Welcome back. I want to talk about some negotiation fundamentals and today I want to start by talking about implicit beliefs. They're called implicit because we walk around with these beliefs, so we have them without often thinking much about them. But I want to suggest that these beliefs themselves can change. We're not completely tethered to these, but we walk around with beliefs and these implicit beliefs are about the extent to which things are either themselves fixed or malleable, changeable. If I were to ask you a question like, do you think athletes are born that way, or is it only through hard work they become extraordinary athletes? Or are leaders born, or are they made? Now of course, it's both, but in our minds we implicitly think about the extent to which it's mostly one or mostly the other. Now, I mentioned athletic ability and leadership, but the same is true for things like public speaking or even ethics, but I want to think about implicit beliefs about negotiation. Are great negotiators just born that way, or is it hard work that enable them to become great negotiators. Now, if you're watching this video you must believe that at least to some extent, we can become better negotiators by working at it, and that is exactly what I want to convince you of. But we can think about the idea that we implicitly walk around with extent to which being a good negotiator is something that we're born with or that we have to really work at. There's a scale that asks a series of questions like the negotiator someone is, is very basic and it can't be changed very much, or good negotiators are born that way. Things that suggests that, hey, we're fixed in one way or the other. If we have this fixed mindset, that is we're just born that way, there are a lot of implications that follow that aren't very good. If we're fixed and we believe, hey good negotiators are born that way, what that means is bad feedback, negative feedback can be quite threatening. That means that I'm going to perceive myself as a bad negotiator. If I have a malleable mindset, I believe that experience is a great teacher, well, in that case, I'm going to think that I can learn from negative feedback. That every failed negotiation is an opportunity to get better. That process is likely to guide me to seek opportunities to learn and develop my skill as a negotiator. We're more likely to process information through, think critically, through think about becoming a master and persist in the face of challenges, and so malleable beliefs are going to guide us to be more persistent, more receptive to feedback, and more likely ultimately to succeed. Conversely, a fixed mindset is going to threaten our self image, we might not want critical feedback and in some cases, people with a fixed mindset engage in behavior that's even quite counterproductive. If you have a fixed mindset and you think people are born this way, and if I fail then it really reflects the failure about me, people will sometimes engage in what's called self handicapping. By self handicapping, you think of somebody that maybe gets drunk before they take a final exam. Or you think of somebody that say is playing ping-pong and starts playing with their non-dominant hand. They're doing things that give them an excuse like, well, yeah, I really knew the material and if I hadn't been drinking I'd have done really well. Or I'm a better ping-pong player, but if I'd played with my right hand I would have played better. People will engage in this self handicapping in ways that actually harm their performance, but give them an excuse to preserve their self-image. For negotiations, what you want to make sure is that people have a malleable mindset because they're going to be much more receptive to feedback. They're going to persist and try and not engage in self handicapping behavior. This is true for many different domains, whether it's leadership or athletics or public speaking, particularly important for negotiations to adopt this malleable mindset so we end up doing better as we negotiate and in fact, negotiators with more malleable mindsets in MBA courses end up doing better, claiming more value, they end up performing better in the whole course. Now, it can bleed over into other behaviors like engaging in some questionable tactics because they're more likely to believe, well, if I lied in this one case, it doesn't really reflect on me, it's just in the moment and I can still improve later. It can have other side effects as well, but the broad idea is that we have this learning mindset as long as we have malleable beliefs. One of the key ideas for this whole course is to develop a malleable mindset and it allows us to believe that we can improve over time.
