When we negotiate, we often face difficult bargaining situations: the other side plays hardball and tries to manipulate us. Emotions run high, the deal looks uncertain, people have hidden agendas, and relationships are tricky to manage. In those adverse conditions, it’s hard to keep a clear head. We start feeling stressed, maybe fearful; our focus narrows, our mood worsens, and we feel less and less equipped to solve the problem.
In the thick of the moment, we might struggle to remember exactly what to do: the proven strategies that work. Or we might be past that point already: the emotions got the better of us and we want to retaliate. It’s not a personal fault. Very few people are expert negotiators, the ones who deal with high-stakes issues and make decisions under uncertainty and pressure day in, day out. When you do something daily, you get to practise, and the rules and norms become habits. For seasoned negotiators, many behaviours become automatic. They’re also better equipped to recognise behavioural patterns in their counterparts, and less likely to get triggered and snap: ‘he had it coming!’ Sure, in the moment it feels like vindication. But once the adrenaline drops, it stops feeling like a win and starts feeling like regret. That is why knowing something in theory is different from doing it in practice. Putting the rules into practice takes conscious effort, self-regulation and hard-won skill.
But there is a type of learning that builds skills faster and easier than relying on remembering the rule book alone. It is ‘identity-based’ and it works through behaviour modelling (Bandura, 1977; Oyserman & Destin, 2010). Instead of trying to follow rules of behaviour all the time, wondering what we should do, we can ask ourselves: ‘What would a smart negotiator do?’ It’s effective, and it’s how we learn in the first place. Children model the behaviour of adults; young footballers emulate the style of the professionals they admire. Learning through observing the behaviour of others isn’t just easier; it also carries you through the moments when following a set of rules gets hard.
Identity-based learning sits alongside the negotiation strategies established by the experts: academics, psychologists, accomplished negotiators, diplomats, successful business people. A substantial part of the negotiation literature relies on teaching rules: ‘when this happens, you do that’. But some authors wrote about real-life examples to show how the negotiation strategies work. For example, the Harvard professor Robert Mnookin took on the dilemma of when to negotiate and when to fight in Bargaining with the Devil, by examining the interests, alternatives and costs of political figures such as Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela. But for many centuries in ancient times, negotiation savvy was embodied by Hermes for the Greeks, and by his equivalent, Mercury, for the Romans. And closer to our own times, the god-archetype of negotiation found his place in analytical psychology through the work of Carl Jung and Karl Kerényi (Jung, 1969; Kerényi, 1976).
In psychology, Hermes is an archetype, embodying the model of problem-solving in negotiation, with both strategic and defensive skills. He is astute, knowing how to frame the negotiation and how to reject the frame imposed on him. He understands the needs, wants and wishes of the other party, acting as a psychopomp (guide of the soul: from psyche, the soul, and pompos, the guide). He is a good mediator in conflict. Moreover, he leans into his hermaion capacity and makes his own luck by positioning himself in the right place and acting at the right time. Not malicious by nature, he gets his way through wit, using cleverness and cunning. Theorists also looked into his ‘trickster’ nature. But Hermes does not act in bad faith: he does not win at the expense of his brother Apollo, and he makes sure Apollo gets something valuable out of the deal, the lyre. In real life, many manipulators walk a thin ethical line, and some cross it: they want to win at your expense, with no concern over what you get out of the deal. This framework advises firmly against those tactics, on two grounds. Firstly, in repeated bargaining situations, some people do punish those who act in bad faith, even when they bear an economic cost themselves, in what is known as altruistic punishment (Fehr & Gächter, 2002): ‘I lose, but you lose too’. And secondly, trust is currency. Exploitative behaviours today might prevent great deals tomorrow.
Much of negotiation theory and practice teaches rules and strategies, and teaches them well. But the Hermes framework aims to work on the layer beneath: instead of leaning heavily on rules alone, you can model the ideal negotiator archetype, Hermes. Alternatively, you can use your own models, successful negotiators you really like. One advantage in using Hermes is that, as an archetype, you can apply it easily, from one dilemma to the next, without the extra details that come with real negotiators. Hermes is stripped to the essentials. Also, the necessity to model Hermes as a negotiator archetype arises from an even more practical problem: the sheer number of ways less scrupulous negotiators can try to get one over on you. There are countless psychological biases, strategies of influence, and manipulation techniques, all proven effective. Unless you dedicate real time to learning them all, understanding when and how they work and what to do about them, it can be genuinely hard to withstand the pressure. Even worse, some of these tactics are designed to escape your conscious awareness altogether. But almost all the techniques used against you in negotiation to constrain, trick and coerce, cluster into four main ways of targeting you and the deal. Some threaten your cognitive ability: the capacity to discern clearly. Others make you feel off balance by flattering or threatening your sense of self and worth, so you accept less favourable terms. Some exploit the relationship, using the social influence mechanisms that make people conform and want to be part of a group. And finally, some distort your sense of reality: your chances, your ability to seek alternatives. Memorising a defence for every technique would be a climb up a harsh mountain, but you can develop four main capacities that meet the vast majority of them.
In the Hermes framework, the negotiation capacities are his Faces, and they are Faces because each one looks in a different direction. The Astute looks at the deal before him, with cognitive clarity. He asks: ‘How do I frame the problem?’, ‘How do I anchor the price?’, ‘How do they frame the issue? Do they offer me two options to choose from that are both advantageous for them?’, ‘Is the issue they bring up really important to them, or just a cheap play for a concession?’, ‘How do I reframe the deal from my point of view, the way I see the real issue?’ The Psychopomp looks behind what is obvious, using emotional intelligence to read hidden needs, desires and drives. A negotiator with psychopomp capacity will ask: ‘Is that genuinely what they want?’, ‘Is their warmth genuine, or just an instrumental tool of extraction?’, ‘Do they really like me, or do they flatter me so I reciprocate with a concession?’, ‘Are they shouting because I made them angry, or just to intimidate me?’ And the Psychopomp also works beneath, to steady you and help you stay grounded: ‘Should I stay firm and let them exhaust their energy on an angry show?’ The Mediator looks between people, at the interactions that connect them, employing social skills to build the relationship. He uses social intelligence, empathy and perspective-taking to understand how the relationships can help or hinder the negotiator and the deal. He asks: ‘They are threatening to walk away: is that genuine, or just an escalation?’, ‘They are promising repeat business for this extra concession, but do I have that in writing?’, ‘I am negotiating with two other parties: are they trying to keep me out of the loop?’, ‘Are they trying to make me feel left out, so I rise to the bait?’ And finally, the Hermaion looks beyond, to the horizon, thinking like a mathematician: if this deal doesn’t work out, what are my alternatives? What are the chances? He also looks beyond the here and now and asks: ‘What is the ideal time and the ideal place that would increase my chances of success?
Each Face carries its meaning in its name. ‘Astute’ comes from the Latin astutus, ‘craft’, and, by an old tradition, the Greek asty, the city: the worldly, hard-to-fool shrewdness that sees clearly and resists deception (Harper, n.d.-a). The Astute looks at what is before him, firstly by crafting the right frame in which the deal is discussed. He doesn’t let the other party impose the frame; he negotiates the frame itself. ‘Psychopomp’ is a title literally borne by Hermes, ‘guide of souls’. He looks behind appearances, at true motives, desires and drives. The Psychopomp also works beneath: he helps negotiators stay grounded, acknowledging to themselves the way they think and feel, their needs and expectations, because someone who knows themselves is less likely to be manipulated. The Psychopomp deals with the depth, in others and in yourself. The depth in itself is not a problem, unless, during deal-making, it hides manipulation and intimidation on the adversary’s side, and self-deception within. The opposite of kidding yourself is staying grounded: realising that most often in negotiation a show is just a power display, not actual power. It works only if it moves you, if your emotions start running high and affect your ability to make decisions. We talk about staying grounded in everyday life, but in electricity, a grounded conductor survives the surge because the surge passes through it, into the earth. The wire is left intact. By contrast, an ungrounded conductor burns. Hence, you can let your opponent exhaust their energy on an angry show, without letting anything ignite in you. ‘Mediator’ comes from the Latin medius, ‘middle’: the one who stands between and brings two sides together (Harper, n.d.-b). Unlike the Psychopomp, the Mediator does not look behind what people say; he looks between, at the social interactions and the roles people assume in negotiation. And ‘Hermaion’ is a word of Hermes’ own: a windfall, a lucky find. Yet Hermes was among the most resourceful of the gods, one who made his own luck, which is why the Hermaion asks you to weigh your options and chances, and to read how the environment, not necessarily the people, supports or undermines the deal. The Hermaion looks beyond: the capacity that most naturally puts the current deal and its odds into perspective.
So why can’t negotiators just get down to business and create a good deal that works for both parties? Why do so many reach instead for influence and manipulation tactics that target your thinking, self-worth, emotions, needs, wants, relationships, and your perception of the alternatives? The value of a deal is not completely objective, settled, and inherent. It is mediated by people: by their cognitive ability to evaluate the deal and solve problems, by their wishes, drives and ego, through relationships that enable or hinder a deal, and in a specific environment that can create auspicious conditions. But knowing how to position yourself in a specific environment is, again, a limited human capacity: it depends on understanding probabilities, patterns and chance. Simply put, the value of most things is decided by people’s subjective perceptions, by what a fair price is taken to be. If the value of most things was settled, negotiation would be redundant. That is why psychology changed the negotiation paradigm of the rational actor, demonstrating through valid and reliable experiments that people’s choices and decision-making can be influenced by their own biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). And for over forty years, academics and practising negotiators at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School have worked to operationalise the use of psychology in negotiation (Bazerman & Neale, 1992; Fisher & Shapiro, 2005).
Of course there are objective criteria, such as market knowledge, precedent, the usual ways of doing things, that keep either party from acting in a completely exploitative way. But those criteria set the boundaries; they rarely settle the deal. Within them, the price is still mediated by people’s assessments and their capacity to negotiate a good one. That is why psychology explains and works at every level of negotiation, alongside those long-standing conventions. At the end of the day, every deal ever signed is judged by people, and answers to their needs, desires, and willingness to build relationships and work in a certain environment.
The Greeks drew this line long ago. Their rational god, the one who weighed, ordered, and calculated, was Apollo. Hermes was a different intelligence altogether: cunning, persuasive, quick to read people and turn a situation. He proved it in the cradle, out-negotiating Apollo himself: a stolen herd traded for an invented lyre. He was working the psychological levers of a negotiation long before psychology had anything to say to economics. That is why he, and not the calculating Apollo, crosses from the realms of mythology into our everyday life, work, businesses, and formal environments.
Behind the storytelling, myth, and metaphor, Hermes is an archetype, capturing something stable and real from the way people have negotiated over millenia. Hermes feels atemporal. His ancient wisdom is our street smarts. There is a good reason for this. Our brain architecture and capacity have changed very little over the last few millennia. The shape of the brain settled tens of thousands of years ago, long before Hermes (Neubauer, Hublin, & Gunz, 2018). Culture and nutrition improved our cognitive skills, but those changes are environmental, not evolutionary. Evolution happens at a much slower pace (Bratsberg & Rogeberg, 2018). Besides, the capacity to judge a fair exchange and to sense when someone is exploitative is shared by people from very different cultures (Sugiyama, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2002). That is why Hermes still speaks to us. But the main question is not whether Hermes is still relevant, but whether he is highly effective in dealing with modern negotiation dilemmas. Therefore, the Hermes framework of negotiation starts from a mythological blueprint but builds on a psychological foundation, employing the bio-psycho-social model in psychology (Engel, 1977).
Hermes was never confined by the bounds of Greek myth: earth, Olympus, and the underworld; he moved freely between them. The final boundary he now crosses is time, and he reaches our negotiation table only to find it already his: he was ever the god of the marketplace and the bargain. He does not arrive as a stranger asking for a seat; he comes home and reclaims his chair. And he was never the god of the powerful alone. Hermes belonged to everyone who ever had to strike a deal: merchants and messengers, travellers and shepherds, the shrewd and the ordinary alike. That is the mission this framework carries forward. Negotiation has too long been treated as the business of select rooms: boardrooms, diplomacy, high stakes. Yet everyone negotiates, every day. Hermes served all of them once. Now he does so again.
References
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