Conflicted Read online

  Laurence Alison told me that in order to be effective, interrogators have to suspend moral judgement, no matter what terrible crime the suspect may have committed. ‘There’s a reason this person has ended up opposite you, and it’s not just because they’re evil. If you’re not interested in why they’re here, you’re not going to be a good interrogator.’ Janin echoes this sentiment in what he says is the most important piece of advice he gives his clients: ‘SUSPEND JUDGEMENT. GET CURIOUS!’

  Disagreement is hard work even for management consultants and their clients, who at least share a culture: analytical and logical, responsive to incentives and interests. What should you do if the person you’re talking to seems emotionally led, irrational, possessed by bizarre beliefs? That’s a question Jayne Docherty addresses in her book on the Waco negotiations. The key to it, she suggests, is to assume that they are being rational, and make it your job to figure out what kind of rationality they are using.

  Max Weber, the great sociologist, argued that we use the term ‘rational’ too narrowly. It usually describes people acting in a logical way designed to achieve a material goal. Weber called that instrumental rationality and proposed three other types of rational behaviour. There is affective rationality, when I make my relationships central to whatever I say and do; that’s the rationality used by the respondents in Daniel Kahan’s study. There’s traditional rationality, when we are happy to accept the steer that previous generations have given us, which is why we might put a tree in our house in December. Finally, there is values rationality, when everything we do is in the service of some higher value, almost regardless of outcome. That’s what the Davidians were employing, to the befuddlement of the more instrumentally rational FBI.

  Few people rely on just one mode of rationality; most of us switch between them or use more than one at once. Docherty points out that the Davidians could actually be quite practical and analytical and willing to problem-solve, as long as it didn’t conflict with their ultimate values. This is one way that curiosity can help us. In a disagreement with someone who isn’t using instrumental rationality – whether family member, colleague or political opponent – then, rather than assuming they’re crazy, you can try and get curious about what mode of rationality they’ve moved into. When your daughter is being irrationally stubborn about going to bed later, she might be operating in affective rationality; she is looking for a way to spend more time with you. What’s the deeper logic of the other person’s behaviour? Come to think of it, what’s the deeper logic of your own?

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  You’re not only trying to get curious yourself, you’re trying to stimulate the other person’s curiosity. So how do you do that?

  Gregory Trevors, a psychologist from the University of South Carolina, has studied ‘the backfire effect’: the paradoxical tendency for people to strengthen a belief in false information after the falsity of that information is pointed out to them (the term was coined by political scientists who found that, in 2009, people who believed that Iraq was behind 9/11 were more likely to believe that proposition after being shown information which refuted it). It’s a similar reaction to the one that addicts have on being told their habit is bad for them. The risk of correcting someone, as we’ve seen, is that you trigger an identity threat. That brings what Trevors calls ‘moral emotions’, like anger and anxiety, into play, which can quickly derail the conversation. Anger and anxiety lead people to focus narrowly on defending their position and attacking the source of any conflicting messages. An alternative strategy is to try and activate the other’s ‘epistemic emotions’, like surprise and curiosity, which, according to Trevors, act as an antidote to anxiety and anger. Carli Leon, the former anti-vaccinator who spoke about how insults had made her dig her heels in, also said, ‘What helped me was people asking me questions that got me to think.’

  Earlier on we discussed how to avoid triggering a threat reaction: convey your regard for the other person before getting into the disagreement (being curious about what they have to say is one way to do that). Other than affirmation, you can also frame new information or new arguments in a way that intrigues them rather than putting them on the back foot. As Daniel Kahan found, surprise – I didn’t know that, or, I hadn’t thought of it like that before – loosens up rigid beliefs. Displaying your own curiosity about the topic indicates that you don’t think you have all the answers and encourages them to feel curious too. Gregory Trevors suggested using stories, humour and metaphors to neutralise the other’s defence system. In short, rather than trying to sound convincing, try to be interesting and interested.

  It’s always easier to be incurious than curious. As Neil Janin suggested, curiosity is hard because it requires the allocation of scarce resources: energy, time and attention. If you have a different opinion to me on, say, immigration, that might be because you have a different experience of it to me. But contemplating that gulf of difference demands an expenditure of brainpower on my part to which I’m often unwilling to commit. It’s simply quicker and more efficient to dismiss you as bigoted than it is to be interested in what you’re saying. In a world where we’re bombarded with opinions, that can seem like a necessary reaction, but it’s one we should resist. By shutting down our curiosity about different views we make ourselves less intelligent, less humane – and less interesting.

  10. Make Wrong Strong

  Mistakes can be positive if you apologise rapidly and authentically. They enable you to show humility, which can strengthen the relationship and ease the conversation.

  ‘There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it.’

  Thelonious Monk

  You have just arrived at the scene of a potential suicide. A man is standing on the ledge of a tall building, threatening to jump. The police brief you on what they know about him, and you make your way up to the roof, where, from a distance at which he won’t feel threatened, you attempt conversation. You begin by trying to make an emotional connection – by showing that you care about him as a person. ‘Hello Ahmed,’ you say. ‘It looks as if you’re having a hard time. I’d like to help if I can.’

  At that moment, you realise – perhaps because he tells you, perhaps because you just know – that you’ve made an excruciating mistake. His name isn’t Ahmed. It’s Muhammed.

  You have lost control of this situation before you even started. What now?

  That was the question Paul Taylor, a professor at Lancaster University in the UK, and one of the world’s foremost scholars of crisis negotiation, put to one of his graduate students, Miriam Oostinga, after realising that nobody had yet studied it. Oostinga was immediately gripped by it. In the tense, emotionally freighted situation of a suicide negotiation, one false note would seem to have the potential to destroy whatever fragile bond of trust the negotiator has established. But errors are inevitable – so how do negotiators cope with them? At Taylor’s suggestion, Oostinga pursued the question for her PhD.

  We all make errors of communication, the kind of error that has an instant and palpable effect on the participants, straining relationships. Think of the teacher who jokes about a pupil’s haircut only to realise she has hurt his feelings; the politician who impulsively tweets an opinion he immediately regrets; a salesperson who unintentionally condescends to an upset customer. Even a minor error can have an emotional, even physiological effect, both for the person on the receiving end and on the person making it. Whether and how the maker of the error recovers from it can determine how well the rest of the conversation goes.

  Oostinga recruited trained negotiators from the Dutch police and prison services to participate in her study of errors. Some were crisis negotiators, others were interrogators. I asked her what she made of them, as people – did they have similarities? ‘I would say that they were all intrinsically interested in the person they’re talking to,’ she said. ‘When they talked to me, they really gave me the feeling that they were interested in who I was and what I was doing.’ Oostinga star
ted by interviewing the participants, to get a feel for the problems that errors create for them. ‘Nobody is capable of a 100 per cent perfect interaction,’ one of them told her. ‘There is always something that goes wrong.’ The risk of making an error increases as the stakes get higher – when there are more lives at risk – and when negotiators are dealing with aggressive individuals who draw them into a struggle for dominance. Errors might be factual, like getting someone’s name wrong, or mixing up the time and day of an event. Or they might be errors of judgement, like adopting an overly domineering tone, or saying ‘I understand how you feel’ when, as their interlocutor is immediately liable to point out, they patently do not.

  What took Oostinga by surprise is that the negotiators were wary of the whole notion of errors. They regarded stray messages as an inevitable side-effect of thinking on their feet. Trying to avoid them would only ensure the conversation was superficial and impersonal. ‘We should be cautious not to become small-talkers who do not say anything wrong,’ one of them remarked. Another said, ‘If we do not make errors, we are not human any more. We become like robots.’ The negotiators felt that ‘error’ was too unambiguously negative a term to describe an event that can have positive consequences, if handled skilfully.

  For the next stage of her study, Oostinga simulated crisis scenarios and found ways to trip the negotiators into errors. For instance, they might be told to speak to a person called Steven, who has barricaded himself into a room in a prison and is threatening to kill himself with a knife. The first time that the negotiator uses the name he has been given (negotiators are trained to use names) the perpetrator – played by an actor – would angrily respond, ‘I’m not Steven.’ Other scenarios simulated judgement errors. During a conversation, a suspect would react badly to the negotiator’s tone – for instance, by accusing him of sounding formal and superior, or overly friendly. Oostinga was interested in how the negotiator reacted and in how the conversation developed afterwards.

  The errors had some predictable effects: they raised the stress levels of the negotiator and made the conversation more stormy and volatile. But they also had unexpected benefits. The worst enemy of an interrogator or hostage negotiator is not deceit or anger but silence; their primary goal is to keep a conversation, any conversation, alive. Oostinga discovered that errors can be useful in that way. For instance, when describing a scene which the suspect had witnessed, an interviewer would get an important detail wrong (because she had been fed false information by Oostinga). The suspect would respond indignantly: ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Then he would go on to describe how things really were, in detail. The conversation would flow, and the interviewer would gain richer information.

  Instead of dwelling on a mistake, the professionals would use it to build a closer relationship. They were practiced at making immediate and sincere apologies: ‘You’re right, my mistake’; ‘Yep, that was a stupid thing to say. Can we start again?’ Occasionally they would deflect, blaming the source of their information. But when they felt able, they would accept responsibility and expose a vulnerable side of themselves to the interviewee. Doing that can be productive, the negotiators told Oostinga, if it helps to rebalance an inherently lopsided power relationship. In other words, apologies can correct for the one-down effect – so long as they are believed in.

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  Saying sorry is an art few bother to master until it’s too late. Benjamin Ho, an associate professor of economics at Vassar College, studies why some apologies work, while others are regarded as worthless and insincere. It might seem like an odd thing for an economist to focus on, but Ho is a behavioural economist, interested in the costs and benefits of social behaviour. After all, an economy doesn’t run on money; it runs on human relationships (it has taken economists a long time to realise this). The mistakes we make in our social interactions can damage or break those relationships. Apologies are an important way of restoring them.

  At the corporate level, apologies have real economic importance. When a company like Volkswagen or Facebook screws up, it needs to apologise effectively if it is to minimise the damage done to its relationships with consumers. A 2004 study, led by Fiona Lee of the University of Michigan, reviewed the corporate annual reports of fourteen companies over a twenty-one-year period, and analysed the way those companies talked about negative events, like poor earnings. Lee and her colleagues found that the companies that owned up to their mistakes in public had higher stock prices a year later than those that tried to bury them.

  Inspired by Lee’s work, Ben Ho looked for other ways to establish a link between apologies and economic outcomes. Together with his colleague Elaine Liu, he looked at the way that medical malpractice is handled in the United States. When doctors make mistakes that harm their patients, they can get caught in a bind. On the one hand, presuming they are honest, they want to apologise. On the other, by doing so they expose themselves to the threat of a ruinous legal action. Now, imagine what it is like to be a patient who does not get an apology from a doctor who has made your life, or the life of someone you love, unnecessarily painful. You would feel furious, wouldn’t you? Even if you hadn’t originally intended to sue, you’d probably want to do so now. And that was what was happening: patients were upset, yet doctors didn’t feel able to apologise, which made patients angry enough to sue.

  To break this vicious cycle, many American states – thirty-six at the time that Ho and Liu published their paper – have passed laws that make doctors’ apologies inadmissible in court (a bill to that effect was introduced to the Senate in 2005, by Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton). The idea is to create a safe haven for doctors to say sorry, thereby improving their relationship with the patient and making legal action less likely. Since some but not all states passed the law, Ho and Liu found that in states which had passed ‘apology laws’, there was a reduction in claims filed of 16–18 per cent and malpractice cases were settled almost 20 per cent faster. That’s a huge reduction in the number of costly, draining legal disputes, and all because people were able to hear a figure in authority say ‘sorry’. This finding helped Ho put a concrete value on apologies, and it confirmed a theory he was already developing: that for an apology to be effective, it must appear hard to make.

  Whether it’s a doctor, builder or politician, we have to place deep trust in an expert for our relationship with them to work. When the expert makes a mistake, the relationship is jeopardised. Whether or not the expert can repair that damage with an apology depends, says Ho, on whether or not the apology is seen to cost them something. Ho draws on game theory, a branch of mathematics influential in economics and biology. In game theory, a ‘costly signal’ is one where an agent communicates in a way that is difficult to fake. The classic example from biology is the male peacock’s tail, the existence of which made Charles Darwin despair because he couldn’t discern the evolutionary logic behind such an elaborate, heavy adornment. The game theorists’ explanation is that the tail’s excessiveness is the point: the male peacock is signalling its extraordinary fitness, like a king who builds an absurdly elaborate palace to display his wealth and power. To signal ‘I’m fit’ or ‘I’m powerful’ in a way that reliably convinces others, the signal must be hard to fake.

  Ho thinks the same logic applies to apologies. When we feel that someone has wronged us, we want them to say ‘I’m sorry’, but often the words themselves are not enough for the apology to feel satisfying; we need to feel they’ve been tough to say. While relationship counsellors advise couples to apologise to their partner to help heal a rift, anyone who has been in a relationship will know that you can also apologise too quickly. If you say sorry without it seeming like you had to struggle to do so, the words come across as empty and glib. In fact, we sometimes punish the people we love for apologising to us, pressing them on their reasons for not saying it sooner. The reason we do this is that we want them to pay an emotional price for it. The same logic applies to corporate apologies. The jeering a
nd humiliation that often follow a public apology from a company or politician aren’t proof that the apology was a waste of time, says Ho; the jeering and humiliation are what makes the apology effective.

  Ho enumerates a few different ways to make a costly apology. For instance, I’m sorry – here are some flowers. This is the most straightforward version of a costly apology. The cost here is obvious and tangible. The more expensive the flowers, the better. Then there is the ‘commitment apology’: I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again. The cost here is that you are foreclosing or giving up some future option. Of course, if you then go on to do it again, it’s less likely to work the next time. Then there is what I think of as the Englishman’s apology: I’m sorry, I’m an idiot. This is a particularly interesting approach because what you’re trading with is your right to be seen as competent and effective (Ho’s term for it is a ‘status apology’). Finally, there is what Miriam Oostinga refers to as the ‘deflect’ response: I’m sorry, it wasn’t my fault. This is not a very effective way to restore a relationship, precisely because it is not costly to say. But in some circumstances it might still be the best thing to do, for example if your reputation for competence is paramount and you can show it wasn’t your fault.

  In 2018, Ho got an unexpected chance to test his theory of apologies against real-world data. He received a call from John List, a professor at the University of Chicago, renowned for running real-world experiments using large datasets. List was calling in his capacity as chief economist at Uber. He wanted Ho to help him quantify the value of an apology to the business. Like any service-based business, Uber sometimes annoys or upsets its customers – a car that doesn’t arrive, the wrong choice of route. List suspected that when a poorly served customer received an apology, they would be more likely to use Uber again in the future. But to convince Uber’s management of that he needed to put a number on the value of apologising.