Misbelieving Several weeks ago, I went to a bookstore with my husband to pick up a book he wanted. He did not buy it, but I found an intriguing book: Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things by Dan Ariely (HarperCollins, New York, 2023.) While the book discusses what [Read More]
The Sound of Silence is a song written by and released in 1964 by Simon and Garfunkel. It was used in the movie, The Graduate. Its lyrics include the phrases: “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening.” It is the last phrase I want to dwell on: People hearing [Read More]
Recently, I attended a webinar sponsored by the Beverly Hills Bar Association entitled “ Ethical Obligations: How Bias Plays a role in our Decision- Making” presented by Mindy Gulati, Esq., Founder and CEO of Fundamental Advisory. Initially, Ms. Gulati discussed the notions of explicit and implicit Biases as well as [Read More]
A few weeks ago, I posted a blog on the importance of the words we use during a mediation or any negotiation. For example, rather than using labels “the other side” or “Plaintiff” or “defendant”, we should use the actual names of the people involved. As chance would have it, [Read More]
Recently, I attended the Annual Conference of the Southern California Mediation Association. One of the workshops intrigued me as it was all about the words we use. Entitled “Words Matter: What to leave at the Courthouse Steps” , the speakers Dr. Debra Dupree and Harold Coleman, Jr. Esq. discussed how [Read More]
The other night in mediation ethics class, we discussed using deception in negotiation and more specifically why certain folks will outright misrepresent an important fact as opposed to merely puffing or embellishing a little bit. In order to use such deception, we have to tell ourselves it is okay by [Read More]
A recent blog post (dated August 21,2023) by the staff at Harvard’s PONS (Program on Negotiation) concludes that while sincere anger may be advantageous in a negotiation, appearing to be happy may or may not be disadvantageous in a negotiation: …When we display anger, our counterparts tend to view us [Read More]
In my practice of mediation, I never gave this question any thought! But I should. I just finished reading a book entitled Quiet by Susan Cain (Broadway Books, New York 2013) and realized that our answer to this question greatly impacts absolutely everything we do in life (including negotiating disputes!) [Read More]
