INTELLIGENCE
ORI AND ROM BRAFMAN


For the Mideast, process matters as much as solutions.


Growing up in Israel, we heard one piece of news almost as predictably as the arrival of Hanukkah. Amid fanfare and expectations, a United States president would announce plans to broker a meaningful Mideast peace. But with the exception of Jimmy Carter’s Egypt-Israel accords, these ambitious attempts have fallen short. As recent violent eruptions in Gaza demonstrate, despite a variety of innovative solutions, the Israelis and Palestinians are just as entangled in conflict as they have ever been.

As President Obama begins his own efforts, placing calls to Mideast leaders on his first day in office, we fear he may follow in his predecessors’footsteps. The biggest challenge he faces isn’t finding a reasonable solution? there have been plenty of those. It’s overcoming human irrationality.

From a purely rational perspective, the Mideast problem has at least one obvious solution: Israel agrees to give the Palestinians autonomy over Gaza and the West Bank and the Palestinians cease their aggression against the Jewish state. Negotiators and presidents alike must have felt bewildered at the rejection of such perfectly reasonable solutions. Two findings in the realm of behavioral economics help explain the problem.

In one study, researchers gave subjects $10 to split with another, unknown, participant in the next room. They could split the money any way they wanted ($5 and $5, $7 and $3, etc.). The catch was that the other subject could decide whether to accept the split. If the “decider”accepted the split, each subject got to keep the money. But if the decider declined, both parties left empty handed. There was only one round to the game, the participants’identities would always be kept confidential, and no negotiation was allowed.

Most people presented their counterparts with a 50/50 split, which was always accepted. But when a splitter got greedy and kept a larger portion of the money, the decider almost always rejected the offer and walked away empty handed. From a rational perspective, of course, it made sense to accept any monetary offer, however uneven, because some money is better than none. But the receivers could not help feeling that a small cut was just not fair. Fairness overrules economic sense.

In the Mideast conflict, negotiators should focus on perceptions of fairness, and specifically on framing any proposal as a 50-50 split.

The second force in play is process. Researchers have found that employees who are up for a raise care as much about the evaluation process and whether they felt heard as about the amount of the raise.

While it would certainly be naive to imagine that Mideast peace could be achieved just by giving each side a voice, as long as either side feels the process is unfair, no solution, however reasonable, will be accepted. Perhaps the answer, counterintuitive as it sounds, is to stop looking for a solution and focus on the process.

We hope that President Obama tackles the issues of fairness and process underlying any peace negotiation. As long as these core issues of human behavior are not addressed, any compromise, even a reasonable one, will fail.

Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman are co-authors of“Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.”Ori is an international speaker on management; Rom is a psychologist who lectures on interpersonal dynamics. Send comments to brafmans@nytimes.com.