Chris Voss stood in a hallway on the twenty-seventh floor of a Harlem high-rise, talking to a door. Behind it, the FBI’s investigators believed, were at least three heavily armed fugitives who had used automatic weapons in a shoot-out with a rival gang a few days earlier. Behind Voss stood the New York SWAT team.
He was the head of the FBI’s crisis negotiation team in New York, and by his account he kept saying the same kind of thing, slowly, in a low voice. “It looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”
Nothing came back. Not for an hour, not for five. After six hours of silence, his team was almost convinced the apartment was empty.
Then a sniper on the next building radioed that a curtain had moved.
The door opens
The front door opened. A woman came out first, then all three fugitives. Asked afterward why they had given up, all three gave Voss the same answer, he writes: “We didn’t want to get caught or get shot, but you calmed us down. We finally believed you wouldn’t go away, so we just came out.”
Look at the sentences he quotes, though. None of them is a promise. “It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail” doesn’t say they won’t, and they ended up in handcuffs. What he had told them, in effect, was that he could see what they were afraid of.
You can name what the other side fears without conceding a thing.
Understanding is not agreeing
Voss went on to become a full-time FBI hostage negotiator and, by his own rough count, worked at least 150 cases, kidnappings included. In his 2016 book Never Split the Difference he calls the approach tactical empathy, and calls it the book’s centerpiece: “understanding the feelings and mindset of another in the moment and also hearing what is behind those feelings so you increase your influence in all the moments that follow.”
The word “tactical” is doing work. “Empathy is not about being nice or agreeing with the other side,” he writes. “It’s about understanding them.”
Sympathy sounds like “I’m so sorry,” and agreement like “you’re right.” A label sounds like “it seems like you feel cheated,” and then it stops. Labeling is one of the skills he teaches for this: saying back, in a neutral frame such as “It seems like…” or “It looks like…”, the feeling you think is behind what someone is doing. Labeling, in his words, “is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it.”
A nurse who says “this looks like it’s going to sting” hasn’t put the needle down. She has only shown she knows what you’re bracing for.
What the scanner actually saw
Voss gives the technique a brain-science explanation. Exposing negative thoughts to daylight, he writes, “makes them seem less frightening,” and he points to a brain-imaging study by the UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman as evidence that labeling an emotion, “applying rational words to a fear,” can disrupt it.
The study, published in Psychological Science in 2007, put 30 volunteers in a scanner and showed them faces with emotional expressions. In some blocks they picked the word that described the face’s emotion, such as “angry” or “scared.” In others they picked a name that matched the face’s gender. Compared with the other tasks, the authors reported, choosing the emotion word went with a weaker response to the negative images in the amygdala and other limbic regions, and with more activity in one region of the right prefrontal cortex.
Notice whose brain that was. The people doing the labeling were the ones being scanned, and they were looking at photographs. Nobody was being labeled. The authors themselves left open whether the words matter, or whether any way of thinking about the emotion symbolically would do.
So the lab result is about what happens in the labeler’s own brain while putting an emotion into words. The step from there to frightened people behind a door is Voss’s, drawn from his field experience. It may be right. The 2007 study wasn’t built to test it.
The project that got shelved
Say a colleague learns that the project she spent three months on has been cancelled, and she comes to your desk. You can offer sympathy (“that’s awful, I’m so sorry”), agreement (“you’re right, it was a bad call”), or a defence of the decision. Each of those is about you or the decision.
Or you can try a label: “It sounds like the three months feel wasted, and nobody asked you first.” If you’ve guessed wrong, she may correct you, and then you know what’s actually bothering her. If you’ve guessed right, you haven’t reversed the decision or promised a new project. You’ve only said out loud what she was already thinking.
That may not be enough. A label delivered in a flat, rehearsed voice can sound like a technique, and to someone who wants the decision changed, being understood may feel like a consolation prize. But it can buy you the next sentence of the conversation, which is where the actual bargaining starts. Voss, in Harlem, needed six hours to get his.