hi everyone in this screencast i want to talk to you about cognition and how it impacts negotiations so we're going to start by quickly defining what what i mean by cognition or what cognition means talk a little bit about cognitive heuristics and cognitive biases before talking about how things like biases and things like heuristics are important in negotiating settings negotiation settings so cognition refers to mental processes they refer to how our brains actually produce thought and so when we talk about connect cognition we're often talking about something that is believed to be at least something that is innately human something that describes how all human beings think because it's a biophysical thing it's connected to to how the brain actually produces uh the things that we think we know are the things that we know uh and so it's it's it's it's characterized often as uh sort of on a continuum between whether it's a conscious thought or unconscious thought that is conscious thought is you know we're aware that we're thinking about things we're aware that we're we're seeing something versus unconscious which is the the kind of thought that just happens that we're not really consciously aware of and so some of this deals with you know your brain is actually keeping you alive at the same time that it's actually thinking about say the context of this contents of the screen uh screencast but it's also a little bit more uh about thought itself and what we might react to or how another way to think about or another thing to think about with cognition is whether whether our thinking uh is reflective that is whether we sort of compare it to what we know already or whether it's simply just reflect reflexive that is just a reaction uh so there's a lot of debate a lot of discussion and literature that says that you know we might reflect a little bit but our brains are actually designed to focus more on reacting reflexively to stimulus without actually bothering to think much about them another important distinction to consider when it comes to cognition is this sort of tension between rational objective thought and irrational or illogical thought and so the question is is do we actually spend the time to think through all of the details of the situation in order to make a decision in order to come to a conclusion as in do we actually think rationally or are we taking shortcuts and arriving at a solution that we think might be best but we haven't really considered all the the potential components of that of that issue and so you know when we talk about cognition we're talking about all of these things uh as if they're sort of in constant tension with each other but remember ultimately what we're trying to do is we're trying to describe uh you know mental processes how our brains are actually functioning so when it comes to you know how our brains function one of the things that we we sort of gravitate towards are these ideas these these models that are known as heuristics so a heuristic is is really just a model a representation uh that scientists and scholars of human thought have come up with to describe a mental process and so there are a bunch of these common heuristics that have been studied one of them you know is the availability heuristic which says that you know we won't pick the best thing we'll pick the thing that is most available in our in our recall memory like what do we go to first or you know we might pick the thing that we recognize rather than the thing that is correct or right we might choose make a decision based on what the best or what we believe the best person is doing we might pick or choose based on what the majority of folks are doing rather than what is the you know correct or appropriate response in negotiation we often deal with anchoring and we deal with adjustment we've mentioned we've mentioned this a couple of times in this class already and this is another uh heuristic that is useful it helps us come to decisions quickly but it often will prevent us from exploring the full range of options might also narrow the zone of possible agreements if we're talking about a distributive setting there are also you know any number of other kinds of heuristics that might impact how we would uh interact with each other during negotiations so in terms of how heuristics biases and cognition can be understood or applied in negotiating settings it's important to understand that biased outcomes biased decisions can lead to negative outcomes for for the negotiation you know if we enter into a negotiation and what we come out with is a solution that is biased it might actually cause more harm or lead to more conflict in the long run uh because we haven't considered a potential solution it might narrow we might bias in ways that narrow the range of possible solutions that we'd consider in other words we won't expand the pie big enough right so it would limit the available options that we can negotiate it might also ultimately it could also be a source of conflict between parties so it's important to understand that you know biased choice or biased thinking might lead people to disagree with each other as well the problem with heuristics and biases is that they're very difficult to counteract the reason is everybody uses them everybody does this this is how all humans think and it's really impossible nearly impossible to counteract them you know a lot of the research suggests that the more we know about you know heuristics and biases doesn't actually have an effect in terms of reducing them we're seeing some uh indication that some harder more more in-depth training can improve things like implicit biases um but ultimately we will always rely on heuristics to make decisions and that might lead us to you know create or enact uh biased judgments or bias decisions i say this and yet we understand that reframing can help if we frame something as a gain versus a loss it might actually help us see the solution in a different way and so reframing when it comes to counteracting biases and negotiations is very important because it might actually change what we what we understand or how we might actually think about the problem another important way to counteract cognitive biases is to rely on third parties mediators uh or or outside objective observers because they might provide us with a source of information a source of thinking about the problem that isn't enmeshed in the conflict itself so we talked a little bit about uh cognition as in it's a you know a description of mental processes um you know we discuss what heuristics and biases are and how they might impact negotiations and a little bit about how there are some different tactics that can help address but maybe not eliminate biases from negotiation processes