The One With Yokohama Revisited « So no one told you life was gonna be this way.

December 7, 2008

The One With Yokohama Revisited

Filed under: Japanese Culture (日本文化), Japanese Language (日本語), Random Musings, Winter (冬), Yokohama (横浜), dSLR — tutousan @ 9:58 pm

Of arguing over positions.

“……When negotiators bargain over positions, they tend to lock themselves into those positions. The more you clarify your position and defend it against attack, the more committed you become to it. The more you try to convince the other side of the impossibility of changing your opening position, the more difficult it becomes to do so. Your ego becomes identified with your position. You now have a new interest in “saving face” – in reconciling future action with past position – making it less and less likely that any agreement will wisely reconcile the parties’ original interests.

“The danger that positional bargaining will impede a negotiation was well illustrated by the breakdown of the talks under President Kennedy for a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. A critical question arose: How many on-site inspections per year should the Soviet Union and the United States be permitted to make within the other’s territory to investigate suspicious seismic events? The Soviet Union finally agreed to three inspections. The United States insisted on no less than ten. And there the talks broke down – over positions – despite the fact that no one understood whether an “inspection” would involve one person looking around for a day, or a hundred people prying indiscriminately for a month. The parties had made little attempt to design an inspection procedure that would reconcile the United States’ interest in verification with the desire of both countries for minimal intrusion.

Cold War Alliances

Image from encarta.msn.com

“As more attention is paid to positions, less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties. Agreement becomes less likely. Any agreement reached may reflect a mechanical splitting of the difference between final positions rather than a solution carefully crafted to meet the legitimate interests of the parties. The result is frequently an agreement less satifactory to each side than it could have been……”

Fisher.R & Uly.W (1991) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In