Latest Huthwaite research finding
Published April 2008
Huthwaite research staff from each of the 33 countries in which we operate recently came together to share their latest research findings. Leading the way was our Slovakian representative, Loprai Filo, who has just completed a two-year project studying how skilled negotiators manage and maintain their feelings of relative power.
For many years we have known that, in their planning, successful negotiators analyse the power balance, look at ways of improving it in their favour and create strategies to manage it. But even when the other side frustrates those strategies – perhaps with new facts or arguments – the skilled practitioner still manages to feel powerful and to act accordingly. Filo wanted to understand what lay behind this apparent innate ability. Widening the research field beyond the behavioural helped to come up with a surprising finding.
"I wanted to see whether other factors – education, ethnicity, physical characteristics – could have a part to play", explains Filo, "and, because of our close ties with it, I was fortunate enough to have the help of various departments within the University of Bratislava."
Surprisingly, it was the Bratislava University School of Medicine's Nutritional Research Unit that helped him unlock the mystery by identifying diet as the missing element.
Filo continues, "The clue that set our investigations running was that many of those cultures that have a proverbial reputation for effective negotiation – for example, Southern European, North African, Middle Eastern and Japanese – share many dietary characteristics. We compared the nutritional intake of a group of skilled negotiators with that of a group of average practitioners and eventually isolated Omega 3 fatty acids as the key variable."
Omega 3 fatty acids are prevalent in fish based diets and, guided by Filo's comparative data, the nutritional researchers tracked their effects to specific locations of the brain – particularly the Frontal Lobe. This location is long associated with reasoning and perception and the team believe that it houses an individual's feeling of self-esteem, in other words, how influential or powerful they feel. Omega 3 appears actively to stimulate this perception.
This is a startling finding, but one that was only waiting to be uncovered. As the Science & Nature section of the BBC's website authoritatively comments, "Omega 3 fatty acids are known to help prevent heart disease and they can improve the condition of some patients with depression and bi-polar disorder. But their effects on brainpower have not been investigated in the same depth." Well, not until now, we can say!
If you want the detail of Loprai Filo's research study, then click on this link. It will however only be available today, April 1st.
And why not read Managing Power in Negotiation if you'd like to know more about how skilled negotiators manage their power perceptions - which will be available indefinitely.
