Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary talent for negotiation. He was also an outstanding public speaker. Among the many words of wisdom he left behind, there is this piece of advice for negotiations:
“If you talk to a man in a
Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary man with an extraordinary talent for negotiation. He was also an outstanding public speaker. Among the many words of wisdom he left behind, there is this piece of advice for negotiations:
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
So strongly did Mandela believe this, that he learned Afrikaans during his time imprisoned in Robben Island. The identification between Afrikaans and Apartheid was so strong that many activists were deeply offended when they heard Mandela speaking it to the white warders. But Mandela was right. So much so that his linguistic approach to negotiation might have given him an edge in his initial secret meetings with de Klerk. Mandela might have had a small advantage over his opponent when they negotiated in de Klerk’s native language. He unknowingly benefited from The Foreign Language Effect.
Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native one? Keysar, Hayakawa and Sun Gyu from the University of Chicago asked this question, and found out that the answer is “no”: our deeply rooted and irrational aversion to loss disappears when a problem is presented in a foreign language; we respond in a cooler, more rational way 1.
Our decisions are affected by a wide variety of seemingly irrelevant factors. One is our dislike to lose what we have, a dislike so strong that it wins over the pleasure of gaining something we did not have before. The Asian Disease problem illustrates this bias in our decision making. This is the situation we face:
Recently, a dangerous new disease has been going around. Without medicine, 600,000 people will die from it. In order to save these people, two types of medicine are being made.
Here is the problem framed in terms of losses:
If you choose Medicine A, 400,000 people will die. If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that no one will die and a 66.6% chance that 600,000 will die.
And here is the problem framed in terms of gains:
If you choose Medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved. If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that 600,000 people will be saved and a 66.6% chance that no one will be saved.
Which medicine do you choose?
Although the number of certain deaths is the same in both versions of the problem, people take the safer option (medicine A) more often when survivors are mentioned, and they take the riskier option (medicine B) when deaths are mentioned. So, when the same choice between A or B is presented in terms of losses (if you choose A, X people will die) or in terms of gains (if you choose A, X people will live), we are much more likely to choose B in the first case but A in the second 2.
Keysar and colleagues presented the As