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  In his memo, Moran explained why he eschewed the bullying methods used by other interrogators. He believed that if the prisoner was forcibly reminded he was facing his conqueror, he would be placed ‘in a psychological position of being on the defensive’. Moran did not believe in making the prisoner feel scared or powerless. Stripping a prisoner of his dignity merely reinforced his determination not to speak. The aim should instead be to achieve ‘intellectual and spiritual rapport’.

  Moran’s premise was that even the most implacable prisoner has a story that he wants to tell. The interrogator’s job is to create conditions in which he feels willing and able to tell it. The surest way to do that is to show that you care about him as a human being:

  Make him and his troubles the centre of the stage, not you and your questions of war problems. If he is not wounded or tired out, you can ask him if he has been getting enough to eat . . . If he is wounded you have a rare chance. Begin to talk about his wounds. Ask if the doctor has attended to him. Have him show you his wounds or burns.

  Today, most experienced interrogators agree. Steven Kleinman, a former army colonel, was one of the US military’s most prolific and experienced interrogators and an outspoken opponent of the abusive practices used in the war on terror. He told me about an interrogation he carried out in Baghdad. His colleagues had captured an Iraqi gunrunner who had been selling arms to insurgents. Under aggressive questioning, the prisoner had steadfastly refused to speak, except – Kleinman noticed – to request a call to his daughters. When it was Kleinman’s turn to question the prisoner, he began by talking about how bad he felt about leaving his two daughters at home. In exchange, the Iraqi disclosed a worry that his work was making the city less safe for children. ‘We began speaking more as two concerned fathers than as an interrogator and detainee,’ said Kleinman. Although he didn’t it put it this way, Kleinman had used the norm of reciprocity. He opened up a little of himself, which cued the prisoner to do the same. The Iraqi went on to tell Kleinman everything he needed to know.

  As distant as this kind of scenario is from the lives most of us live, it offers a model for embarking on a potentially tense disagreement. Before leaping into the dispute itself, focus on creating the right context for it. Figure out what the other person cares about and acknowledge whatever that is in how you talk to them. Behave in the manner with which you would like them to respond; be your ideal interlocutor. Since disagreement makes us nervous, we often put on a mask of invulnerability when we do it, but that’s counter-productive. Open up a little to them and they are more likely to open up to you.

  Better relationships lead to better disagreements. The sequencing is important. If there’s one thing that marks out experts in difficult conversations from the rest of us, it is the way that they devote care and attention to moulding the relationship before they get into the substance of the disagreement. It’s the way they begin.

  * * *

  Divorce mediators meet with couples in the process of splitting up, to try and help them come to agreement in a way that saves on legal fees. Often, the partners can hardly bear to talk to one another. The late Patrick Phear, a pioneer of divorce mediation, explained to an interviewer that he always started with a point of agreement, no matter how trivial: ‘I will, if I have to, start with the fact that we can all agree we are human beings and we are in this room.’ What you’re agreeing about matters less than the act of agreeing. When I spoke to another divorce mediator, Bob Wright, he echoed Phear. ‘I tell them, “You both agreed to mediation. That’s something.”’ It’s a trick, but it works because the act of agreement on something other than the matter at hand is a small reminder that the disagreement itself need not define the relationship.

  Wright, who runs a mediation practice in Grand Rapids, Michigan, regularly sits down with couples in which at least one partner is seething with resentment and anger. In such a situation, you might have thought it best to stay away from the emotions and get straight to the negotiation. But Wright has learnt that the best way to proceed is to get the messy stuff out in the open. He begins by asking each partner to give their side – to talk about what they want, and how they feel about it. Then he asks the other partner to summarise what they heard, and – importantly – to name the underlying emotion. People are generally comfortable with the first task, but find the second one harder. ‘Most people – or I should say most American men – don’t focus on the emotional component. I tell them, it’s OK, you’re just guessing.’ Wright will help them guess if he needs to, because he knows from experience that just having them say the words out loud transforms the conversation.

  What happens, I asked him, when an angry person hears someone say, ‘I can see you’re furious about that?’ ‘They often say something like, “DAMN STRAIGHT – and I shouldn’t have to tell you!” Then they relax. Once the emotion is on the table it’s easier for them to be less angry. It’s remarkable to watch.’

  Unarticulated emotion is like an unexploded bomb, and naming it somehow defuses it. But you have to be listening. In a commencement speech to UCLA medical graduates, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande told a story from when he was a student. While working the nightshift in a hospital emergency department, he was assigned a prisoner who had swallowed half a razor blade and slashed his wrist. As Gawande investigated his injuries, the man kept up a foul-mouthed stream of invective towards the hospital staff, the policemen who had taken him in, and the incompetent young doctor who was treating him. Gawande had the urge to tell the man to shut up. He thought about abandoning him. But he didn’t:

  I suddenly remembered a lesson a professor had taught about brain function. When people speak, they aren’t just expressing their ideas; they are, even more, expressing their emotions. And it’s the emotions that they really want heard. So I stopped listening to the man’s words and tried to listen for the emotions.

  ‘You seem really angry and like you feel disrespected,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am. I am angry and disrespected.’

  His voice changed. He told me that I have no idea what it was like inside. He’d been in solitary for two years straight. His eyes began to water. He calmed down. I did, too. For the next hour, I just sewed and listened, trying to hear the feelings behind his words.

  * * *

  Creating the bond of trust that precedes a productive disagreement is easier said than done, of course, especially when there is little to work with. You might find yourself plunged into a dispute with someone you don’t know very well, with barely any time to work on the relationship. But that doesn’t mean you should skip the first stage. It just means you need to work fast.

  One group of professional communicators who need to strike up a rapport in an instant, a dozen times a day, with people who distrust or even despise them, are the police. We usually hear about police–citizen interactions when things go wrong, but the best cops are highly skilled communicators. For American officers, it’s a question of survival, for them and everyone they encounter. In the United States, where cops and many criminals carry firearms, officers are acutely aware of the possibility of potentially lethal violence erupting. Saying the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, can make all the difference.

  Over the last several years, a spotlight has been turned on the use of force by American law-enforcement officers, after a series of appalling abuses of power have come to light. In response, the USA’s most forward-looking police departments have been rethinking how they interact at close quarters with people from the communities they serve. Police–civilian encounters are often tense and can quickly become confrontational, which is why de-escalation is considered an increasingly important skill. To find out how it is taught I travelled to Tennessee, where the Memphis police department, under its African American director, Michael Rallings, has been leading the way. In 2016, a Black Lives Matter rally blocked a bridge in Memphis for several hours. Rallings persuaded them to clear the way without the threat of force, linking
arms with protesters as they left. For three days, I shared a room at the Memphis Police Academy with around twenty cops, most of them experienced officers. They were a mix of white, African American, and Asian American men and women, all of them eager to learn.

  The department had hired a training company called Polis Solutions, co-founded by an ex-cop with a philosophy PhD called Jonathan Wender, who we’ll hear from later. In Memphis, the Polis team was headed by Don Gulla, a retired cop who had spent over thirty years policing the streets of Seattle. Now, together with his colleagues Mike O’Neill and Rob Bardsley, also retired cops, he trains police officers in de-escalation, although he is not very fond of the term. At dinner with the three of them in their hotel the night before the first day of training, there was a general shrug when I raised it. ‘Everyone’s talking about de-escalation, but nobody ever really says what it is,’ says Gulla, a Filipino American with kind, genial eyes. ‘Say there’s a guy out there in the lobby going crazy with a meat cleaver. How do I de-escalate that? Probably the best thing to do is shoot him. Is that de-escalation?’ His face creased into a smile. For Gulla, de-escalation was a fancy word for good communication.

  ‘What do you do when someone is screaming at you?’ asked Gulla of his class, the next morning. ‘Do you say, “SHUT UP AND CALM DOWN”? No, you don’t say that, because that’s going to make him worse.’ Just as important as de-escalating, Gulla suggested, was not escalating in the first place. Under pressure, cops can make the mistake of getting caught in a vicious cycle of reciprocity. ‘Instead of shouting back at them, you say, “Dude, I get it. We’ve got work to do, you and I.”’

  As we’ve seen, the beginning of a potentially fraught encounter (which, for cops, is most encounters) is crucial. A connection has to be made before the conversation about what to do can begin – and you can’t make that connection when you’re lecturing the other person on how to feel. In fact, as Gulla’s colleague, Mike O’Neill, emphasised, doing so invites the wrong kind of reciprocation: ‘As soon as you tell someone to calm down, they’re going to say, “NO, YOU CALM DOWN.” You’ve opened the door for an argument or a fight.’

  The Polis team advised the Memphis cops to ‘start where they’re at’, a phrase they had picked up from a chance meeting in Louisiana, while running a previous course. The three of them were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant (Gulla and his fellow trainers are dedicated foodies) when a man in a suit walked in and asked what the food was like. They got talking with him, and when they explained why they were in town, the man told them he was an insurance adjuster, responsible for investigating claims. That meant he had to deal with individuals in a variety of emotional states. He shared his approach for fruitful interviews: ‘I start where they’re at. If they are angry, I go with them. If they are happy, I go with them.’ The insurance adjuster didn’t mean that he got angry with angry people. He meant that he would always try and respond, in what he said or how he said it, to their feelings. He calibrated his communication style to their emotional temperature. From then on, the phrase became a Polis mantra: start where they’re at.

  Starting where they’re at means paying attention to where they’re at. In class, Mike O’Neill spoke about the need for an officer arriving at a potentially volatile scene to pause, if only briefly, to assess what is going on, emotionally as well as physically, before intervening. ‘I just walk in and listen for a couple of seconds. I’m trying to piece it together. Sometimes we turn up to a scene and assume we know what the problem is, but only after we ask some questions do we find out what’s really going on.’

  A female officer spoke up. ‘I try and relate to people. If there’s a baby in the house I might ask if I can hold her. Then the focus is on the baby, and everyone calms down. I’ve walked into someone’s living room and seen SIG symbols [SIG Sauer is a popular brand of firearms], I’m like, OK, so there are guns in the house, good to know. But I also see an opportunity to engage. “So what guns do you have?”’ Another female officer spoke about disclosing to a person she was arresting, who had a sick parent, that her own mother had recently died from cancer. After the class heard her out in a hush, O’Neill nodded. ‘Everything that ever happened to me in my life came back and helped me in my job. Even the fights between my mom and dad. Everything can create empathy.’

  Another officer recalled going to the home of a man he needed to arrest for domestic violence. ‘I got there, and the mom wanted to leave with the kids but he was standing with the baby in his hands and he wouldn’t hand her over. He started asking me questions, like whether I believe in God. At first I was like, none of your business, I’m a cop. But then I thought, why not. We got talking about different religions, about what was going on in the Middle East, what we’d watched on the History Channel. Before I knew it, he’s put the baby down and we’re walking to the squad car. Still talking.’

  Only some of our disagreements are about achieving compliance, but the principle of making an emotional connection with the person before getting to the hard part applies to all sorts of tough conversations, including political ones. Eli Pariser, the online activist and media entrepreneur, has observed that some of the best American political discussions online take place in forums on the websites of sports teams. Since the participants know they have something in common – a shared love of their team – they find it easier to let their guard down and engage with views different from their own. If the only thing you have in common is the disagreement, it’s hard to disagree productively. Too often we talk about finding something in common as if it’s an end in itself, instead of what it can be: a springboard to fruitful disagreement.

  * * *

  After fifteen minutes of sitting silently in the cab of the truck, Alfred Wilson was reprimanded by a voice inside his head. ‘I felt this tap on my shoulder,’ Alfred told me. ‘It was Heather. She said, “Alfred, you need to speak up.”’ Alfred resolved to take the advice of his dead friend. But he didn’t want to get straight to the flag – that would have felt too confrontational. So, he asked himself: what would Heather do now? ‘She would have engaged him first.’

  Alfred works for a Charlottesville law firm, where he specialises in guiding people through bankruptcy. Five years previously, he had been looking to hire a data-entry clerk – someone to meet new clients on their first visit and enter their information into the system. One of his legal assistants recommended her friend Heather Heyer, but warned him that he would have to be open-minded. Unlike the other candidates Alfred was interviewing, Heather had no legal experience and no degree. Alfred decided to get her in anyway. He met a nervous but charming young woman. ‘This is weird for me,’ she told him. ‘You’re all in suits. All I’ve ever done is work in a bar.’ Alfred asked her how much she earned in tips on a typical weekend. When she told him $200, he concluded that she must be a pretty good communicator and decided to take a chance.

  When Heather arrived for her first day on the job, she seemed a little groggy. That morning, she came into Alfred’s office and asked if she could change her working hours, which were 8.30 to 5 p.m. Taken aback, Alfred heard her out. ‘I’ve always bartended,’ she explained. ‘I never got up before noon. I don’t know if I can do this.’ She proposed working from 12 p.m. until 8 p.m. Alfred was amused by her chutzpah. ‘I said, are you kidding? Our clients aren’t here at 8 p.m.’ But Heather persisted. They negotiated a 10 a.m. start. Alfred laughed as he recalled this to me. ‘That was Heather. Getting people to have difficult conversations and compromise.’

  Heather was hardworking and a fast learner. She proved to have an exceptional ability to connect with clients. ‘People who come to our office are on their worse luck,’ said Alfred. ‘They might have recently had a heart attack, or they’re fighting cancer. Their home is being foreclosed, their car has been repossessed. So when they come in, they are basically embarrassed. Heather would be the first person they met. She had this way of making them feel comfortable, helping them relax.’ After a few months, Alfred notice
d that Heather was making a difference to his case filings. ‘Our clients were telling us much more after they had spoken to Heather, which meant we could help them more. She was opening doors for us.’

  Heather got to know Alfred’s family. ‘She was close to my youngest daughter. Heather would talk to her about the importance of speaking up.’ Sometimes, when he walked into her office, she would be crying, usually because she had seen someone vulnerable being abused on social media. One day, when he asked her why she was crying, she said it was about him. ‘Alfred, I don’t understand why you help some of these people.’ She said she had noticed what happened when he met new clients. Alfred, bemused, asked her what she meant. ‘You reach your hand out and they don’t shake your hand,’ said Heather. ‘It’s like they don’t want you to help them.’

  Alfred realised she was right. ‘I guess it had happened to me so many times in my life that I hadn’t been paying attention, or said anything about it,’ he told me. ‘I had got to the point where I started accepting being treated that way.’ Heather also noticed that after leaving his office, an hour later, the same people would be hugging him and thanking him profusely. That only upset her more.

  Alfred had been so intent on avoiding the possibility of conflict he had allowed this small injustice to perpetuate itself. He changed his behaviour. ‘Now, if I stretch my hand out and they don’t respond, I say “Hey, I didn’t get to shake your hand.” I get them to engage with me, and to deal with the uncomfortable feeling that they’re in. Then they open up more. Heather had a gift for those conversations.’ He recalled a video clip someone had taken of her from the day of the rally, talking to a white nationalist woman. ‘Heather is with three black friends, and she’s asking this lady, very calmly, can you explain why you don’t like my friends? If you can’t explain it, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’