Many books on negotiation aimed at a popular audience, even those clearly aimed at an audience that wants to be sophisticated, tend to combine a repackaged variant of Getting To Yes with a negotiation‐related repackaging of Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal works on cognitive psychology. Those that do not repackage GTY often seek to discredit GTY’s precepts (or Harvard’s negotiation teaching) by offering simplistic misinterpretations of the GTY maxims and then, debunking the simplistic strawmen. The good news: David Sally’s One Step Ahead refreshingly does not repackage GTY and indeed tries to counter some of its basic maxims with criticisms that are legitimate and not overly simplistic. Instead, Sally takes a different approach and introduces some thought‐provoking analogies for negotiation. He does draw on the typical, but valuable, notions we have learned from cognitive psychology.

The author recognizes that standard game‐theoretic models of negotiation tend to assume infinite cognitive capacities. You know information about me. I know you know it. You know that I know that you know it and so on. The hyper‐rational negotiators posited by game theorists are assumed to be able to carry out this thinking forever, which allows them to reach an equilibrium outcome. The evidence of people’s cognitive limitations, well documented by Kahneman and Tversky and waves of behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists, suggests that people do not conform to the assumptions of game theorists and that basic game‐theoretic models do not typically provide good predictions of many one‐shot negotiated outcomes. As an advisor on negotiations, I have observed that the majority of clients are so focused on what they will propose to their counterpart(s) that the question, “How will they respond when you say or do that?” is often taken as a sign of sagacity. A minority will think on their own to how their counterparts will respond and adjust their initial move to preempt the response or plan their response to the counterpart’s move.

Instead of tapping game theory as the animating metaphor for negotiation, Sally draws on the brilliant sociologist Erving Goffman, who observed that the “assumption that one’s opponent is exactly as smart as oneself is not a wise one in daily affairs. The subject must put a stop to the cycle of moves and countermoves at the point he thinks will be exactly one stop ahead of the furthest step” that one’s counterpart will take, “regardless of how much more devious” one could be (23). Sally talks about negotiators as Level Zero, One, Two, Three, and so on. As a fundamental step, Sally argues, one should assess the level of sophistication of one’s counterpart and then choose the strategy that optimizes against that level of sophistication. As an overarching framework, this focuses the negotiator on assessing her counterpart’s sophistication level and then seeking to be one level more sophisticated than the counterpart in various ways.

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