Give a Reason for Every Number
(right, the ultimate in lame reason giving: the dog ate my homework!)
To reinforce anchoring and framing effects of first offers and offer-characterization, always state the reason you are valuing the item to be traded in the manner you are. “I’m offering to pay you $20,000 in exchange for a dismissal because (choose one or more): (a) I impeached your witness with interrogatory answers in the deposition; (b) the only case law in your favor has been questioned by the Supreme Court and hasn’t been cited since 1972; (c) your expert witness went to Ralph’s School of Law and mine went to Harvard; (d) recent jury verdicts for the theft of trade secrets of this nature have been less than the cost of doing the first round of discovery; and, (e) anything else you have.
In experiments on reason giving, researchers have found that people are far more likely to accommodate others if a reason is given even if the reason makes no sense whatsoever. In one such experiment, students were asked to cut into a line at Kinkos. One group was instructed to give no reason; another to give a good reason (“I’m late for class”) and another to give an irrational reason (“because I want to”). Those who provided no rationale were, not surprisingly, the least successful. Only sixty percent of them were allowed to “cut” into the line. Those who presented a logical rationale got what they wanted an extraordinary 94% of the time. But here’s the truly remarkable part. Those students who presented a meaningless rationale such as, “I want to cut in line because I need to,” racked up a ninety-three percent success rate, only one percent less than their logical peers.
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