An executive I coached—a composite of dozens I’ve worked with before major deals over 30 years—prepared for negotiations impeccably. He studied the term sheet twice, modeled three counter-scenarios and walked in ready. But listen to what he told himself the morning of: “These guys always lowball at the last minute. That’s how they operate. They’re not pulling that on us.”
That’s not analysis. That’s a verdict. Delivered before the meeting starts and immune to anything that happens once it does. And here’s what I’ve learned watching high performers negotiate: the verdict, not the terms, is usually what decides the outcome. If you walk into a negotiation already certain the other side is the problem, you will spend the meeting collecting evidence for a conclusion you’ve already reached.
What Is Confirmation Bias in Negotiation?
Confirmation bias in negotiation happens when you decide who the other side is before the meeting starts. Labeling them as bad-faith actors, and then unconsciously read everything that follows as proof you were right. It’s a verdict, not a read on the deal, and it’s rendered before any real information comes in.
Leaders love this feeling and mistake it for preparation. Certainty about the counterparty feels like edge. It’s actually armor. And armor has a cost. When your mind has pre-classified the other side as bad-faith actors, three things quietly happen. You stop asking real questions, because you believe you already know the answers. You read neutral moves as confirmation, because a verdict metabolizes everything as evidence. And you concede nothing exploratory, because flexibility now feels like being played.
Notice the language pattern in yourself and your team. A leader analyzing a deal says “these terms carry risk.” A leader running a verdict says “these people can’t be trusted.” When the subject of the sentence shifts from the deal to the humans, the negotiation has already started going somewhere the spreadsheet never modeled.
Why Does Perspective-Taking Beat Empathy in Negotiation?
Why does the mind do this? Because to a brain built for survival, an unfamiliar counterparty is a threat until proven otherwise. And being right about a threat feels safer than being open to one. Locking in a verdict is how the mind protects itself from people it hasn’t fully sized up. The cost is that it protects you from information too.
The research on what actually wins negotiations points the opposite direction from armor. In a series of three studies published in Psychological Science in 2008, Adam Galinsky and colleagues found that negotiators who took their counterpart’s perspective—worked to think through the other side’s interests and likely moves—were better at discovering hidden agreements and at both creating and claiming value at the table. Empathy, notably, didn’t deliver the same advantage; understanding how they think beat feeling what they feel.
A 2011 series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Roman Trötschel and colleagues went further: self-interested negotiators were more likely to hit painful partial impasses, but perspective taking reduced that risk. It let negotiators trade concessions on low-priority issues for wins on high-priority ones, increasing their own profits without gutting the other side. Read that carefully: seeing their side wasn’t soft. It was how the tough negotiators got paid.
How to Prepare for a Negotiation: A 4-Step Checklist
In my coaching work the pre-negotiation conversation is rarely about tactics. It’s about locating the verdict. So before any high-stakes meeting, run this sequence:
1. Write the verdict down.
Finish this sentence honestly: “What I’ve already decided about these people is ______.” You can’t examine a conclusion you won’t admit you’ve reached. Seeing it in writing—“they’re sharks,” “they think we’re desperate”—converts a lens back into a hypothesis.
2. Prosecute your own certainty.
Ask three questions of the verdict: What’s my actual evidence? What else could that evidence mean? What would I expect to see today if I’m wrong? A verdict that survives honest cross-examination becomes useful caution. Most don’t survive it.
3. Map their priorities like you mapped your own.
List what you believe the other side needs most and least from this deal. Then mark which entries are researched and which are assumed. The assumed ones are your best questions for the first 20 minutes. This is perspective taking as a discipline, not a mood.
4. Choose your entry state on purpose.
Ten minutes before the meeting, drop the rehearsal of their bad behavior and rehearse your questions instead. A regulated negotiator who can be surprised is more dangerous, in the best sense, than an armored one who can’t. If pre-meeting certainty is a chronic pattern for you, it’s worth reading why high-stakes decisions trip the mind’s survival alarm. It’s the same machinery wearing different clothes.
None of this means trusting blindly or ignoring a counterparty’s track record. It means knowing the difference between what you’ve verified and what you’ve decided—and refusing to let an unexamined verdict negotiate on your behalf.
The executive with the lowball prophecy? The deals that finally moved weren’t the ones where he armored up harder. They were the ones where he walked in with his questions sharper than his conclusions. The room can’t surprise you into a better deal if you’ve already ruled surprise out.
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