Tactical empathy in negotiations – an underestimated success factor
The “rational actor” in negotiations has served its time. At the latest since the two scientists, psychologists and later Nobel laureates Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman at the Californian universities of Stanford and Berkeley, focused on the “emotional actor” at the beginning of the 1970s, and finally identified emotions as the driving force for behavior, ways of thinking and distortions of perception. A special FBI unit, the Critical Incident Response Group, founded in 1994, has long experimented with therapeutic approaches that appeal to the human need for acceptance. It is no longer a matter of convincing the opposing side with logical arguments, but of establishing a positive relationship with it for tactical reasons. The aim is to influence the formation of judgments about uncertain or unknown facts (judgment heuristics) and to work with cognitive distortions. Empathy instead of mathematics, emotional instead of rational problem solving – this is the new tactic. And: It works!