Empathy for the fraudster

Former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss talks to Fraud Magazine about the inner workings of successful negotiations and how empathy for your negotiation counterpart is essential to any interaction. And Voss explains how the techniques used by hostage negotiators can help fraud examiners crack tough admission-seeking interviews.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure the size of a peanut, located deep within the temporal lobe of the brain. Humans have two of them — one for each hemisphere of the brain. Although amygdalae are tiny, they play an outsized role in processing emotions, regulating behavior, learning and detecting danger. The amygdalae are responsible for the intense overreactions to stressful situations, also known as the fight-or-flight response or amygdala hijack. They’re central to our most basic, primitive responses, what some might call “lizard brain.” When the amygdalae don’t work as they should, people may experience anxiety, depression, poor impulse control or difficulty recognizing other people’s emotions. 

And like their almond namesake — “amygdala” comes from the Greek word for almond — they can be tough nuts to crack without the right tools. With their emotion-processing power and danger-detecting duties, amygdalae are activated during life’s thornier situations. When emotions are running high during tense business negotiations, serious discussions (or arguments) with loved ones, or, say, admission-seeking interviews with fraud suspects, you’ll need a few tactics and strategies that can override emotional responses to difficult discussions.

Chris Voss isn’t a neurologist, but as a former agent and lead international hostage negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), he’s spent more than two decades developing fine-tuning those strategies that can neutralize those highly emotional reactions and get people to agree to something when they’d rather be disagreeable. The many tactics and techniques he perfected as an FBI agent to get terrorists and bank robbers to release hostages can be just as effective in lower-stakes situations that still require careful deliberation.

Voss met with Fraud Magazine during the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference held last June in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a keynote speaker, to discuss the finer points of negotiation and how fraud examiners can use his techniques and strategies to better connect with difficult interview subjects.

Every interaction is a negotiation

Generally, when we place an order with a barista at a café, we’re not thinking the interaction is a negotiation with the barista. But, according to Voss, even the most mundane situations are negotiations for the simple reason that we’re trying to get something from someone.

“The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want,” Voss writes in his book, “Never Split the Difference.” But how we get someone to agree to our demands requires more than just asking for what we want; how we treat the barista when placing that coffee order determines whether they’re moved to spit in the coffee mug or pour an extra shot of espresso.

Getting the raise or promotion you want? You need to ask the right way at the right time. Setting boundaries in a personal relationship? Your counterpart needs to respect your limits. Getting a toddler to eat all their dinner? That takes skill.

Negotiation experts, such as the authors of the foundational text on the subject, “Getting to Yes,” define negotiation as the practice of “back-and-forth communication designed to reach an agreement when you and the other side have some interests that are shared and others that are opposed.” Leigh Thompson, author of “The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator,” writes that negotiation is an “interpersonal decision-making process” that’s “necessary whenever we cannot achieve our objectives single-handedly.”

Voss distills negotiation to a practice that “serves two distinct, vital life functions — information gathering and behavior influencing — and includes almost any interaction where each party wants something from the other side.” Simply put, negotiation is “communication with results.”

What Voss learned as a 24-year veteran of the FBI and what he’s taught to numerous professionals over the years as CEO and founder of the negotiation training consulting firm, The Black Swan Group, is that getting those results depends on understanding where your negotiation counterparts are coming from emotionally. The best negotiators have sharp listening skills and show empathy for the other party — even for criminals. Fraud examiners preparing for interviews with suspected fraudsters can learn a lot from a former hostage negotiator.

Learning from crisis

Voss tells Fraud Magazine that he owes his career as a hostage negotiator to a knee injury. Before becoming an FBI negotiator, he’d been a member of the SWAT team in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, FBI field office. When the bureau transferred him to the New York City field office. He tried out for the hostage rescue team there, but he injured his knee during the tryout and needed reconstructive surgery. Voss took it as a sign to try something else, and he started exploring his career options. “I thought there must be something I could do to make myself more employable,” he tells Fraud Magazine. “I wanted to be a hostage negotiator principally because it sounded cool and I’d been on the SWAT team, and I really liked being part of crisis response.”

“Thank god for the injuries, because hostage negotiation would come to define my entire life.”

However, becoming a hostage negotiator wasn’t a simple process for Voss. When he met with the head of the FBI’s crisis negotiation unit in New York about joining her team, she rejected his offer. Instead, she told him to volunteer for a suicide helpline to gain experience talking to people in crisis situations. Voss accepted the challenge and got an education in managing human emotions. “I learned how empathy could be used to influence decision-making,” Voss says.

Empathy, according to Voss is “the demonstration of understanding, which doesn't require either agreement or disagreement or even liking someone.”

But, in Voss’s recollection, the helpline wasn’t quite what he’d expected. “They told us on the hotline that no call should exceed 20 minutes. And if you did it right, it would take less time than that,” says Voss. “I remember thinking that it was crazy because in the movies and TV, when somebody’s experiencing a crisis, the helpline volunteer talks to them for hours,” says Voss.

He was also surprised to learn after his first performance review that he’d been handling calls incorrectly. As he recounts in “Never Split the Difference,” his shift supervisor told Voss that his calls were the worst he’d ever heard. At the end of one exchange, Voss’s caller congratulated him for doing a good job. According to the shift supervisor, Voss had made the call about himself and didn’t get a commitment from the caller. After that, Voss worked hard to improve his helpline skills and make those calls about the people on the other end of the line. That hard work paid off as five months later he returned to the head of crisis negotiation team with the message that he’d taken her training advice. He’d landed the job.

“In every negotiation, in every agreement, the result comes from someone else’s decision,” Voss writes. “We can influence them by inhabiting their world and seeing and hearing what they want.”

Empathy is understanding

Inhabiting someone else’s world to see and hear what they want is empathy, and having it is the only way to connect with your negotiating subject, says Voss. But he cautions not to confuse empathy with sympathy — empathy isn’t feeling sorry for your negotiation counterpart or agreeing with their position. Empathy, according to Voss is “the demonstration of understanding, which doesn't require either agreement or disagreement or even liking someone.”

Voss explains to Fraud Magazine that thinking of empathy as understanding makes it an unlimited skill that you can use with anybody, and most importantly with those you disagree with. “With empathy, since agreement and disagreement aren’t necessary, you’re not being disagreeable,” says Voss. “Empathy is an action. They don’t know you understand unless you demonstrate that understanding, which can be like saying, ‘Here’s how I think you see things.’ That’s empathy.”

Unfortunately, people don’t always see how valuable it is to understand your negotiation partner, no matter who they are. “Most people say, ‘What good does it do me to make them feel understood? OK, so I took the time to make them feel understood. Like, so what?’” Voss counters that understanding and demonstrating that understanding “always closes the gap.”

To demonstrate why understanding where others are coming from is so important to negotiation, Voss often recounts the time he and the FBI hostage negotiation team convinced the leader of a rebel group in the Philippines to release a U.S. citizen his group had kidnapped and held for ransom. The leader was asking for $10 million in return for the citizen. But Voss heard that the leader was really asking for war damages — to right the wrongs of the past. Voss advised the team to commiserate with the rebel leader and to repeat his version of history. In being heard, the rebel leader dropped his demand for $10 million, and the citizen was eventually released.

“If I can repeat your perspective back to you fully and completely, then about half of my agreements will be made on the spot,” says Voss. “You need to feel understood first. You need to feel involved. You need to feel heard.”

There’s also an added advantage to developing empathy in negotiations. Having empathy and makes you curious, which makes you a better negotiator. “Curiosity is a superpower — you’re smarter when you’re curious,” Voss tells Fraud Magazine. “You're in a positive frame of mind. You pick up more information. You see patterns more quickly. You don’t get fatigued mentally when you're curious, and the consequence of that is people feel understood.”

Emotional intelligence on steroids

What all this understanding and empathy amounts to is building a skill bank in which you remove yourself as a threat to the person on the other side of the negotiation. Fraud examiners may recognize this as building rapport — an essential part of the admission-seeking interview. But when we’re about to enter a difficult situation, such as trying to get a confession from a fraud suspect, Voss says that many of the things that we think enhance rapport with others is “counterintuitive and can make an interview go downhill fast.”

One thing you never want to do when beginning an admission-seeking interview with a highly emotional person is ask them how they feel. “I sound like I’m oblivious to how that person is feeling at the moment.” That person isn’t going to appreciate a question like that because they’re a suspect in a fraud case. “You triggered all this negativity off a question that you think is rapport building, when in fact, the opposite is happening,” says Voss.

When starting a difficult interview, the best approach is empathy and recognizing their perspective. Instead of “how are you?” it’s better to say, “Of all the places on earth you could be right now, this is probably the last place you want to be,” Voss tells Fraud Magazine. Recognizing their perspective removes you as a threat, says Voss, because as the fraud examiner, you’re there to get information from the suspect, you’re there as a seeker of truth. If you’re not a threat to them, they’re more likely to supply all the information you need.

What Voss alludes to here with this technique of recognizing your counterpart’s perspective is part of a strategy that his firm trains professionals to use in negotiations called tactical empathy. Tactical empathy is using emotional intelligence to understand another person’s feelings to gain influence over them. It’s a practice of understanding and acknowledging another person’s perspective to build trust with them. Voss calls tactical empathy “listening as a martial” and “empathy on steroids.” He tells Fraud Magazine that the two cornerstone skills he teaches along with this strategy are labeling and mirroring. In the example above, labeling is noting that the interview is the last place on earth they want to be; it’s naming how they feel and validating their emotions. 

Mirroring is repeating the last one to three important words that someone has just said to you. “It's actually a superior way to ask someone, ‘What did you mean by that?’” says Voss.

What labels and mirrors do in a negotiation is pull information out of people quickly and far more efficiently than questions do, Voss explains to Fraud Magazine. “What you want to do is trigger information out of someone without consuming a lot of energy.”

Tactical empathy is using emotional intelligence to understand another person’s feelings to gain influence over them. It's a practice of understanding and acknowledging another person's perspective to build trust.

“The repetition of words shows that you heard what the other person said,” says Voss. “The mirror communicates that you’re trying to understand but you need them to use different words. It enhances people’s thinking and draws information out without creating friction the way a question would.”

Voss points out that learning how to effectively use labels and mirrors can be a difficult skill to master. “People either have a natural predisposition to labels or mirrors. It’s difficult to get out of the hijacking listening moment to articulate understanding.”

The most difficult skill to learn

Labeling and mirroring take a lot of practice. They also require listening skills. According to Voss, the most difficult skill for novice negotiators to master is listening. Most people aren’t good at listening, but it’s the one skill that will make you an expert negotiator. “Most people aren’t good at hearing the other side,” says Voss. “If people even listen at all it’s only listening for the opportunity to hijack a conversation. Listening is analysis and reason.”

To understand how to listen, you need to know how hearing isn’t the same as listening. “Somebody can hear every word you say and not comprehend a bit of it.” Listening is comprehending and being curious. But there’s no quick fix to mastering listening skills. It takes practice. “Know what listening actually is and knowing that empathy is not about agreeing. Then you can get good at listening.”

An unlimited supply of emotional intelligence

Developing negotiation skills comes down to developing and maintaining your emotional intelligence. Voss says that if you continually develop and practice emotional intelligence, you’ll have an unlimited supply at your disposal. “Emotional intelligence isn’t like your IQ; which has a ceiling. Emotional intelligence is pretty much unlimited with practice. Anybody can pick it up if you choose to.”

But Voss advises that if you stop using emotional intelligence, you’re at risk of losing it. You can become an expert in using emotional intelligence, but if you stop trying to get better at it, your skills will erode. “You’ve got to practice every day. In my everyday interactions, I'm practicing because I don’t know when I’ll next be in a negotiation. It’s a perishable skill and doing it is insufficient to maintain it.” 

Jennifer Liebman, CFE, is editor in chief of Fraud Magazine. Contact her at jliebman@ACFE.com.