Why Negotiators Should Listen More Closely

Negotiations are often treated as a game of chicken: the party that projects more leverage, confidence, and willingness to walk away wins the better deal.

But in real-world deal making, listening and earning the trust of counterparts can be equally important to reaching agreements and making everybody better off.

In the article, Good Listening as a Wise Negotiation Tactic, Professor Zhiying (Bella) Ren of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and UCLA’s Hanne K. Collins argue that listening to your counterpart, with the goal of understanding their real interests, can lead to better outcomes in negotiations.

Published in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, the article also examines why disagreements shouldn’t simply be avoided for fear of deadlock. Far from just stalling deals, disagreements can offer opportunities to ask questions and dig deeper, eventually unlocking unexpected value.

So how can a focus on listening and understanding be consistent with business goals, when negotiations are often framed as competition for scarce resources?

Look beyond the apparent position

People tend to enter negotiations with what researchers call a “fixed-pie” mindset: if one side gets more, the other must get less, Ren said.

But what people say they want — their position — can be different from the underlying reason they want it — their interest. Positions often conflict on the surface, and people tend to stay at that surface-level conflict instead of listening for the interests underneath.

Ren illustrates the distinction with an example from previous research: Two sisters fight over an orange and eventually compromise by cutting it in half. But one wanted the peel for baking while the other wanted the juice. Had they understood each other’s interests, each could have gotten everything they really wanted.

Negotiations can work the same way, Ren said. A request for higher salary, for example, might actually be driven by an employee’s need for a larger home. Understanding that motivation could reveal other options, such as housing assistance, that satisfy the employee at a lower cost to the company.

Listening can facilitate better deals, without requiring negotiators to abandon their own interests, Ren said. “When negotiators listen well, they can obtain information that not only grows the pie, but also gets them a larger slice of it,” she added. 

Don’t rush past disagreement

Research found that people generally dislike disagreement and try to quickly resolve it. In negotiations, that can lead to an exchange of offers and counteroffers that eventually lands on a number everybody can accept.

But Ren argues that the disagreement itself may contain valuable information you could lose if you’re only focused on resolution.

For example, when an offer is far from what negotiators expected, the parties could stop exchanging numbers and ask what’s driving the difference instead. The answer might uncover priorities that make a different deal possible.

“We often just want to resolve disagreements,” Ren said. “But exploring a disagreement can reveal underlying interests that would otherwise remain hidden.”

And listening may even reveal that no deal is the better outcome, she added. In the rush to reach an agreement, negotiators sometimes accept deals that shouldn’t have been accepted, between parties whose fundamental interests are not compatible. Research calls this tendency “agreement bias.”

“There are cases where the buyer’s and seller's interests are just incompatible, but because they want to resolve the disagreement so much, they don't learn enough information about what the other person is actually looking for. They end up getting tangled in a deal that they're not supposed to agree on,” Ren said.

Listen for what’s missing

Even attentive negotiators can make another mistake: assuming that what they hear is the other party’s full position.

But people may intentionally omit information in negotiations, or use truthful but still misleading statements.

For example, a used-car seller might claim that the car has never been in an accident. What they might not say is that the car has a transmission problem, the authors write.

That makes listening an exercise in noticing what hasn’t been said.

For example, Ren said, one way to prepare for a negotiation is to think in advance about the areas in which the other party has an incentive to withhold information and craft direct questions about them.

“You have to ask that specifically,” Ren said. “Without direct questions, people can find ways to avoid sharing information.”

Good listeners also track how a conversation changes. A counterpart showing flexibility on price but consistent about timing may be revealing that the timing of the deal matters more than money, the researchers write.

But signals can vary across cultures, they warn. For example, negotiators in cultures such as the United States may be more likely to state priorities directly, while in other cultures such as Japan, preferences may be revealed more indirectly.

Finally, good listening needs to be visible to the other person.

When a negotiator asks follow-up questions or returns to earlier points, nonverbal behaviors such as eye contact, nodding, and responsive facial expressions signal to the counterpart that they are taking their proposals seriously, the authors write.

This matters because listening serves two purposes at once. It helps a negotiator gather information, but it can also build the trust that makes the other side more willing to provide it.

A smart way of pursuing your interests

Developing a listening habit doesn’t mean talking less or letting the counterpart control the conversation, Ren said. In fact, listening well may require taking more initiative by asking questions that steer the conversation toward information that matters to your business, she said.

Negotiation will always involve competing interests, she added. But treating every disagreement only as a conflict rather than also as a source of information can leave value on the table.

“People are not getting enough value from disagreement,” Ren said. “We often call it ‘conflict resolution’ because we think that addressing conflict means to resolve it. But in fact, there are many ways to make disagreement more productive.”

That starts with reframing what disagreement is for. “When negotiators see a disagreement only as a battle for scarce resources, they risk not going anywhere. Instead, we want to use listening to learn how we can extract value from opposing interests and from disagreements,” she said.