Empathy Anyone?

As readers of this blog know, I lost my grandmother last fall. It was sad, but not tragic. After all, she was 99 and lived a long, productive, happy life. Last week, I (and my siblings) received a very formal letter from a lawyer with an enclosure — under Pennsylvania law, where my grandmother lived, beneficiaries of her estate are required to receive notice of her death. So, the lawyer duly enclosed the official Pennsylvania state language letting me know of my rights (to contest probate, etc.). The cover letter was equally formulaic:

Ladies & Gentlemen:

You will find enclosed with regard to the trust . . . the notice required under Pennsylvania Uniform Trust Act of your grandmother’s death on November 3rd, 2009.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Here’s the thing — this lawyer was at my wedding, invited to my son’s Bar Mitzvah, and has known me since I was 10. I get the same cover letter as someone he has never met — really? And, even if we didn’t know each other, the letter should be better. 

Continue ReadingEmpathy Anyone?

Chocolate Cake v. Fruit – Or Why We Get Emotional During “Rational” Negotiations

I was listening to a great story earlier this week on NPR which described an interesting experiment:

In his book How We Decide, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, Jonah Lehrer writes about an experiment by Stanford University professor Baba Shiv, who collected several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups.

In the WSJ article, Jonah writes: “One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.”

And then he writes:

“Here’s where the results get weird.

Continue ReadingChocolate Cake v. Fruit – Or Why We Get Emotional During “Rational” Negotiations

Can Guys Teach Gender?

Yes . . . and they should! Coming back from the works-in-progress conference this past November at Harvard, one of the most interesting conversations was a late-night one between several professors — men and women — about teaching gender in a negotiation class. Now that the new semester is starting up, I wanted to bring this topic up again.

As others have noted to me, the vast majority of gender and negotiation research, and public presentations on gender, tend to be by women. Debbie Kolb would point out that everyone has gender — not just women — and yet there is clearly something about teaching gender that make at least some male professors uncomfortable. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not for lack of thinking it’s important; it’s more that they don’t want to be patronizing or make the situation worse by raising stereotypes that they themselves do not believe in. At least one male professor hoped that by avoiding teaching gender, and teaching general negotiation effectiveness, everyone would get the message that people should not be defined by their gender. But, as he noted, that does not, in the end, necessarily serve either the male or female students in our negotiation classes. 

Continue ReadingCan Guys Teach Gender?