Sample frameDay 155·Negotiation · Close

Good morning. They apologised and you accepted. The terms didn't change.

Negotiation.

After the Lie

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Think of the counterparty who told you something that turned out to be untrue — the capacity that didn't exist, the rival offer that was never really there. You carried on with them. Which term in that agreement did you change, so that the next thing they told you could be checked?

The idea

Maurice Schweitzer, professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, ran a series of repeated trust games with John Hershey, whose outcome-bias work you met on Day 62, and with Eric Bradlow. They published the results in 2006 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes under a title that gives away the finding: 'Promises and Lies: Restoring Violated Trust'. When a counterpart simply behaved badly, trust could be rebuilt, and a consistent run of trustworthy behaviour afterwards brought it back. When the same bad behaviour came with deception, it didn't. People who had been lied to never fully recovered their trust, even after an apology, a promise, and a stretch of conduct that gave them nothing further to complain about. A promise sped the repair along; it never completed it. The trap is treating a lie as a larger version of a mistake. Mistakes are repaid with performance. Lies change what performance is worth as evidence, which is why the remedy has to be structural.

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