Your Gut Is Lying to You: Why Negotiators Are Falling Behind

I spent this past weekend reading through Harvard’s latest article on cognitive bias in negotiations, called “Essential Negotiation Skills: Limiting Cognitive Bias in Negotiation” by Max Bazerman and Deepak Malhotra.¹ It’s one of those articles that makes you uncomfortable because it holds up a mirror to your own decision-making process and shows you exactly how irrational you’ve been.

The timing was perfect, as this article reflected a lot to me due to the insights gathered by interviewing senior executives across Europe for my doctoral thesis on virtual negotiations, and their experiences kept echoing the same themes Harvard described in their article. With a coffee I sat down with both pieces of research, looking for the connections. What I found compelling is that both researches completely reframe how trust and rationality work in modern negotiations.

Here’s what I learned…

We’d all like to think, and believe, we are rational negotiators, meaning: cool, collected, making smart decisions based on facts and logic. However, we’re not.. (at least, not to the full extent).

Most of us trust our gut way more than we should. And in complex negotiations, that intuition can quietly sabotage even the best deals.

Harvard researchers have identified what’s actually happening inside your head when you negotiate. They call it System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 is your intuition: fast, automatic, emotional. It’s the voice that says “this feels right” or “I don’t trust this person” without giving you a reason why. System 2 is deliberate reasoning: slow, conscious, logical. It’s the part that actually thinks through scenarios, weighs options, and considers consequences.

When negotiations get complex, and they usually do, we naturally default to System 1 thinking. Those shortcuts feel efficient, right but ultimately often wrong.

Harvard’s research identified four critical strategies to fight this: create a list of negotiations that require extra diligence, resist time pressure tactics, break negotiations into multiple sessions to give your brain time to process, and adopt an outsider lens to evaluate objectively. These aren’t revolutionary tactics. Yes, they’re boring, systematic but work! But here’s where it gets interesting. In my doctoral thesis I interviewed 16 senior negotiation experts/ executives across Europe about large complex negotiations. What we unpacked confirms everything Harvard suspected and reveals something Harvard didn’t predict.

Traditional negotiation relied heavily on System 1 cues, such as body language: E.g., the spontaneous conversation over coffee or the “feeling” you got about someone across the table. Virtual negotiations, over tools such as Zoom evaporated all of that. One of the participants nailed it with the following statement:

“Trust used to be built over coffee. Now it’s built through consistency.“

Trust hasn’t disappeared, it has fundamentally changed. It moved from affective trust, which is emotional and gut-based, to cognitive trust, which is competence-based and rational. The shift happened because System 1 cues simply don’t exist in virtual formats to that extend anymore. You can’t read body language on a Zoom call the way you can in-person. You can’t have those spontaneous hallway conversations that used to build rapport. Virtual meetings last 60-90 minutes instead of multi-day in-person sessions. There’s no room for improvisation anymore, at least, if you do not intend to do it and plan it…

Successful virtual negotiators abandoned intuitive approaches entirely. They had to. Now they conduct extensive pre-alignment sessions, data-driven scenario planning, and AI-assisted research. Every meeting is structured, documented, analyzed. 14 out of the 16 executives in my research now use AI for summarization, scenario analysis, and pattern recognition.² As one participant explained:

*“AI does the legwork; we do the sense-making.” *

This is exactly what Harvard recommended, using systematic tools to reduce cognitive load while maintaining human oversight.

Virtual negotiations didn’t make us better negotiators by choice. They forced us to become better negotiators by eliminating all the System 1 shortcuts we used to rely on. However, the challenge is to adopt and take your time to reflect on the situation you are in.

As a result of my research, I created the Business Negotiation Framework, seven elements that define modern complex negotiations. Virtual communication is now the norm, requiring explicit and structured interactions with no room for ambiguity. Hybrid interaction for trust-building means using strategic in-person touchpoints where they actually matter. Increased deal volumes require formal processes because you can’t wing it anymore. Trust-building happens via cognitive signals where you demonstrate competence, not charisma. Strategic, data-driven preparation is mandatory System 2 thinking with no exceptions. AI acts as an enabler, supporting systematic analysis without replacing judgment. And human factors like empathy, cultural awareness, and generational differences still matter.

In conclusion, we were making too many irrational decisions based on System 1 thinking. We were always trusting our gut too much. Challenge it… We were always vulnerable to time pressure, emotional manipulation, and cognitive shortcuts. In-person negotiations just gave us enough extra information, such as body language, side conversations, social cues, to occasionally overcome our own irrationality.

Virtual formats took all of that away and deals took longer, misunderstandings multiplied, etc. The negotiators who adapted fastest weren’t the most charismatic, they were also not the best at reading people. But, they were the ones who built systematic preparation routines, who forced themselves into System 2 thinking, who replaced intuition with data, consistency, and transparency.

If you’re still negotiating based only on gut instinct, you’re negotiating with one hand tied behind your back. Build preparation routines that force systematic analysis. Document everything. Use AI tools for pattern recognition and scenario planning, but keep human judgment in the decision-making process. Trust now depends on demonstrating competence through consistency, transparency, and data-backed arguments, not charisma or body language, or a “feeling” you give someone.

Ultimately, the negotiators who win now are the ones who’ve stopped trusting their gut and started trusting their data.

Thanks again, Tim H.

@misc{herglotz2026dn02,
  author       = {Herglotz, Tim},
  title        = {{Your Gut Is Lying to You: Why Negotiators Are Falling Behind}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {2},
  number       = {2},
  howpublished = {Tim Herglotz, entry № 02},
  url          = {https://timherglotz.com/your-gut-is-lying-to-you-why-negotiators-are-falling-behind/}
}