Not to sound like a clickbait article but… Here’s the one secret to negotiating your competitors don’t want you to know about. If you want to get better at negotiating, talk less. No, really. A new study from MIT has found awkward silence is great for negotiating.
The tactic is actually based on an interrogation method called “The Reid Technique.” It was developed back in the ‘50s and its namesake purposefully inserted sustained periods of silence to try and extract information. The researchers from MIT found it still works today. After several experiments, they concluded that staying silent for more than three seconds “reliably led to breakthroughs” in negotiations.
If you started adopting this technique, you would be in some pretty great company. A guy you might have heard of named Steve Jobs from that little mom-and-pop operation Apple loved the awkward silence approach. He was famous for taking 20 seconds to respond to a criticism which gave him time to think of a good answer, and as the MIT research also showed, made the person speaking to him believe he was truly listening.