Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (21 page)

Nobody wants to be called a racist. It's distressing, and for those with public personalities, it can kill their career. The irony is that sometimes, the more unprejudiced we
try
to appear, the more we sound like a racist.

Consider the mortifying experience of entertainment reporter Sam Rubin in an interview with Samuel L. Jackson about his upcoming film
RoboCop
. As the interview started, Rubin asked Samuel Jackson about his Super Bowl commercial.

Ironically enough, Samuel L. Jackson
was
in a Super Bowl commercial—for the movie
The Avengers
. But that wasn't the point. As Rubin said later, “I immediately felt so dumb, I didn't bring that up.” Jackson had essentially accused Rubin of being a racist, and Rubin felt so mortified that he became paralyzed and was unable to defend himself.

Sam Rubin's fear of being seen as racist was well placed. He knew what had happened to southern TV chef Paula Deen when accusations that she was a racist surfaced. When Deen formally admitted in the course of a lawsuit that she had used racial epithets, her admission cost her multiple endorsements and her popular show on the Food Network. The original lawsuit was dismissed, but not before Deen was humiliated and her career had been derailed. A year later, Deen said, “I feel like ‘embattled' or ‘disgraced' will always follow my name.”

Even those of us without a nationally broadcast television show will expend great effort to avoid being labeled a racist. Michael Norton of Harvard University has shown the lengths that people will go to to avoid using race when they describe another person. To study this, he created an experiment called the Political Correctness Game. You can play it yourself here:
http://blogs.hbr.org/​2013/​07/​the-two-minute-game-that-reveals-how-people-perceive-you/
.

Mike's game was a variant of the childhood game Guess Who. Here's how it worked. One of the two players would pick a card from a deck, turn it over, and see a photograph of a face. Then, the partner had to figure out which face, out of an array of faces, their partner had picked. The partner could ask questions to narrow down the options, but they all had to be yes or no questions. Half the photographs were of white individuals and half were of black individuals. Even though race was an easy and obvious descriptor that would have efficiently helped participants to identify the target person, few participants asked whether the person was white or black, and this was especially true if their game partner was black. Indeed, almost half of the participants refused to ever mention race in any of their questions.

This strategy of avoiding any mention of race not only hurts your performance in the Political Correctness Game, it defeats its intended purpose, as Evan Apfelbaum of MIT's Sloan School of Management has found. The more someone tries to be colorblind and ignore race, the
more
they come across as racist.

And it's not just trying to avoid
saying
certain words that makes things worse. Actively trying to banish negative thoughts from our minds—a simple and intuitively appealing strategy known as suppression—is also counterproductive.

To understand this, try the following task: Do not think about a white bear.

Okay, what happened? If you're like most people, the second you are told
not
to think about a white bear, all you can do is think about a white bear. After all, in order
not
to think about a white bear you have to think about a white bear, at least somewhere in your mind. And you have to be on the lookout for any reference to white bears; thus, you become hypersensitive to white-bear references. And not only that but suppressing thoughts about white bears is exhausting.

As you might imagine, the same principle applies when we try not to think about race. When we try to suppress any thoughts about race, we actually think more about race. So suppression only increases attention to stereotypes.

Our research shows that perspective-taking offers a way out of this conundrum. Consider a simple experiment we did with Gordon Moskowitz of Lehigh University. We showed undergraduates a photograph and asked them to write about a day in the life of the person in the photograph. In one version of the experiment the photograph was of a black man. Some of the participants were asked to suppress any stereotypes they might have of that person. Others were told to take the perspective of the person and go through the day as if they
were
that person, looking at the world through his eyes. Participants then wrote their essays. Later, participants engaged in a task that was designed to surreptitiously measure racial bias. The perspective-takers exhibited less racial bias than did those who had been asked to suppress thoughts of race.

Suppressors also make
others
feel uncomfortable. In contrast, perspective-takers put others, even interracial others, at ease. In a study we did with Andrew Todd of the University of Iowa, we used the same paradigm as above, but instead of measuring racial bias with a computer, participants were interviewed by a black woman who asked them questions about their experiences on campus. Black interviewers rated their interactions with perspective-takers as more comfortable and more enjoyable than their interactions with control participants. And our videotapes confirmed why: Perspective-takers smiled more, made more eye contact, and leaned forward more. While perspective-takers sat closer and with more immediacy, suppressors sat further and further away.

These effects are not just limited to the lab; they also occur in the doctor's office and the workplace. Going to a doctor is anxiety producing. This is especially true when the doctor is white and the patient is black. But what if we turned doctors into better perspective-takers?

In research we conducted with Jim Blatt of George Washington University, we did just that. For some medical students we asked them to “put themselves in the shoes” of their upcoming patients. To get them in a perspective-taking frame of mind, we also asked them to recall a recent interaction and to put themselves in the shoes of the other individual and reflect on what that person was thinking or feeling.

Here is what we found: Patient satisfaction was higher following interactions with clinicians who had been given our simple perspective-taking prompt. And importantly, this effect occurred for both white and black patients.

So, instead of trying to pretend that racial differences don't exist, we should try to learn about others' experiences. Perspective-taking is a much better strategy for connecting to diverse others, reducing anxiety during interracial interactions, and preventing stereotypes from dominating our thoughts. Suppression makes us look like a racist. Perspective-taking makes us appear engaged and present.

What is the key to a happy marriage? It may not surprise you at this point to learn that perspective-taking is a key predictor of a strong marriage.

But it might surprise you to learn that perspective-taking can also increase the propensity for divorce! How can the same ability lead to such divergent outcomes?

Perspective-taking is often the glue that binds spouses together. Perspective-taking enables us to connect with our spouse by anticipating the other's wants and needs—sometimes even before they do. But when spouses begin to compete, perspective-taking can do far more harm than good. Why? When we put ourselves in the shoes of a foe, we consider how they can harm us and imagine all the devious chicanery they might be plotting against us, and we pivot into a mode of paranoid self-protection.

Consider two spouses locked in a serious argument, or even a divorce battle. Taking the perspective of an estranged spouse leads you to imagine the duplicitous, scheming, and underhanded activities they may be plotting against you. So you preemptively beat them to the punch by engaging in these very activities yourself.

In hypercompetitive contexts like divorce, imagining what the other person is thinking can act like gasoline poured onto a roaring fire of suspicion. In these cases, perspective-taking perverts the Golden Rule from “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to “Do unto others as you
think
they will do unto you.”

Our research has shown that even when two people don't know each other very well, perspective-taking can bring these individuals closer together by facilitating communication, increasing cooperation, and reducing prejudice. But for perfect strangers, just as in couples, when competitive feelings escalate, adding perspective-taking to the mix only intensifies the competition. When resources are scarce, perspective-taking promotes selfish behavior. And when we perceive someone to have transgressed against us, we can be driven to greater retaliation.

Consider an experiment we ran with Jason Pierce of Universidad Adolfo Ibañez. We asked MBA students to think about a negotiation in which their counterpart was either a fierce rival or a collaborative partner. We had half of the participants take the perspective of their rival; the other half were given no additional instructions. We then asked them about the lengths they would go to to come out ahead in an upcoming negotiation. When people actively tried to get inside the head of their heated rival, it
increased
their own use of unethical negotiation strategies. It accelerated and inflamed their competitive impulses and incited these negotiators to protect themselves from the potential deviousness of their competitor. They fought
anticipated
fire with greater fire.

Earlier, we said that perspective-taking was more effective than empathy in producing efficient and beneficial negotiation outcomes. However, perspective-taking without
any
empathy is dangerous. Take bullies: They are great at appreciating someone's vulnerabilities…and taking advantage of them.

These effects of perspective-taking also apply to the thorny question of whether we should meet our foes face-to-face or not. It's generally believed that face-to-face meetings are the key to establishing rapport and incipient feelings of trust. As we wrote earlier in our discussion of trust, face-to-face meetings can be the glue that binds people together. But in overly competitive situations, face-to-face meetings can cause conflict to erupt into full-scale animosity.

President Jimmy Carter came to appreciate this dynamic back in 1978. When trying to broker a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Carter brought President Anwar El Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel to Camp David. After days of face-to-face negotiations, President Carter was confronted with increasing suspicion. His hope of a landmark peace treaty was on the verge of collapse as he found himself caught between two feuding adversaries. “It was mean,” he told his wife. “They were brutal with each other, personal.”

President Carter then made a dramatic decision: He temporarily cut off face-to-face contact with these adversaries and met with each leader individually. He shuttled back and forth, receiving offers and counteroffers, while preventing direct interaction between the two leaders. The physical distance calmed their competitive impulses. The result was a groundbreaking peace treaty, one that would earn Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, what allowed them to come together in their famous handshake photo was actually being physically apart during the negotiation.

We have shown that face-to-face communication can lubricate the wheels of cooperation, but other times, it can fan the flames of competition. So how do we know when to meet face-to-face or to keep our distance?

Along with Roderick Swaab of INSEAD we conducted a large-scale quantitative analysis of over 100 negotiation and group decision-making studies to answer that very question. We found that the key factor that determines whether it is better to be face-to-face or far apart is where people are on the friend-foe continuum. When people are unsure of whether to compete or cooperate, meeting face-to-face creates rapport that guides the interaction into cooperative territory. Closer contact helps smooth the cogs of social interaction and enables trust to develop.

But if two individuals already feel great animosity toward each other, the ability to see and hear each other inflames competitive feelings. In this case, the ability to see your partner decreases the likelihood of reaching a settlement.

The dilemma of whether to meet face-to-face is just one of many questions we need to answer when placed in the one situation that requires the utmost balance between competition and cooperation: a negotiation. Next, we discuss when it's best to compete and when it's best to cooperate to get the most out of any negotiation.

Let's examine why Alvin Greene's placement atop the ballot order made such a difference in his political fortunes. To understand the role of the name order effect on election results, Jon Krosnick of Stanford University analyzed a naturally occurring field experiment in Ohio. Why Ohio? Because, in the Buckeye State, the placement of names on ballots is randomly rotated, precinct by precinct. With these data, Jon could compare how many votes candidates received as a function of their rank on the ballot. Here is what he found: The first candidate listed almost always had an advantage.

As you might expect, the ballot order effect is strongest among unfamiliar candidates like Alvin—if we have no other information to go on, we're more likely to make our decision based on ballot order. But what about in a presidential election, where candidates spend millions of dollars mailing materials, running advertisements, making public appearances, and carefully crafting platform-thematic messages. Shouldn't the familiarity of presidential candidates overwhelm any ballot order effects?

Not entirely. Consider the 2000 presidential election. When Jon Krosnick looked at the order effect in three states that rotated candidate names (California, North Dakota, and Ohio), being listed first always led to an advantage. Though only two candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore, captured more than 96 percent of the vote, there were actually seven candidates on the ballot. In California, Bush received 9.4 percent
more
votes when he was listed first versus last. And in North Dakota and Ohio, Bush received about 1 percent more votes when he was first versus last. That may not seem like much, but it corresponded to thousands of votes.

As you might recall, in 2000, the outcome of the presidential election in the United States came down to just a few hundred votes cast in one state, Florida, where Bush received 2,912,790 votes to Gore's 2,912,253 votes. In other words, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes, less than ¹⁄¹00th of a percent of the votes cast.

What was the ballot order in Florida? Bush was listed first on every ballot. (You might be wondering how a candidate's position on the ballot is determined in Florida. In Florida, the governor gets to decide the order; in this case, the governor was Jeb Bush, George W. Bush's brother.) Based on this research, had the ballot order been rotated in Florida, the outcome of the presidential election would likely have been quite different.

Is voting behavior really that capricious? And why, exactly, would ballot order matter? Because although we typically make choices that reflect our preferences, when we are “on the fence” we look for any shortcut or signal, however arbitrary, to help us make our decision. In these cases, we are sensitive to any indication that one candidate is better than another. We use ballot order because we interpret, often subconsciously, the first name on a list as an implicit recommendation. This thought process isn't quite as crazy as it sounds. In many cases, the first name on a list is the one we should pay more attention to. For example, when we see a movie poster, the first actor listed is usually the one with the starring role in the movie.

In the world of politics, it is good to be first. But it's not just presidential candidates who benefit from going first. Prisoners do, too.

Shai Danziger of Tel Aviv University followed eight Israeli judges for 10 months as they presided over 1,000 parole applications made by prisoners. When prisoners apply for parole, their application reviews are randomly assigned to time slots during the day. And when Shai looked at the relationship between the assigned time slot and the likelihood of being released, he found that the probability of being granted parole was far higher at the beginning of the day than at the end. If you were the first prisoner reviewed on a particular day, your odds of getting released were 65 percent. However, if a prisoner was unlucky enough to be reviewed at the end of day, their probability plummeted to nearly zero!

What was also interesting is that the probability of parole decreased over the course of the morning but rose again right after lunch, once hungry judges were recharged. How can we make sense of this pattern?

It turns out that the natural default response is for judges to deny the parole request. It makes sense: If the question is whether to release a potentially dangerous criminal onto the streets, when in doubt, saying no is the way to go. At the beginning of the day or after lunch, when judges are rested and energetic, they can engage in effortful thinking and focus on the merits of the case. However, as judges get tired and their blood sugar drops, they lack the energy for careful processing and they become more likely to revert to the default: “no” on parole. A tired and hungry judge is not a lenient one.

On ballots and in parole hearings, it is good to go first. But sometimes, in competitive situations, it's better to be last.

Singers and ice skaters can appreciate the benefits of going last. So can academics.

In 1997, Adam was on the job market as a fifth-year graduate student at Princeton University. In December of that year, he got exciting news that the business school at the University of Chicago was inviting him for an interview. The head of the search committee at Chicago asked him to be the first candidate interviewed (they were interviewing six candidates over a four-week period). He asked his professors at Princeton if he should go first or schedule his interview for one of the later dates. To Adam, they all said the same thing: They would want to go first. Going first signals prominence, they said. Adam agreed to be the first candidate interviewed at Chicago. He did not get the job.

Later, after the sting of the rejection had worn off, he sifted through all the job interviews he had observed at Princeton while he was a student. In his five years there, the last candidate had gotten the job every time!

This effect isn't limited to Princeton or to academia. Study after study has found that in serial competitions—situations in which each candidate performs one after the other—it pays to go last. For example, when Wändi Bruine de Bruin of Leeds University analyzed data from nearly 50 years (1957–2003) of the Eurovision Song Contest, she found that contestants who went later in the competition got higher scores.

This same effect has been documented on
American Idol
. Lionel Page of the University of Westminster devised a clever analysis that used data from the popular TV show to calculate the benefit of going last. In each episode of
American Idol
, contestants perform a song and at the end of each week, one of them is voted off the show until a final contestant wins the competition. So what effect did performing last have? Of the first 111
American Idol
episodes, the singer who performed last advanced to the next round a whopping 91 percent of the time.

You might think this effect only occurs for trivial television shows and would vanish in rigorously evaluated professional competitions. Well, when Wändi addressed this question by analyzing data from the European and World Figure Skating Championships from 1994 to 2000, she found the exact same effect: Going later was better than going earlier. Skaters who were randomly assigned to perform later received better scores in the first round. And these skaters also got an extra boost in the second round; in many cases, skaters with higher scores in the first round skated later in the second round, too.

Here's a powerful example of the effects of going later: In the 2010 Winter Olympics, there were two leading competitors in the male figure skating competition: Evgeni Plushenko and Evan Lysacek. But one of the two was heavily favored to win: Plushenko. In fact, in betting markets, the payout for a bet on the underdog Lysacek was
18 times greater
than the payout for Plushenko. Everyone thought Plushenko would win. But across the two events, Lysacek skated 13 positions later than Plushenko. Lysacek finished with 257.67 points to Plushenko's 256.36, a difference of just over one point. (The third place finisher was more than 10 points behind Lysacek.) Of course, there are many factors that influence the scores skaters earn, but the order effect could well have tipped the balance.

So why is this happening? For one thing, when judges evaluate everyone at the end of the competition, the memory of earlier candidates fades. Recognizing this, movie producers who hope to win an Academy Award release their movies late in the year. Indeed, the vast majority of Best Picture winners come from movies released between October and December.

Yet what is interesting about this effect is that it occurs regardless of whether all candidates are judged only at the end of competition (as in
American Idol
)
or
if they are judged after each candidate performs (as in figure skating).

How do we make sense of the later-is-better effect in figure skating, where each skater is evaluated after each performance as they skate? Here, a number of effects contribute to the “later-is-better” pattern. First, judges like to give themselves room to reward later candidates. In other words, a judge may want to give a perfect 10 to someone early, but worry that someone else who performs later might do even better. As a result, judges are stingy with very high ratings in early rounds, essentially saving them for later contestants. Second, judges hold very high standards at the beginning. They start with an idealized image of how well skaters can perform, and the benchmark for early skaters is extremely high. And third, going later may help the performers themselves; having seen others give stellar performances may motivate later contestants to put extra effort into their performance or take a risk that pays off.

Whenever multiple candidates compete in order—again, we call this a
serial
competition—going later is better. This has been documented across competitions of all types, no matter how evaluators judge performance. The judgments might involve ranking the candidates (i.e., deciding who is first, second, third, etc. as in the Queen Elisabeth Classical Music Competition), or the judgments might consist of selecting one candidate (like voting on
American Idol
), or the judgments might involve rating each candidate (selecting a number from a scale, as in the World Aquatics Championships, high school gymnastic meets, etc.). It doesn't matter, later candidates do better.

So what are the rules that we can use to know when to go first versus last in a competitive situation?

There is a simple solution that depends entirely on two factors.

The first factor is the nature of the competition: Are we being selected from a
list
(like voting)? Or are we being evaluated
one at a time
(like an interview process)? Or is it a
yes/no
decision (like whether or not to release someone on parole)?

If a candidate is being picked from a list, we assume that the first option is somehow better or more credible than the others. The person listed first on a ballot gets an implicit recommendation. Thus, going first is better.

When competitors perform sequentially, however, it's better to be last. Here, the combination of recency (the last contestants are the most salient and vivid) and high standards early on helps later contestants receive more positive evaluations.

For binary decisions, like a yes/no decision, it all depends on what the default is. When the decision-maker is fatigued, they tend to go with the default decision, like keeping a potential parolee in prison. So if the default option works against you—like it did for the Israeli prisoners—you want to be first. But if the default is in your favor, it can pay to be last.

Job interviews can be a bit more complicated. They typically resemble a serial competition, so later is better. Yet in some settings, the judgments are binary; managers make a series of yes/no decisions because there are many positions to fill. In this case, fatigue can become an issue—if the default is to say no, you want to be early (or just after lunch). However, if the default is yes, then you want to be late in the day (or just before lunch).

The second critical factor is how many candidates there are.

Dana Carney of the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that when there are only two options, the first option usually wins. For example, when encountering salespeople, customers and clients disproportionately choose to work with the first person they meet. Or when evaluating two similar products (in the case of her experiment, Bubble Yum versus Bubblicious gum), people chose the first option nearly two-thirds of the time. So when there are only two options, first is best.

But what happens as the number of options increases? When does it become better to go last?

Antonia Mantonakis of Brock University tested this idea by varying the number of wines that people tasted. Consistent with Dana's work, when there were only two wines, the first wine was selected almost 70 percent of the time. Even with three wines, there was a clear advantage for the wine that was tasted first. However, as the number of wines grew beyond four, an advantage for the
last wine
emerged. Analyses of martial arts competitions also reveal a later-is-better effect when there were five or more competitors.

By understanding these order effects—how they operate—we can learn to pick a position that will lend us a greater advantage and yield better outcomes in competitive situations.

These are the keys to gaining a competitive advantage. But, as friends, we also need to consider ways to make selection processes fair to promote legitimacy and cooperation.

To promote fairness, we endorse randomized, rotational systems. For example, on political ballots the best way to account for order effects is to ensure that every name appears in each ballot position equally at the precinct level. A randomized, rotational system supports democracy and mutes the effects of political machinations and inequity. Surprisingly, only 12 of the 50 states (24 percent) in the United States currently use a rotational system. Some states use an alphabetical order, others use a lottery, and some, like Florida, allow the sitting governor to decide.

In sequential competition in which there is only one round, randomization is the best solution. Randomization does not eliminate order effects, as those who go later will still have an advantage, but it does allow each candidate to have an equal probability of benefiting from the later position.

In sequential competition with multiple rounds, however, we can promote even greater fairness by randomly determining starting order in the first round and reversing the order in the second round. In contrast, many competitions often compound the benefits of going at the end in the first round, by determining second-round position by the first-round score.

Up to now our discussion of whether to go first or last has been in the context of influencing the judgment of external judges or audiences. The question of whether to move first or last is particularly important in the domain of negotiations, where our counterpart is sitting across the table from us. What should we do in a negotiation? We turn to this question next.