How to Negotiate with a Liar

Leslie  John

Article | Harvard Business Review | July–August 2016

How to Negotiate with a Liar

Abstract

People, including negotiators, lie every day, so when you're trying to make a deal, it's important to defend against deception. The best strategy, says the author, is to focus not on detecting lies but on preventing them. She outlines five tactics that research has shown to be effective: encourage reciprocity. You can build trust and prompt other parties to disclose strategic information by sharing information yourself. Ask the right questions. Negotiators often lie by omission, keeping mum about relevant facts, but if directly asked, they are more likely to respond honestly. Watch for dodging. Don't let your counterparts sidestep your questions—write them down in advance, take notes on the answers, and make sure you get the information you're seeking. Don't dwell on confidentiality. Studies show that the more you reassure others that you'll protect their privacy, the more guarded and apt to lie they become. So be nonchalant when discussing sensitive topics. Cultivate leaks. People often reveal information unwittingly, so listen carefully for any slips and try indirect approaches to gaining information.

Keywords: Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Participants;

Format: Print

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Citation:

John, Leslie. "How to Negotiate with a Liar." Harvard Business Review 94, nos. 7-8 (July–August 2016): 114–117.

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The case describes a program that CVS Health recently implemented to improve medication adherence, an important problem from a societal, public policy, and firm perspective. A test of the program, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement, increased the proportion of adherent customers by 1.4 percentage points. Students are asked to quantify the system-wide economic benefit of this improvement and draw upon insights from behavioral science to examine approaches for boosting medication adherence.

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By the time Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, began hosting a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in January 2018, he had only nine months remaining to convince the people of Toronto, their government representatives, and presumably his parent company Alphabet, Inc., that Sidewalk Labs’ plan to construct “the first truly 21st-century city” on the Canadian city’s waterfront was a sound one. Along with much excitement and optimism, strains of concern had emerged since Doctoroff and partners first announced their intentions for a city “built from the internet up” in Toronto’s Quayside district. As Doctoroff prepared for yet another milestone in a year of planning and community engagement, it was almost certain that of the many questions headed his way, digital privacy would be among them.

In their commentary, Wilson & Stolarz-Fantino argue that specific design features of our research mean that it cannot have policy implications and that researchers “need to consider profit maximization in menu design or studies are likely to suggest ill-informed implementations.” In this reply, we respond to the specific critiques of our work with empirical data and conceptual arguments. We agree with Wilson and Stolarz-Fantino that researchers seeking to understand a policy’s influence on consumers should test predictions about which strategies firms will likely use when implementing a policy. Research, however, that demonstrates the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of an intervention even without perfectly predicting a firm’s response still has enormous value for setting policy.

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How to Negotiate with a Liar

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