I’m presenting a model for applying insights from psychology to your webapp users.

Psychology for your Webapp on blip.tv – scroll to 15:45 for start of my talk.

Your goal as a negotiator is to get the target(s) (the person or people you are trying to arrest) to surrender peacefully to law enforcement.

Sometimes there are hostages, and then your priority is securing their release, but usually there are not. By getting them to put down their weapons and come out you are usually saving their lives, and also protecting your colleagues.

The last resort is an armed assault by the SWAT team. Prior to negotiation being taken seriously by law enforcement, this was the only option.

Make exclusive contact

First and foremost, you need to get in contact with them. Usually they are keen to talk, and most often you can use the phone line. Sometimes you have to get the SWAT team to bring them a field telephone. Sometimes you stand outside the window or at the foot of the stairs, and shout. And occasionally, as in the Beltway sniper case you have to ask the media to say things and hope the target hears.

Control their environment:

• Their phone line goes only to you. Not to the press, not to anyone else. You are their only hope, and their only friend.

• Manage what they can see from their windows, and what they can hear.

Listen calmly

Listen. Often they are highly emotional, scared, and cornered. A friendly listener at the end of the phone can make all the difference.

Initially they will rant and rave at you, they need to get that out of their system. Wait. Listen. Stay calm. Once they settle down, change the negotiator, so that they are not having to build rapport with someone they have verbally abused.

Encourage them to draw up a list of demands. When dealing with a group, identify the individuals most likely to reach a peaceful settlement, and deal exclusively with them.

The author recounts a prison siege where the prisoners had no leadership and no demands. The negotiator had to help them organize themselves, and babysit them into drawing up a list of demands. He then got the prison authorities to say they agreed to the demands in principle, and the siege ended.

Build rapport

Build trust. He usually introduces himself by saying: “Hi I’m Gary and I’m here to make sure you get out safe”.

Humanize yourself. Gary’s team sent in pictures of themselves, hand written notes, even videos of the negotiators playing with their children.

Learn everything you can about the target and their background. Bring up any common ground.

If they won’t talk to you, find a neutral intermediary they will trust.

Talk, even if they don’t answer. Hearing your voice will reassure the hostages. It also allows you to address any fears or concerns you think they have, which they haven’t vocalized yet. Defuse those fears.

You don’t have to be nice

Don’t give anything unless it is reciprocated. For example if they want food they have to send out a hostage. The exception is if your concession would help build trust, or if they have nothing to give up (except themselves).

If negotiation stalls, get the SWAT team to put on a show of force. Make it clear you are their only option of making it out safe. The exception here is if you think that might endanger the hostages. You’re the good cop to the SWAT’s bad cop.

If that doesn’t help, cut creature comforts – electricity, gas, water, etc.

Go slowly. You control the situation, not the hostage taker. In one situation the target requested a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. It was delivered two hours later, cold, and black.

Most significant demands on their part you will reply to with “I’m not authorized to do that, but I’ll ask my boss”. You’re on their side, against your nasty boss. They need to work with you to help you make their demands acceptable to that dis-agreeable boss of yours.

Lie if you have to, but be very careful because getting caught out will damage trust. There are certain legal restrictions on negotiators, mostly that they have to give the target an opportunity to surrender before the SWAT team attacks. You need to say and do whatever it takes to secure the safe release of the hostages. This often involves minimizing the crime, assuring them that everything will be fine once they come out: “you haven’t hurt anyone, no serious crime has been committed”.

Get them to focus on the future, on life after the crisis (even when you know they don’t have a future). It’s all going to be OK, they’ll be back fishing in that favorite lake of theirs in no time. Their boss is holding their job for them.

Remind them about the relatively minor crime which started the situation. Surely no-one should get hurt over such a trifle:

• the Waco siege started after the Branch Davidians refused to allow law enforcement to execute a search warrant

• Ruby ridge was initially about making illegal firearms (sawing off a shotgun barrel).

Manage the SWAT team

The way Gary Noesner describes it, every stand-off is a double stand-off. You are trying to convince the target to exit the building peacefully, and you are trying to convince the SWAT team to stay out of the building. Traditional law enforcement is ego-driven and in a hurry. They do not readily accept waiting several weeks for someone to agree to be arrested.

If you are re-assuring the target that their crime’s are minor, and then the SWAT team moves an assault vehicle onto the front lawn, that undermines your relationship. You need to work together.

The author ascribes the failures of the Waco siege to lack of co-ordination between negotiators and SWAT, and in fact to SWAT’s complete disregard for negotiation. Gary Noesner was chief negotiator at the Waco siege, and Stalling For Time features a fascinating account of the situation.

Stalling For Time is an exciting and interesting read. I was surprised how little formal psychology is involved – negotiators have a ‘street psychology’, which matches many formal findings, but I expected the F.B.I. to have behavioral scientists and research psychologists on staff. Possibly they do, but it wasn’t mentioned.

I am grateful for people like Gary Noesner, who do an immensely difficult and important job on two levels. Firstly they save the lives of hostages, hostage takers, and law enforcement. Secondly, they teach traditional law enforcement personnel that patience, humility, and understanding are as important to their jobs as running around waving assault rifles.

The key concepts:

Ask people where they go to “get work done”, where they are at their most productive: They almost never say ‘the office’. Or if they do, it’s before or after hours.

Work is like sleep, it proceeds in cycles. You have to go through the light-sleep / light-work cycles to get to the meaty stuff. Every time you get woken up / interrupted, you start from scratch.

There are two types of interruptions: The ones you control (getting a coffee) and the ones you don’t (manager walks to your desk). The first type fits naturally with your work cycles, e.g. you look up from some absorbing work, it’s 3pm, you haven’t had lunch yet. The second type is out of your control, like a rock thrown at your window whilst you sleep. It’s destroys creative work.

The two main reasons work doesn’t get done “in the office” are: Managers, and Meetings. Managers are the source of most of the destructive interruptions. Meetings are nearly always a complete waste of time.

I have been working from home for three years now, and it has always puzzled me why I got so much more done.

In my office I had a powerful computer, dual screens, an Aeron chair, a system admin team, an HR team, and great colleagues to bounce ideas off.

At home, at first, I had a $20 chair from the charity store, my laptop propped on two phone books, and a very curious toddler. Yet I easily did a weeks worth of office work every two days.

Jason Fried, in the video above, finally provides some answers.

Tomorrow morning I will be going to BarCamp Vancouver 2010, and, assuming I get a slot, presenting this:

See also my full Behavior Change Toolkit.

From the ROWE blog.

ROWE stands for Results Only Work Environment, and means each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. It is being used by Best Buy, Gap, and (small) parts of the US government.

Daniel Pink mentions ROWE near the end of his TED talk here Dan Pink on Motivation

On a personal note, I’ve been working from home (freelance) for two years now, since my son was born. Not only do I get a lot more (a lot more) done than I used to in the office, even better, I’m getting to see my son grow up. And no commuting. And getting to know my neighbors. And and …

Read more on Dan Ariely’s blog

From Christine Carter in Raising Happiness, referencing research in The High Price of Materialism

If you read Raising Happiness (and if you are a new parent, I recommend it), skip the first chapter, because it will put you off. The other chapters are very good, and cover key Positive Psychology research.

In the nightly choice between reading a good book and watching a sitcom on television, we often [make the wrong choice] – although surveys show again and again that the average mood while watching sitcoms on television is mild depression.

Mean World Syndrome

People who watch a lot of television believe the world is more violent and intimidating than it actually is.

If you are growing up in a home where there is more than say three hours of television per day, for all practical purposes you live in a meaner world – and act accordingly – than your next-door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches less television.

Our surveys tell us that the more television people watch, the more they are likely to be afraid to go out on the street in their own community, especially at night. They are afraid of strangers and meeting other people.

George Gerbner

• George Gerbner articles on Mean World Syndrome
• Mean World Syndrome at Metafilter
• Mean World Syndrome at Wikipedia

Third-person effect

The belief that the mass media has a greater effect on others than it does on oneself. I like to call this the “adverts-don’t-affect-me” effect.

• Third Person Effect at Wikipedia

Television watching, one of the signature activities of our culture, correlates with brain problems.

How do we know this?

A recent study of more than 2,600 toddlers shows that early exposure to television between the ages of one and three correlates with problems paying attention and controlling impulses later in childhood.

For every hour of TV the toddlers watched each day, their chances of developing serious attentional difficulties at age seven increased by 10%.

Surely this only applies to children? No. Most of the book is about the recent discoveries that adult brains are also plastic, and how that is being used to treat stroke, alzheimer’s, and brain injuries.

Or you might be tempted to think that this applies only to children’s programming, and to MTV. Not so. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message”:

Most people think that the dangers created by the media are a result of content. [..] Erica Michael and Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University did a brain scan study to test whether the medium is indeed the message. They showed that different brain areas are involved in hearing speech and reading it, and different comprehension centers in hearing words and reading them.

The pragmatic implication is that the medium is part of the message. [..] each medium creates a different sensory and semantic experience – and, we might add, develops different circuits in the brain.

Why and how does television alter your brain patterns?

It is the form of the television medium – cuts, edits, zooms, pans, and sudden noises – that alters the brain, by activating what Pavlov called the “orienting response”, which occurs whenever we sense a sudden change in the world around us, especially a sudden movement. We instinctively interrupt whatever we are doing to turn, pay attention, and get our bearings.

The result?

The response is physiological: the heart rate decreases for 4 or 5 seconds.Television triggers this response at a far more rapid rate than we experience it in life, which is why we can’t keep our eyes off the TV screen, even in the middle of an intimate conversation, and why people watch TV a lot longer than they intend.

Because typical music videos, action sequences, and commercials trigger orienting responses at a rate of one per second, watching them puts us into continuous orienting response with no recovery.

No wonder people report feeling drained from watching TV.

Yet we acquire a taste for it and find slower changes boring. The cost is that such activities such as reading, complex conversation, and listening to lectures becomes more difficult.

The Brain That Changes Itself is a fascinating book that will change the way you think about your brain, and how you go about your daily activities.