Every negotiation has a midpoint only in hindsight. Which midpoint you land on depends entirely on where both sides opened.
If you ask for £100 and I counter with £50, splitting lands us at £75. If I had instead countered with £20, splitting lands us at £60. Same deal, same facts — different outcome. The midpoint isn't a neutral point of fairness; it's a function of opening positions. Whoever anchors more aggressively shifts where the middle sits.
This is why the negotiator who opens high — or low, depending on the side — and signals they'll hold firm has already won ground before substantive talks begin. Research by Galinsky and others has shown repeatedly that the first number spoken exerts a gravitational pull on the final outcome. Meeting in the middle doesn't cancel that effect. It codifies it.
The reasonableness penalty.
There's a particular kind of negotiator who prides themselves on opening at "a fair number." They've done the analysis, they know the zone of possible agreement, and they want to signal good faith by not playing games. It's an honourable instinct. It's also a tax they pay every time they negotiate.
If your opening position is close to your actual target, and the other side opens far away from theirs, the midpoint sits well past your comfort zone. You either accept a bad deal or you become the one pushing back, arguing, and refusing to budge — which is exactly the behaviour you were trying to avoid by opening reasonably in the first place. The reasonable party ends up looking unreasonable, because they have nowhere further to retreat.
Why splitting feels fair (but isn't).
The appeal of the midpoint is largely aesthetic. It's symmetrical. Both sides moved the same distance. Neither "won." It wraps the negotiation in a tidy ribbon and lets everyone save face.
But fairness in a negotiation isn't measured in distance travelled. It's measured against objective standards — market value, comparable transactions, the underlying merits of each party's position. A 50/50 split between a reasonable claim and an absurd one produces a 75/25 outcome in favour of the absurd claimant. That's not fairness. It's capitulation dressed up as compromise.
Splitting also works poorly in any deal with more than one variable. Price, timing, scope, payment terms, warranties, risk allocation — these don't reduce to a single number you can halve. When people "meet in the middle" on complex deals, they typically end up with a mediocre outcome on every axis, rather than an excellent outcome on the axes that matter most to each side.
The trade you're missing.
The deeper loss from splitting is that it forecloses creative value. Good negotiators don't divide fixed pies; they expand them. They ask what each side actually cares about, discover that preferences differ, and trade accordingly. A seller who needs speed and a buyer who needs certainty can structure a deal where both get what they most want in exchange for concessions on what they care about least.
That conversation never happens when the default reflex is to split. You stop asking about interests the moment you fixate on positions. You stop looking for trades when both sides are focused on meeting halfway on price. The midpoint is where curiosity goes to die.
What to do instead.
Know your numbers
Not just your target, but your walk-away point and — crucially — your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Without a clear BATNA, every offer the other side puts in front of you looks plausible, because you've nothing concrete to measure it against. With one, you can evaluate offers against reality rather than against the other side's anchor.
Open deliberately
"Deliberately" doesn't necessarily mean aggressively, but it does mean with awareness of the anchoring effect. If your opening position is where you'd actually like to land, you've left yourself no room to make the other side feel they've won something. People don't value concessions they didn't extract.
Negotiate across issues, not just within them
Before you start trading on price, map out every variable in the deal and rank them for yourself. Then try to understand how the other side ranks them. Many a stuck negotiation opens up the moment someone asks, "What if we moved on payment terms — would that change how you think about the price?"
Use external benchmarks
Comparable deals, market data, published rates and third-party valuations shift the conversation away from each party's anchor and onto something both sides can reason about. "Here are three similar transactions from the past year" is a much stronger argument than "I think £X is fair."
Be patient with silence
The reflex to split is often a reflex to resolve discomfort — the awkwardness of two people sitting across a table far apart. Learning to sit in that discomfort, to ask questions instead of filling the space with concessions, is one of the highest-leverage skills a negotiator can develop.
When splitting is actually fine.
None of this is to say that meeting in the middle is always wrong. For low-stakes, single-issue, one-shot negotiations — haggling at a market stall, settling a small dispute over a dinner bill — the efficiency of splitting often outweighs the cost of a slightly suboptimal outcome. The same goes for deals where both sides have opened near objective market value; the midpoint between two reasonable numbers is itself reasonable.
The problem isn't splitting. The problem is splitting as a default — a reflex reached for whenever talks feel stuck, regardless of where the anchors sit or what's actually at stake. Used thoughtfully, it's a closing tool. Used reflexively, it's a trap.
The real question.
When someone suggests meeting in the middle, the right response isn't a yes or a no. It's a question: the middle of what? Between which two numbers, arrived at how, and why those numbers rather than any others? Making the anchoring visible is often enough to shift the conversation back onto firmer ground — and to remind everyone at the table that fairness isn't measured in geometry.