Another thought: This is something we all do in everyday life, too. Women especially do it — we tend to have already considered the other party’s position and made an initial compromise with our first move, which means we’ve already lost. I read decades ago that women do this in relationships and immediately recognized my own behavior. Mundane example: We want to go out to a restaurant, and we know our partner doesn’t like our favorite, Thai, so we don’t even request it. We suggest something else, and in the end we go to our partner’s favorite, which we dislike. And our partner has no idea we are annoyed at the choice of restaurant— because he certainly never said we had to go there!
I think this is baked into either human behavior or certain cultures. We’d rather make an adjustment on our own rather than be called out — take that times a hundred if the other party is an authoritarian regime that can imprison/kill you.