Opinion | The Nobel Prize-Winning Professor Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries

Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind, which in turn motivates the other person to share more information with you. A

Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is a leading expert in exploring group thought in politics. Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, built on Tetlock’s work, connecting it with the need for diversity. “If you put individuals together in the right way,

The best results are found when we’re impartial and detached from our own strategies. We all benefit when the best idea is chosen, regardless of whether it’s ours or not.

She had assumed that the goal of discussing a conflict and engaging in debate was achieving victory, defeating the other side. But that’s not right. Rather, the real goal is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place.

Elite diplomats have explained that their goal at a bargaining table isn’t seizing victory, but rather convincing the other side to become collaborators in uncovering new solutions that no one thought of before. Negotiation, among its top practitioners, isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.