“Win As Much As You Can

“He cheated.” “She lied!” “I just followed the rules!” “I feel stupid, as if I was being too fair.” Comments like these are typical from students after participating in the “Win As Much As You Can” 1 (WAMAYC) exercise, a popular activity used in negotiation skills courses, and one that often elicits strong emotional reactions from students. How does culture affect the ways students play the game and the lessons they take away from it? This chapter will briefly review cultural value patterns, highlight some of the cultural assumptions embedded in Western negotiation theory, and then discuss the ways these assumptions manifest in the WAMAYC exercise. The goal is to stimulate thinking about how negotiation teachers can become more culturally competent and to provide opportunities to make negotiation courses more culturally inclusive from the very first class. Specifically, my goal is to help teachers and trainers: 1) better understand the variances among their students that may be grounded in cultural differences; 2) broaden perspectives beyond the tendency to be ethnocentric − assuming that “everyone does it just like we do;” and 3) stimulate curiosity rather than judgment when reacting to an unexpected behavior or response by a student.