Dr. Adam Mastroianni is a psychologist who writes the popular Substack newsletter “Experimental History.”
The offer for a research position was on the table, but Adam Mastroianni wasn’t satisfied.
He wanted more money and, after previously teaching a college negotiation course, was seemingly well-versed in the critical tools to get it.
But there was a problem. The man in charge of his salary at Northwestern also happened to be a negotiation professor.
“It was like two Jedis fighting each other,” Mastroianni said. “The things that work against someone who’s only thought about this don’t work against someone who’s been around the block.”
Ultimately, Mastroianni decided to abandon some of his conventional tactics and adapt his strategy to the unusual circumstances.
“We both said, ‘Let’s just fast forward. You know I’m going to ask for more money. I know you’re not going to want to give it to me. Let’s meet in the middle between those two things and work together as colleagues,’” he said.
Mastroianni is a psychologist and meta scientist whose work has led him to some of the world’s most prestigious universities. He attended Princeton for undergrad, studied at Oxford for two years as a Rhodes scholar, earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Columbia University.
He left academia in 2022 to directly publish his own research. He currently writes the popular Substack newsletter “Experimental History,” which has more than 75,000 subscribers.
Best of 7 spoke to Mastroianni about the importance of “unpacking” before making critical decisions, why seemingly intelligent people can do really dumb things, and differentiating between the three types of negotiation.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Best of 7: Dr. Mastroianni, can you tell me about the “coffee beans procedure” and how you came up with it?
I talk to so many people who don’t like what they’re doing — they want to do something else — and when you ask them what, the most common answer is, “It would be great to run a little coffee shop.”
That’s good and all, but I think a good test of whether you actually want to run a coffee shop is to ask yourself, “Where will you get the beans?” “How expensive is the espresso maker you want?” “What will you do when it’s 6 a.m. and your assistant manager calls in sick?” These are the actual things you’ll have to do on a day-to-day basis.
You might like coffee shops because you like to be in them reading or hanging out, but that’s not what it will be like to run one. The coffee beans procedure is a way of unpacking your preferences. “This is what you’re going to be doing minute to minute, and you’re going to have to live each minute in order. Would you like that?”
It’s funny how hard that is to do on your own accord.
Why do you think we tend to convince ourselves that the grass is greener, particularly when it comes to our careers?
It generally makes sense to leave things packed. If you had to unpack everything you do, you’d never do anything.
Where it backfires is when the compressed version is different from the uncompressed. The compressed version has all the parts that are really attractive. Think of being an actor. You get to be famous. You get to make a lot of money. You don’t think about the fact that you also get cast on whether you have the right cheek bones for the role. Only the people who are cool with that should actually try to pursue that career.
You have some pretty interesting thoughts on why seemingly intelligent people do very dumb things at times.
I think there are two types of intelligence. You can gloss these as cleverness and wisdom. The cleverness is the part you can assess with the test — good at multiple-choice, good at excelling within very legible systems, academia, the business world.
Wisdom is hard to assess. It’s hard to get, hard to know when people have it… This is what we miss when we define intelligence as the ability to solve problems. Clearly people’s problem-solving ability can be very lopsided in a way that’s hard to capture with quantitative assessments. If you have a lot of money but are on your fifth marriage and your kids hate you, you might be smart at some things but pretty dumb at others. Both of these things are problem-solving — they’re just different kinds of problems.
Is there an ideal ratio between cleverness and wisdom?
I think having way more of one than the other gets you in trouble, more so when you lean toward the cleverness side than the wisdom. If I had to pick, I’d rather be wise than clever. I don’t have a lot of wisdom. I come very much from a clever culture, but it’s a little bit like only working out the top half or the bottom half of your body. Getting really strong but only in some muscles is a recipe for getting injured. It’s better to spread it out because you won’t be able to take advantage of strength unless you can use your whole body at the same time.
You write a lot about conversations and why we often think they went worse than they did. Can you share some of what you’ve learned?
There’s all these findings from psychology about how people are overly anxious and overly critical of their conversations. They expect them not to go as well as they do, and afterward, they don’t think they went as well as they did.
There are two findings I’ve worked on. One is the liking gap, where after two people meet each other for the first time, you ask them, “How much did you like the other person and how much do you think the other person liked you?” People generally go, “I liked the other person. I think they liked me a little less.” We don’t know exactly why this happens, but I think a reasonable explanation is people think they’re not going to like new people. We have an ingrained sense of stranger danger.
As soon as I meet you, though, I start to update my opinion of you and think I like you. But I’m always going to update my guess of what you think of me more slowly because I don’t know that as well. Even though I’m like, “O.K., this is going well,” I’m a little less sure that you think it’s going well. So, there’s always going to be this lag between this positive update of my opinion of you and my guess for your opinion of me.
That’s fascinating. What are one or two actionable steps we can apply to be more effective negotiators?
The one semester in two minutes I can give is that in every negotiation, there are only three kinds of issues. There are distributive issues, which are tug-of-war issues where we both want the same thing by the same amount. Another is an integrative issue where we want different things, and we want them in different amounts. I care more than you or you care more than I do. Then, there are complementary issues where we actually want the same thing. We’re not pulling in opposite directions but in the same.
People make two main mistakes when it comes to these. They miss complementary issues entirely. They don’t realize you’re not always going to be on opposite sides of everything. You can find where you both want the same thing, and you should maximize that.
The other thing they do is they try to split integrative issues as if they’re distributive. So, they come to everything like, “The default is we go 50/50,” even though on some issues, you should take zero and give the other side 100 so they can give you 100 on another issue. That is the main mistake I see students make — assuming we must want this the same amount so on average we’ll end up splitting when, in fact, you should dial to one side or the other.
What’s the toughest decision you’ve ever had to make and how did you get through it?
It was probably leaving academia, which is something I’d worked up to for a long time. Basically, I used to write these papers and would just feel stupid. It was so much fun to run the studies and think about them. Why was it so boring to write them up for other people?
I thought it was because I just wasn’t good enough, but I realized I was almost lying when I’d do it. I was covering up the parts that were interesting — this was unexpected, this doesn’t fit in well, I did this on a whim — and it was only when I started writing this blog that I thought I got everything back.
What was hard about it was when you’re in an environment where everyone values the same thing, you feel crazy if you don’t. No one could criticize you for becoming a professor — looks like a great option if you have no context for what it actually means. To most people, it looked like I was giving away something prestigious and stable for something much less prestigious and much less stable.
But they didn’t see what I was getting in return — which, to me, was everything.
What I learned…
One of the other illuminating points Mastroianni made to me was that in negotiations, people often struggle because they don’t have clear definitions of success when they begin the dialogue.
As a result, they’re just trying to win as many items on the table as possible.
Mastroianni pointed out that it’s critical to distinguish what matters significantly to us from what matters only slightly.
“If you get 50 percent of each, 50 percent of what you don’t care about is actually 10 percent, whereas 50 percent of something you care a lot about is worth way more,” he said.
Concession in a negotiation is often viewed as weakness or even defeat. But it doesn’t have to be.
It may actually serve us in the long term to give up more of what we care less about. Sounds obvious, but easy to overlook.