The Art of Saying Less: The Power of Silence in Negotiation

In 1944, a writer going through a rough patch ran into two men, by chance, at New York’s famous 21 Club, both capable of deciding the rest of his Hollywood career. He answered one of them with exactly two words and walked away with a contract.

Robert Greene includes the episode in The 48 Laws of Power (1998), alongside Law 4: “Always say less than necessary.” His thesis is that the more someone talks to make an impression, the more common they seem and the less control they project, and that powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.

It’s an appealing thesis, and partly true. Negotiation research, however, has found that silence works for a rather different reason than the one Greene proposes.

Two words worth $15,000

The man in the story is Michael Arlen, a British novelist and screenwriter of Armenian origin, famous in the 1920s for The Green Hat. He’s often confused with the composer Harold Arlen, who wrote “Over the Rainbow” and was at the height of his career in 1944. According to the anecdote, Michael Arlen went to New York “to drown his sorrows,” and in the lobby of the 21 Club he ran into producer Sam Goldwyn, who gave him the rather impractical advice to buy racehorses.

At the bar he bumped into Louis B. Mayer, an old acquaintance, who asked about his plans. “I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn…,” Arlen began. Mayer cut in: “How much did he offer you?”

The conversation with Goldwyn hadn’t been about money, so Arlen answered evasively: “Not enough.” Mayer replied: “Would you take fifteen thousand for thirty weeks?” This time Arlen didn’t hesitate: “Yes.”

Greene doesn’t comment on the anecdote: he places it in the margin of the chapter, taken from Clifton Fadiman’s The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (1985). His reading fits the law, but it also fits something negotiation psychology knows well: Arlen gave no figure, so Mayer set the first number, convinced on top of that that a competitor was ready to pay. The power of that first number is the subject of our article on how to negotiate your salary.

The king who only said “I shall see”

Greene’s central example is Louis XIV of France, famous for his economy of words. His ministers and courtiers would spend days preparing how to raise a matter with him: what time of day to choose, which part of Versailles to approach him in, what expression to wear.

When they finally laid out the matter, Louis XIV listened in silence, with an enigmatic look, and answered: “I shall see.” Then he walked away, and nobody heard another word about it until, weeks later, the decision was announced. Greene adds a useful detail: as a young man, the king was known for talking a great deal and enjoying his own eloquence. His reticence was an acquired mask.

For Greene, the practical effect is that brief answers make the other side nervous, so they fill the void by talking too much and reveal information about their interests and weak points. He sums it up this way:

They will leave a meeting with you feeling as if they had been robbed, and they will go home and ponder your every word.

That outsized attention to the little that gets said is, in his analysis, a direct source of power.

Warhol: “I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up”

Greene extends the principle beyond kings and professional negotiators. He cites the artist Andy Warhol, who as a young man reached a similar conclusion: trying to convince someone by talking usually backfired, and people ended up resisting out of sheer stubbornness. According to Greene, Warhol once told a friend:

I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up.

In his later interviews he answered with vague, ambiguous phrases that left the interviewer hunting for a hidden meaning, and he let others do the interpreting of his work.

The flip side: when talking too much destroys a legend

Greene’s counterexample is Coriolanus, a military hero of early fifth-century BC Rome whom we know from Livy and Plutarch, more legend than biography (and later a Shakespeare tragedy). Since he spent his life on campaign, few Romans knew him personally, and his name inspired admiration.

When he ran for consul, his first appearance moved the public. But on election day he arrived escorted by the patricians, spoke arrogantly and took victory for granted, and the people voted against him. Later he opposed handing out free grain to the population and called for abolishing the tribunes of the plebs. Summoned to apologize, he insulted the crowd again. He was sentenced to death, the sentence was commuted to banishment, and Rome, according to the account, celebrated as if it had defeated a foreign enemy.

Greene sums it up with an idea that works as a warning: the more Coriolanus talked, the less powerful he seemed, because someone who can’t control their words gives the impression of not controlling themselves. It’s best read for what it is: a moral parable about a largely legendary figure, not a documented case.

What research measures: silence creates value

In 2022, Jared Curhan of MIT and his team published four studies on silence in negotiation in the Journal of Applied Psychology. They called pauses of three seconds or more “extended silence.”

What they found doesn’t quite fit Greene:

• In recorded negotiations, extended silences were associated with agreements that created more value for both sides.
• When one or both negotiators were asked to take long pauses, the value created increased.
• The mechanism didn’t seem to be intimidation. The pauses were linked to a more deliberative mindset and to less “fixed-pie” perception, the belief that whatever one side gains the other loses.
• They didn’t find that the silent party took a bigger share of the deal or that the other side ended up less satisfied.
• There was a status nuance: when status differences were visible, silence from the higher-status party helped create value; silence from the lower-status party didn’t.

Our reading: Greene is right that keeping quiet helps, but less because it disarms the other person than because it forces you to think before answering. The silence that works looks more like active listening than like a pressure tactic.

Where strategy ends and manipulation begins

Saying less than necessary isn’t the same as hiding relevant information or going back on your word. Properly understood, it means not giving away what you think before the other side has also put its cards on the table, and giving yourself time to think.

Greene’s book is something else: a power manual that presents manipulation as the norm, built on anecdotes chosen to confirm each law. It’s useful for recognizing tactics, not as proof that they work or as a model of conduct. We look at the line with deception in bluffing.

If you want to find out how much your own style resembles a competitive negotiator or a more collaborative profile, our negotiation style quiz is a good place to start.

Sources

• Curhan, J. R., Overbeck, J. R., Cho, Y., Zhang, T. and Yang, Y. (2022). Silence is golden: Extended silence, deliberative mindset, and value creation in negotiation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(1), 78-94. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000877
• Fadiman, C. (Ed.) (1985). The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes. Little, Brown. (Cited by Greene.)
• Greene, R. (1998). The 48 Laws of Power. Viking Penguin.