negotiation is at the core of all emotional expression, but this is just a first step toward something bigger, something that explains all the other emotions we can express!
In the upcoming chapter we’ll see there are indeed a lot more.
1Of course, social animals generally would not be signaling with words at all, but quantitatively using emotional expressions. Even in conversations like the one between the authors just above, phrases like “really confident” and “quite confident” roughly correspond to some quantitative level of confidence.
Here’s a variant on the original, boring version of the conversation, but now with numbers in parentheses next to each confidence claim. Positive numbers indicate that it’s higher than usual confidence (a steep curve), and negative numbers indicate lower than usual confidence (a shallow curve).
Mark: I’m really confident (Mark is 5), and you’re not at all confident (Tim is −2).
Tim: I’m actually quite confident (Tim is 4.5), and you’re not nearly as confident as you just claimed (Mark is 2).
Mark: Okay, I’m a bit less confident than I claimed (Mark is 4), but you are as well (Tim is 3.5).
At its most basic, then, this conversation is really conveying just those claimed confidence levels in parentheses. So, the conversation can more simply be summarized by the following, without words at all.
|
Mark’s |
Tim’s |
|
|
Mark says their confidences are: |
5 |
−2 |
|
Tim says their confidences are: |
2 |
4.5 |
|
Mark now says their confidences are: |
4 |
3.5 |
Back and forth it goes, until one party agrees with the other’s claim about their respective confidences, or until one party has had enough and initiates a fight.
2When Tim signals their (i.e., his and Mark’s) respective confidence levels, then he just needs to say that Mark’s confidence is 3 less than what Mark had claimed, and that his own confidence level is 6.5 higher than what Mark had claimed it was (see the bold numbers just below). Social animals just need to be able to convey values both above and below zero.
|
Mark’s |
Tim’s |
|
|
Mark says their confidences are: |
5 |
−2 |
|
Tim corrects Mark (in bold): |
5 − 3 = 2 |
−2 + 6.5 = 4.5 |
|
Mark corrects Tim (in bold): |
2 + 2 = 4 |
4.5 − 1 = 3.5 |