Practice with Pawn Stars
If you want to practice your skills at understanding human behavior, there is no better place to start than watching people negotiate.
If you are good at understanding others, in negotiations you will be able to call people out as honest when they tell you this is their final offer. Or you will be able to know when someone is bluffing and there is still room for negotiation. And there is no better TV show for this than Pawn Stars on the History Channel (U.S.)
I love watching negotiations and calling out the bluffs or seeing when someone else misses the cues and tries to continue when its truly over. It’s heaps of fun and the best part? You get immediate feedback on if you saw it correctly or not. If not, maybe watch it again and see if you can identify what you’ve missed.
In the video above, they don’t do much negotiating, but you can clearly identify anger in the guy who wants to sell his statue. Notice how he glares over his glasses? It’s a look that is very telling that he is not pleased.
How often are you right? It will give you a measure of how good you are at reading people!
I love doing this for fun.
Interesting – I never thought of Pawn Stars in that way 🙂 I’ve never owned a TV and never had cable TV, so I don’t have the History Channel on my cable TV – For those like me who are interested, I found it online at:
http://www.history.com/shows/pawn-stars
Good blog post, I’m interested to read what others see in the gentlemen.
There are psychological reasons why people believe their own stuff is worth more than it objectively can command. We get to see a tiny bit of that here 🙂
Yes, I’m interested in other people’s analysis as well. I’m awful at it, so I would probably see something, and respond with the opposite of what I should. Very hard to stay focused on the actually clues and queues, and not recede into my mind with emotional responses from the past instead of ‘obvious’ queues from the present. Makes me a poor poker player.
Which begs a question … I wonder if Eyes ever has used her skill to play poker 🙂
They had a great episode on ‘Lie to Me’ where a billionaire brought the lie expert into a negotiations session with her, and he would secretly signal to her whether or not the guy was really stuck on his price or not. She got an extra few million out of the deal. He got his little $10k commission 🙁
Using the past isn’t bad as long as you use it to pick up on meaningful patterns (“meaningful” is key; humans are such good pattern-spotters that we tend to see them even when they’re not there). For example, if you have the unfortunate tendency to get in bar fights that you don’t mean to start, you might notice that just before you get punched the other guy always gets a tight, flared nostril kind of look on his face. Then the next time you’re at a bar, someone bumps into you, and it’s their fault but you see that look on their face, you can say to yourself, “oh, I’ve seen that look, and it makes me feel nervous” and decide to suck it up and apologize to diffuse the situation. Eureka! This time you don’t get punched!
Like that. 😉
I watch judge Judy for the same reason. She makes snap decisions on every case about who she thinks is lying. I often think “would Eyes agree with her” .
I’m also a fan of judge judy. 🙂
Look in this video of how expertly the dad defuses the situation.