23/6/2022 Its a Shocker !!Put your hand on the table, touch the cables, I’ll turn the power on and you know you’re gonna get a shock but you’ll feel better for the certainty. Researchers love electrocuting their subjects, There have been so many psychological experiments which literally involve shocking the participants. Think of Milgrim’s famous obedience experiment where someone in a white coat prompts the subject into ‘killing’ another subject by continually turning up the electricity every time they give a wrong answer. It seems when you want to know more about the human mind, researchers use electricity as a prop. More recent research has shown we hate uncertainty, so much so that we’re happier if we know we'll be electrocuted than have any uncertainty about it. Participants were given different percentages of whether or not they’d get an electric shock, from 0 to 100%. Then researchers tested their stress levels.
People with the least stress were those given 0 or 100% chance of getting an electric shock. The greatest level of stress was when the chance of a shock was 50%. Think about how we usually classify chances of success in litigation. It’s all about percentages of success. No one ever 0% or 100%. And it’s very often that 50% is wheeled out as part of a group of a band of possibilities. That’s why, especially in mediation, we often talk to parties about the advantages of ‘buying’ certainty. So they may not get everything they want from the settlement, they might even come away with a lot less than they anticipated, sometimes the settlement can be painful to bear. But it takes away the stress of litigation, the uncertainty of it all. So they know what the situation is and they can stop worrying about it, start moving on. When the parties come to mediation they start a process that can help them to settle the matter once and for all. They are able to ‘own’ the settlement and look to the future. That’s one of the great joys about mediation. No more worrying about whether you’re going to get a shock. Comments are closed.
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AuthorRichard Marshall is an Accredited Civil and Commercial Mediator with over 25 years experience as a Litigation Solicitor, as well as being a qualified Solicitor-Advocate. He is the founder of Striving to Settle, through which he works as a mediator and provides negotiation training. www.strivingtosettle.co.uk Archives
August 2022
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