Talking to Toddlers and Talking to Terrorists |
In the last few years I've read a few thousand pages about negotiation. Massive corporate mergers. Post-conflict peace deals. CIA negotiations with Colombian cartels. Couples therapy manuals. Hostage-standoff case studies. I wanted to understand what actually moves people—what gets someone from dug-in and defensive to open and cooperative, across the full spectrum of human conflict.
The best negotiation book I found had a hand-drawn psychedelic yellow and green cover. It was published in 1980. It's about toddlers.
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, is still in print, still routinely described as life-changing by exhausted parents everywhere, and in my opinion the most practical communication book ever written. The authors had an intuitive genius for what actually works with the most irrational, amygdala-driven, impossible-to-reason-with creature on the planet, the human three-year-old.
A few years after reading it, I picked up Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, the former FBI lead hostage negotiator. Within a few chapters I had a strange sense of déjà vu. The techniques Voss used to talk armed, desperate people out of bank robberies and kidnappings were almost identical to what Faber and Mazlish recommended for getting a four-year-old to put on shoes.
I've been turning that over ever since. If the techniques are the same at both ends of the spectrum—the hostage standoff and the morning school run—what does that tell us about how human beings actually work?
Quite a lot, it turns out.
When the Amygdala Is Running the Show
Here's what's happening in the brain when someone becomes unreasonable.
A study placed undergrads in an fMRI machine and showed them emotionally charged images. Researchers watched in real time as blood flooded into the amygdala—the brain's alarm system—and drained out of the prefrontal cortex, where rational thinking, impulse control, and long-term planning live. The insular cortex, home of empathy and social intelligence, also went dim. The whole evolved, sophisticated outer brain essentially went offline.
This is what........