Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely disproportionately on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions. Once an anchor is set, subsequent judgments are made by adjusting from that initial number — and adjustments are typically insufficient, leaving final estimates closer to the anchor than the evidence warrants. Documented across pricing, salary negotiations, legal sentencing, and virtually every domain where numerical estimates are required.
BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) is the most favourable outcome a party can achieve if negotiations fail and no deal is reached. Developed by Roger Fisher and William Ury in *Getting to Yes* (1981), it is the single most important concept in negotiation theory — determining your walk-away point, your negotiating power, and whether any proposed agreement is worth accepting.
A structured preparation framework for high-stakes negotiations using BATNA, Steel Manning, and Anchoring Bias awareness. Covers salary negotiations, deal negotiations, partnership terms, and conflict resolution conversations. Preparation is where most negotiations are won or lost — this framework shows you how to do it properly.
Power Dynamics describes the patterns of relative influence, authority, and dependence between individuals and groups in social contexts. Understanding who has what leverage, how power flows, what creates and erodes it, and how it is exercised and resisted is essential for navigating organisations, negotiations, relationships, and political environments effectively.
Precommitment is a decision-making mental model in which you deliberately restrict your future choices or make them more costly in order to protect your long-term goals from your short-term impulses. By binding your future self to a decision made when your judgment is clearest, you outsmart predictable self-sabotage. Originally studied by economist Thomas Schelling, it has broad applications in personal habits, addiction recovery, financial planning, and strategic negotiation.
Reciprocity is the deeply embedded social norm that compels people to return favours, gifts, concessions, and other positive actions. One of Robert Cialdini's six core principles of influence, reciprocity is the basis of gift-giving rituals, the effectiveness of free samples, the social dynamics of negotiation, and the foundation of cooperative social structures. It operates across cultures, appears early in child development, and functions even when the initial gift was uninvited.
Zero-sum framing assumes one party's gain must come at another's expense — the pie is fixed. Non-zero-sum framing recognises that interactions can create value for all parties simultaneously — the pie can grow. Most real negotiations, business deals, and relationships are non-zero-sum, but people systematically default to zero-sum thinking, leaving significant value uncreated through zero-sum defensiveness in inherently cooperative situations.