For the record I’m most often actively aggressive. I believe passive aggression is a waste of energy since not only do you end up fighting but you also end up trying to second guess the other party, which leads to suboptimal outcomes. This post is a justification of that.
Let’s say you and I are trying to decide the price of something I want to sell you. There are two ways we can go about it. One way is for us to have a negotiation. I can name my asking price. You call your bid. And if the two meet, well and good. Most often they won’t meet. So one of us will have to budge. We start budging slowly, in steps, until a time when the bid and ask are close together. And then we have a deal.
In most situations (except exceptional cases where there are very few buyers and sellers – read the first chapter of my book. This is within the Kindle sample), this will lead to an efficient outcome. Even if the final price were a little too close to the bid or to the ask, both parties know that under the circumstances they couldn’t get better. And the transaction takes place and the parties move on.
The other situation is where one party publicly states that they are unwilling to negotiate and will do the deal if and only if the counterparty comes up with a good enough offer. If the offer is not good enough, there is no deal. This is similar to the ultimatum game popular in behavioural economics. In this case you are also required to guess (and you have exactly one guess) what the counterparty’s hurdle rate is.
When there is a liquid market, there is no issue with this kind of a game – you simply have your own hurdle rate and you bid that. And irrespective of whether it gets accepted or not, you get the optimal outcome – since the market is liquid, it is likely that your quote will get accepted somewhere.
In a highly illiquid market, with only one buyer and one seller, the ultimatum setup can lead to highly suboptimal outcomes. I mean if you’re desperate to do the sale, you might bring your price “all the way to zero” to ensure you do the deal, but the thing is that irrespective of whether you get a deal or not, you are bound to feel disappointed.
If your ask got accepted, you start wondering if you could’ve charged more. If you didn’t get your deal, you start wondering if reducing a price “just a little” would have gotten the deal done. It is endless headache, something that’s not there when there is an active negotiation process.
Now to build the analogy – instead of a sale, think of the situation when you have a disagreement with someone and need to resolve it. You can either confront them about it and solve it “using negotiation” or you can be passive aggressive, letting them know you’re “not happy”. Notice that in this case the disagreement is with one specific party, the market is as illiquid as it can get – no negotiations with any third party will have any impact (ignore snitching here).
When you express your disagreement and you talk/fight it out, you know that irrespective of the outcome (whether it was resolved or not), you have done what you could. Either it has been resolved, which has happened with you telling what exactly your position is, or you have given it all to explain yourself and things remain bad (in this case, whatever happened there would have been “no deal” or an “unhappy deal”).
And that is why active aggression is always better than passive aggression. By expressing your disagreement, even if that means you’re being aggressive, you are stating the exact extent of the problem and the solution will be to your satisfaction. When you’re passive aggressive, nobody is the winner.
PS: I realise that by writing this post I’m violating this own advice, since this post itself can be seen as a form of passive aggression! Mea culpa.