Surprisingly though, if Nicholas Epley is to be believed, we tend to be very bad at doing so even though we think we are very good at it. In his book “Mindwise: How we understand what others think, believe, feel and want”, Epley cites an experiment that shows that ”More time together did not make…couples any more accurate… it just gave them the illusion that they were”. Worse still, he argues that if one has a mistaken belief about someone else’s perspective, then “carefully considering that…perspective will only magnify the mistake’s consequence” which is logical if instinctively difficult to accept. Whatever the answer though instead of presuming what the other side may think or want, it can often be helpful to stop wondering and simply ask them, particularly in a mediation when there is little downside to asking such a potentially awkward question.

In his Financial Times article ‘How (not) to argue’ http://goo.gl/xH2lxh John McDermott explains why even though an argument may be well evidenced, we may still reject it. One reason is that our response is likely to depend on whether or not the new factual information supports what we believe. If it does, we typically ask “Can I believe this?” but if it challenges it, we instead tend to ask “Must I believe this?” This echoes Daniel Kahneman’s belief that “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second” and suggests that if you want to erode someone’s intransigence, trying to understand who you are arguing with is likely to be more productive than concentrating on the subject of the argument.

In a couple of weeks Charlotte Clayson of Trowers & Hamlins is writing a specialist blog about mediation and public bodies. Please let me know if you would like me to send you or a colleague this.