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Ask for more than expected
Asking is one of the most overlooked success strategies there is, and some people actively avoid it. Nobody can predict another person's answer. You may have clues, but the number or favor you settle on beforehand is an assumption, and challenging that assumption is one of the most useful parts of making an ask.
At a Bay Area charity auction, a one-night catered glamping trip at an exclusive cove was expected to sell for far less than it did. Bidding ran right past that estimate, all the way to $55,000, and two hands were still in the air. The trip sold twice, for $110,000 that night.
A perfectly crafted ask can still come back with no yes at all. Asking for more works as one tool in a kit, and used again and again it brings in more over time.
Why does the first number shape the whole outcome?
Psychologists call this anchoring. In a 1974 experiment published in Science, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman spun a rigged wheel that landed on either 10 or 65, then asked people to estimate the share of African countries in the United Nations. The median guess was 25 after the wheel showed 10 and 45 after it showed 65. A number with no connection to the question still pulled the answers toward itself.
Why do bids at charity auctions run so high?
Two forces push bidders past what an item is worth. Researchers Shirley Ku, Deepak Malhotra, and J. Keith Murnighan studied live and online auctions and described a pattern they called competitive arousal, where rivalry and time pressure drive people to overbid. At a charity event, the money also goes to a cause, so a high price feels less like a loss. Winning the item in front of a room adds a public payoff on top of that.
Why do so many people never ask at all?
Economist Linda Babcock and writer Sara Laschever described one version of this in their 2003 book Women Don't Ask. It drew on Babcock's study of graduating master's students at Carnegie Mellon University, where 7 percent of the women negotiated their first salary offer, compared with 57 percent of the men. The book argued that many people simply don't see a situation as one that can be negotiated. The gap showed up before any discussion of what the offers contained.
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