Chris Voss was a highly successful hostage negotiator for the FBI before moving on to apply his negotiation skills to a range of different domains. According to Voss (Voss and Ratz, 2016) a key element of negotiation is to get an understanding of the hostage taker’s motivation as fast possible, as sometimes there are only seconds available to prevent a fatality. Voss recounts that this can be achieved using empathy, or what Voss calls tactical empathy (ibid). In this article we’ll discuss how empathy and attention relate to participatory knowledge via the work of Aristotle.
Voss observes that tactical empathy is essentially about lowering the focus on your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and increasing the focus on someone else’s thoughts, feelings and emotions. Placing greater focus on the other person changes our own awareness. It moves awareness away from the affect a situation is having on us, to an awareness of the affect the situation is having on the other person. In practical terms, Voss observes that an angry request for money by a hostage taker (for example) should be met with a response along the lines of “I can feel that this money means a lot to you” (Voss and Ratz, 2016). The response is not based on how difficult meeting that request would be for him, but instead much it feels to the other person.
The use of empathy in the above example, opens a possible connection between two people, in this case, a chance for the hostage taker to acknowledge that the money means a lot, and why they want it; to feel understood. Disclosing such information provides leverage points to explore, to get to the bottom of why this situation is occurring and whether the money is a merely a deflection of a greater emotional need. This is the foundation of a dialogue.
As we have discussed previously on this blog, participatory knowledge is the ability to fit ourselves effectively to the demands of an environment in order to meet a goal (Verveake et al, 2017). In Voss’s case, how to safely free a hostage, in a more everyday example, to navigate rush hour traffic as safely and with as less stress as possible. In short, we look at the environment for leverage points, or affordances, which are objects of relevance to our goals (Gibson, 1977).
Empathy allows us to attend to the goals of others to find common ground. In other words, empathy provides affordances and allows us to participate with other people. Empathy should marry goals and produce something beyond one individual, not be used for one goal to dominate another. Equally, empathy should not be overwhelming, where someone becomes washed away by the emotional demands of someone else. To this end, Aristotle provides insight.
Aristotle (2019) in his work on ethics, suggested that virtues need to be properly apportioned to specific situations. For example, take two potentially conflicting virtues- honesty and kindness. If we are totally honest, we cannot be totally kind at the same time. This is acknowledged beautifully in the Shakespeare play Hamlet, where Hamlet laments that he “must be cruel to be kind, thus bad begins leaving worse behind”. Hamlet uses brutal honestly and puts aside kindness for a longer term aim. It was not possible to apply both virtues at the same time, one had to be totally dominant (honesty), and what had to be put aside (kindness) for Hamlet to participate effectively with the current situation as he saw it.
The above is what Voss seems to mean when he discusses lowering the focus on us and increasing the focus on the other. We cannot place the focus entirely on the other, otherwise our own goals, emotions, thoughts and feelings will be washed away. There needs to remain the proportionate ratio of virtue applied to the situation at hand. Voss cannot simply tell a hostage taker they are in serious trouble, and they need to surrender, which would be honest but inappropriate, more kindness is required, or more accurately in this case, more empathy for the other. Hamlet’s approach in this situation would be poorly fitted.
This is a key argument for Aristotle, no virtue is entirely good or entirely bad, they are all capable of excess and deficiency (Aristotle, 2019). What needs to be done is the effective application to each situation as it evolves and changes. This is achieved by developing our participatory knowing, and we increase our participatory knowing by attending to the environment around us carefully and attending to the people around us with equal care.
Empathy is a means of attending to the people around us and proportionately applying our virtues to others and situations. Voss’s experience and work illustrates this well, it is certainly noble to be honest, as Hamlet was, but the real skill is determining how honest to be in any situation to be effective. Empathy allows us to develop the careful attending required to gain an optimal grip on our circumstances (Merleau-Ponty 2004).
Reading
Aristotle, A., 2019. The ethics of Aristotle. BoD–Books on Demand.
Gibson, J.J., 1977. The theory of affordances. Hilldale, USA, 1(2), pp.67-82
Merleau-Ponty, M., 2004. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. Psychology Press.
Voss, C. and Raz, T., 2016. Never split the difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it. Random House.
Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C. and Miscevic, F., 2017. Zombies in western culture: A twenty-first century crisis (p. 104). Open Book Publishers
