How Being Too Agreeable Can Undermine Negotiations

We often think tat the point of a negotiation is to reach an agreement. The top-selling book on negotiation is called Getting to Yes, after all. The implication is that a good negotiator is someone who makes deals, not someone who walks away. I

n relationships, this problem is even worse. Most of us don't want to think of ourselves as someone who turns a friend down. And the more they need our help, the more important the request is to them, the harder it is. Where does this come from?

We don't like to be disagreeable

The current state of the art in describing personality is something called the five-factor model. If you give a large group of subjects a personality test with hundreds of questions, you will find certain identifiable patterns: Some of the questions tend to get similar answers from the same people. The people who say, "I always show up to meetings on time" also tend to say, "I keep my desk tidy" and "I never take office supplies home with me." Once you have a stable group of questions that track together, psychologists try to name the underlying quality that unites those people. For the questions above, the underlying construct is called conscientiousness.

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