I want to think about how we navigate our own ethical quandaries. How do we decide where to draw the line and what to do? I want to share some ideas about expert negotiators, that I've interacted with. One was a sports agent, Craig authentic, where he put it, I thought quite eloquently. He said, "I never lie, but I'm not a one man truth squad." For him, his reputation was really important, but he's not aggressively correcting everybody else's misperception. Similarly, I talked with Angel Calzadilla, a crisis negotiator. He explained to me, he rarely lies. I asked him once, well, why not lie to a hostage taker. They clearly don't have great moral standing. Why not, if they ask for food, why would you never put something in the pizza? He said, "Well, you know, they might feed the pizza to a hostage first, and you never want to lose that credibility." Now there are exceptions. He described one tragic case, where after a very long negotiation, they were concerned things wouldn't resolve. They were so concerned that this hostage taker was going to kill the hostage. He did say, "Hey, I want you to come to the window, just to make sure you're okay." Where really what he wanted to do, is have him come to the window, so someone might take a clear shot. But the idea is that we want to be very careful with deception, because our credibility is our currency. It's what enables us to reach an agreement, when people can trust what we say, and will want to deal with us in the future. Imagine the following case. Imagine you negotiated with somebody. You talked over the terms, you reached a deal, you shake hands on it, and then you plan and sign the contract the next day, you're driving home. As you're driving home, imagine somebody calls you with a better offer. What would you do? Would you say no, the handshake deal is binding? Or would you say, "Hey, unless it's a signed deal, It's not really a deal." What's binding? What I want to do is I want you to think through what you think would be the right thing to do. Then think about how you would feel if your counterpart, having just shook your hand, suppose they took that better deal. There's a personality measure, machiavellianism, inspired by the book, The Prince, by Machiavelli. This personality trait is, how people orient themselves to the world. Are they going to take advantage of situations as they can? You can think of somebody who's very Machiavellian, where they see the rules of the road as what's legal. A must we signed the contract, It's not a deal. Of course, everyone would do that. The second part that is, we're thinking about what other people would do is really important. Here's the problem. I think everybody knows the rules of the road or what's legal, and anybody would take that better offer. Sure I'm going to take that better offer too. But the problem is, they come back and they're surprised to find that this person, across the table never wants to do business with them again. Why are you so upset? Of course you would have done that. Now similarly, other people who like," No, I'd never take that other deal. For me, what's really important is my word, my bond, I shook hands, yes, there's a better deal, but I'm not going to throw away the relationship." Here, those people are going to be surprised, when their counterpart does something unexpected to them. Here's the idea that is, we want to appreciate that people might have very different orientations than we do. That some people are going to care a great deal about the social relationship, and stay very high in their ethical standards, and will be upset if we ever fall short. We should recognize that if we have very high ethical standards, that there are people who see the world very differently than we do too. That's a key idea, to recognize that with his handshake deal, people may orient themselves differently than we would. Here's my advice. I'm not going to tell you what moral standards to adopt, but I am going to argue that you should be consistent. You should set high moral standards. Because our reputations matter so much. We end up interacting with people or reputations followers more than we realize. I would encourage you to aim high. I'd also encourage you to signal high moral standards. Because by signaling high moral standards, we decrease the likelihood that other people will justify acting unethically, if they think they're just acting in self-defense. By consistently adhering to our moral principles, setting high moral standards, were more likely to end up not being the target of deception, and we're more likely to act morally ourselves. The final piece of advice I'd offer, is that before we enter negotiation to prepare for difficult questions, I mentioned this before about trying to answer questions. But here's the idea. In the heat of the moment, we might reach out and latch onto it a lie, just because it's easy in a moment but we might regret that later perhaps as we have to build around it, and we dig ourselves into a hole. We want to anticipate difficult questions. We'd like to plan responses and we'd like to aim high. Because in the heat of the moment, we're unlikely to end up going higher than that.
