Sales · The supplier who has the buyer cost the discount, Faced with a 15% discount demand, the head of an industrial SME stops arguing over their costs and turns the question round: "If you were steering my margin and had, at this price, to pay my suppliers and my teams, what would you set that discount at?" The buyer, forced to reason from the seller's constraint, finds themselves proposing 5%. This case illustrates the central finding of Galinsky's work: perspective-taking shifts the dial towards a realistic agreement, not through pressure but because the buyer produces their own concession. The seller never said "no": they had the other party say "reasonable".
Political · Camp David 1978: anticipating the other side's domestic constraints, During the Camp David Accords, the American mediation invited each party to consider the other's internal constraints, what Begin had to sell to the Knesset, what Sadat had to justify to the Arab world. Fisher and Ury, in Getting to Yes, describe precisely this logic: moving from incompatible positions (the line of the border in the Sinai) to underlying interests (Israeli security, Egyptian sovereignty). By having each side recognise the other's domestic imperatives as a shared parameter, a formula was made possible, demilitarisation rather than territorial partition, that covered both home fronts. This is role reversal carried to the diplomatic scale.
Diplomatic · Rapoport's rule: state the opposing position before refuting it, The conflict theorist Anatol Rapoport formalised, in Fights, Games, and Debates (1960), a rule inherited from Carl Rogers: begin your refutation only once you can restate the other's position to their full satisfaction. Taken up by Daniel Dennett under the name "Rapoport's rules", it has informed the practice of diplomatic dialogue and constructive debate: compelling each party to state the opposing argument better than its proponent disarms hostility and signals that "the other has been heard and understood". This is the intellectual matrix of role reversal: one persuades only after proving that one has genuinely taken the other's place.
Judicial · The mediation that has the opposing party draft the agreement, In a classic civil mediation between two companies in commercial dispute, the mediator is stuck on symmetrical, hostile positions. They resort to reversal: they ask each lawyer to draft the clause the other party could reasonably accept, placing themselves in the other's interests. The exercise, documented as a mediation practice (role reversal), reveals that both parties in fact feared the same thing, an unfavourable precedent, and not the sum at stake. By forcing them to state the other's needs, the mediator turns a clash of positions into a negotiation of interests, and unlocks a settlement protocol. A scenario representative of mediation practice, with no attribution to a named case.
Corporate · The HR director who has the unions arbitrate the budget, In a tense annual mandatory pay negotiation, management faces a demand for an across-the-board rise that the budget cannot fund. Rather than a flat refusal, the HR director opens up the parameters: "If you had this budget and had to arbitrate between an across-the-board rise, targeted bonuses and preserving headcount, how would you allocate it?" Confronted with the real trade-off, the employee representatives themselves redirect the demand towards a mix of a floor rise plus a bonus. The technique works here because management accepts transparency over the budget, without which the reversal would be perceived as manipulative. A scenario representative of labour relations.
Everyday life · The parent who has the teenager set the curfew, A recurring conflict over the Saturday-night curfew turns into a test of authority. The parent gives up imposing and reverses: "Imagine you were responsible for someone you love, that you couldn't sleep until they were home, and that you had to set a time. Which would you choose?" The teenager, invited to experience the burden of responsibility rather than endure a rule, proposes a time often more reasonable than feared. The technique fosters responsibility without humiliating and defuses the head-on clash, provided one does not slip into the preachy tone that would cause it to fail.
