Originally from Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation

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Negotiation scholars and teachers often talk about negotiation skills through the metaphor of tools in the toolbox. Teachers want to make sure that students have a variety of tools and we push our students to recognize the importance of each, even quoting the old cliché that “[i]f the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Arthur G. Wirth, Forward to Abraham H. Maslow, The Psychology Of Science: A Reconnaissance (1966).

This article focuses on the fact that negotiation scholarship primarily studies the hammer, the skill of assertiveness in negotiation. In fact, the majority of empirical negotiation studies take this even further—studying only the hammer and imagining only a single opportunity to hit the nail on the head.

Based on those studies, we make conclusions that if one chooses not to use the hammer at all or does not hold it as well as another, one is not a good builder. And negotiation scholars’ advice is also too often focused only on this hammer—how to swing it harder, how to position your hands, the angle of the swing, and so forth.