Imagine Carsten de Dreu, renowned professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, sitting in his office with one of our advisors Rima and chatting away about how to negotiate successfully. But not only Rima gets to enjoy this close-up and in-depth talk – our delegates are just sitting right next to them, virtually, behind their laptops and eagerly asking questions. Another great example of how eMUN-fellows.net takes advantage of the new technologies and brings Europe and knowledge together to shape future global leaders!

The virtual question session started with an introduction round, where all the delegates showed their, frankly most of time hidden, shy side of them not wanting to go first – already the first chance for Carsten de Dreu to step in and evaluate this situation from the psychological point of view and assessing this as the ‘going first problem’. After the initial jolt the session merged into an eager flow of questions and replies by Carsten de Dreu offering his exciting insights into negotiation from his academical perspective.

As you might have already seen in our previous posts, we had the honor of the Bonn Negotiators joining us during our second offline meeting and introducing to us the Harvard Model of negotiation. A strong believer in this model himself, Carsten de Dreu offered additional valuable information on this. Let’s take the ‘orange case’ as an example: You and your friend have one orange to share – what to do? After short negotiation you find that sharing it half-half seems to be the most fitting and fair solution. Holding your half of the orange in your hand, you use it for getting fresh orange juice out of it; your friend though only uses the skin for cooking and throws the fruit flesh and possible juice away. Do you see the striking point? You both had the same preference of wanting the orange but for different reasons! Deriving the key point of this for negotiating – get to know your partners reasons by critically asking why.

"Wir freuen uns, dass die UN Stadt Bonn als Gastgeber für eine so junge und innovative Initiative wie eMUN-fellows.net dienen konnte und wünschen den Delegierten viel Erfolg für die WorldMUN Konferenz im März, und natürlich alles Gute für ihre individuelle und persönliche Entwicklung!"

Jürgen Nimptsch, Oberbürgermeister der Bundesstadt Bonn