We are often counseled to engage in perspective taking and empathetic understanding to achieve better results in business negotiations, both for ourselves and for our counterparts. Yet perspective taking and empathy are two different skills. Perspective taking is a cognitive ability that involves considering how other people think. Empathy, by contrast, involves emotionally connecting with others and experiencing sympathy and concern for them. Moreover, people who naturally take others’ perspectives may not be especially empathetic, and vice versa.
Are the two skills always useful in business negotiations and other interactions, or might one skill be more valuable—and the other a potential hindrance—depending on the nature of the situation?
In a set of experiments, Professor Debra Gilin of Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia and her colleagues set out to answer this question. Their conclusions may help you better understand your counterparts and achieve better outcomes for yourself and your organization in business negotiations.
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Different Tasks, Different Skills
In their study, Gilin and colleagues created various competitive scenarios and assessed the degree to which perspective taking or empathy helped or hurt their participants’ performance.
In the first experiment, pairs of undergraduate students engaged in a simulated arms race. The participants were financially rewarded for disarming weapons and financially penalized for bombing the country represented by their counterparts. Students who were naturally skilled at perspective taking achieved higher monetary outcomes for themselves and more peaceful resolutions than did those who were more naturally empathetic. It seemed the more empathetic participants had difficulty predicting their opponents’ strategic moves. Their ability to tap into the other side’s emotions was of little use to them in this task.
In two other experiments, groups of three students were given a chance to briefly get to know one another. They were then separated and asked to choose one of the other students as a partner for the next round, where they would have a chance to win a cash prize. The catch, they were told, was that they would advance only if the person they chose also chose them. Thus, the experiments tested students’ ability to assess the strength of the connections they had just developed. In these experiments, students who were naturally empathetic or who were encouraged to be empathetic achieved more matches than did those who were more naturally skilled at perspective taking or who were primed to take others’ perspectives. In this context, participants’ intuitive skills and emotional reasoning were more important than their ability to think strategically.
In a final experiment, perhaps not surprisingly, participants responded more to cognitive cues when engaging in perspective taking and more to emotional cues when empathizing. The results suggest that we have the ability to switch between perspective taking and empathy as needed.
Choosing Which Skill to Highlight
Overall, Gilin and colleagues’ study suggests that perspective taking and empathy are not always the boon to business negotiation that one might expect, and they are certainly not interchangeable. Rather, each is useful in different contexts. The results suggest the benefits of drawing on one or the other skill depending on the situation.
More specifically, when you are focused on building business networks and alliances, aim to empathize with those around you by tuning in to their emotions. Similarly, empathy will be valuable in helping you negotiate or mediate heated disputes. By contrast, in complex talks where significant negotiation strategies and tactics are required, you may profit more from perspective taking—that is, trying to understand how others think rather than what they feel.
Of course, it’s difficult to turn empathy or perspective taking on and off like a switch. Moreover, the complexity of real-world negotiation often requires us to draw on both skills, sometimes simultaneously. But when you understand that each skill has its time and place, you will be more capable of questioning your thoughts and feelings about your counterpart and focusing on what matters most.
The Basics of Perspective Taking
When we take another person’s perspective, we actively consider and appreciate their viewpoint, role, and underlying motivations, according to Adam D. Galinsky, William W. Maddux, and Gillian Ku.
Getting inside a counterpart’s head can help you resolve disputes and improve the quality of your deals, according to Galinsky and colleagues. Perspective taking promotes trust between negotiators by helping them overcome suspicious assumptions about each other’s behavior.
Some people are especially skilled perspective takers. People who live abroad for an extended period of time, for example, learn to study the behavior of those around them for important cultural cues—a practice that improves their perspective-taking ability back at home. But any negotiator can become better at envisioning a counterpart’s perspective by pausing to analyze their interests, motives, and needs.
What thoughts do you have on when perspective taking and empathy are especially helpful in business negotiations?
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