How to Get to “Yes” With Someone Who Won’t Listen to You

You and the person you care most about in the world may come to an impasse over a small but seemingly insurmountable dispute. It’s as simple as this. You want to get a cat, and your partner wants to get a dog. There isn’t enough income to get both pets, so the arguments and campaigning are going on at full pace, with the very essence of your relationship starting to come under fire.

When two parties, romantic or not, are embroiled in such a conflict, what can be done to move to a resolution? According to new negotiation research, the answer may be much simpler than anyone realizes.

How Trust Can Make All the Difference

According to a new study by Leuphana University Lüneburg’s Caroline Heydenbluth and colleagues (2026), most negotiations between quarreling parties take place in a series of steps. However, previous research on conflict resolution tends to look only at one-shot negotiations. When scarce resources must be shared in the real world, this often occurs in a series of steps rather than in an all-or-none fashion. Unions and bosses rarely sit down at the table for a single attempt at hammering out a new agreement. Negotiations can go on for days, weeks, or months. Just as with the dog vs. cat dispute you’re having, there can be multiple tentative agreements reached that quickly break down for seemingly no reason at all. Someone just changes their mind, and the deal is off.

In successive negotiations in the real world, people often start out with their own selfish interests serving as their primary motivation. Greed can overtake both parties as both make outrageous demands, and from then on, it becomes increasingly difficult to back off and reach fair terms.

To overcome this downward spiral, Heydenbluth et al. note that trust is the most important facilitator of amicable resolutions. Trust, they note further, has three components: “reciprocity, positive expectations about the counterpart’s cooperativeness, and willingness to be vulnerable.” People who trust each other are unlikely to initiate power grabs because they won’t fear being exploited. Trust also builds honesty. Why would you lie to someone who you believe is acting in good faith? You and your partner want to keep your relationship strong, and therefore won’t let this dispute tear that bond asunder.

Getting to “Yes,” Step by Step

With their main interest in the kind of sequential negotiations that take place when people are proceeding in steps to reach an agreement, the Dutch authors manipulated levels of trust, making its relevance increasingly greater across each one. Their basic paradigm was the “common resource dilemma,” also known as the “social trap,” in which pairs of negotiators have to figure out a way to divide a set of limited resources. The resources, in these experiments, were the rights to harvest nine fruit types whose values were known only to each participant, not their partner. Negotiations took place over a sequence of steps, either with or without the opportunity for partners to revise their claims. The question was whether manipulating levels of trust would change decisions the participants would make over how to divide up the limited resources and whether, furthermore, negotiators would change their offers not only of who gets what, but who gets what when.

Participants learned to consider the three elements of trust. In the high-level conditions, this information emphasized the value of building mutual trust, and in the low-level conditions, participants were warned to be wary of being overly trusting.

Contrary to predictions, trust had no effect on resource allocation once the initial round of negotiations took place. It was possible to increase somewhat the levels of trust across negotiating sequences, but this still didn’t overcome the inefficient decisions participants made at step one of the process.

As the authors concluded, “Dyads seemed to have engaged in immediate actions, even if such actions were unsystematic, disregarded resources’ dynamic value, and harmed negotiation efficiency and outcomes.” Once the process is set in motion, people struggling over limited resources spiral downward, destroying, say the authors, any opportunities to make mutually beneficial decisions.

Getting to That "Yes," and Fast

If indeed sequential negotiations are fated to fall apart once each side stakes out its claim, the best way to promote agreement is to prevent the greedy grabs from happening in the first place. If this isn’t possible, then Heydenbluth et al. provide another possible approach. One of the major blocks to cooperative and sustainable solutions, they propose, is lack of communication as negotiations unfold. The authors call this the remedy for this problem “informational cooperation.”

Returning to that dog-cat dispute, here’s how this study’s findings could be put to use. Before even launching into what will probably be a contentious discussion, explore why each of you has your particular preference and why. Maybe you want to relive old times with a beloved cat you had in childhood. Perhaps your partner visited a friend with a puppy and wants one for himself. This discussion could help each of you communicate your needs more openly and gain greater empathy for the other person's position.

Thinking sequentially could allow you, furthermore, to propose a solution that spins the process out over a few years. Right now, you can’t afford both animals, but could you set up a condition in which a mutually satisfying resolution can be arranged?

The informational cooperation piece of the negotiation puzzle that the authors suggest as a solution is another approach. Rather than turn your frustration and annoyance inward, communicate with your partner about how you’re feeling and encourage your partner to do the same. Rather than retreat to your own separate corners, full of anger and frustration, jump-start the communication process by expressing (non-defensively) your own feelings.

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To sum up, disagreements about limited resources don’t have to devolve into greed and recrimination. Recognize the challenges that face any negotiation and turn those challenges into effective and fulfilling strategies.