Most adults, for better or worse, are terrible negotiators.

This is for many reasons, but the two primary ones are, one, adults don’t know how to ask clearly, concisely, and consistently for what they want from other people. And two, adults aren’t honest enough and vulnerable enough with themselves to know what they really want in the first place.

Case in point: Three-year-old children are really good at negotiating with adults and other children. They know what they want, and they ask for–or demand–that which they want clearly, concisely, and consistently from other people. They are also radically transparent, vulnerable, and honest with themselves about what they want. Adults tend to view how a three-year-old expresses their needs and desires as immature, selfish, and naive, but adults, for all of their social sophistication in masking their needs and desires from other adults out of fear of being taken advantage of, aren’t any less immature, selfish, and naive.

When adults know what they want and dare to express those needs and desires in a way that other adults can hear and respond to, they become better negotiators. They also become less fearful of outcomes and consequences. Both of getting what they want and of not getting what they want.

The social sophistication adults demand of others in a negotiation is really, at the bottom, just a deep desire for those other adults to be as confused and misdirected as they are. Because the kind of direct clarity that successful negotiation requires scares adults with its power to change status, change social games, and change culture. Continuing a pattern of confusion and misdirection through terrible negotiation leads to increased conformity, preserves fragile status games, and allows the myth of an egalitarian, non-hierarchical society to continue. Which is what adults are really negotiating over all the time.

If those fragile, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical structures are the psychological, social, and cultural constructs we’re bent on preserving as adults with our terrible negotiations, then let’s just be honest with each other about it. And let’s not act surprised when a moderately sophisticated negotiator who has radically different desires comes along and upsets the apple cart of our carefully constructed, yet terrible, paradigm.