Benni Zaiser
The coding of 48 hours of simulated hostage negotiations from several field experiments led to a serendipitous find outside the initial trials’ focus: crisis negotiators, who complete more training sessions on interpersonal communication than any other law enforcement officer, communicated in patterns that reflected cognitive bias and undermined their efforts to effectively build rapport (Study 1). Empathetic projection, egocentric bias, implicit bias, and overconfidence were among those most frequently observed.
Viewing the central role that empathy plays in successful rapport-building and its susceptibility to projection bias, a follow-up study of semi-structured interviews with 13 crisis negotiators process-traced how empathetic projection, as a heuristic, undermines empathy (Study 2).
Currently, a large-n online study (n > 800; Study 3) is underway to determine and compare proportions of empathetic projection in samples from several populations. Samples include police crisis negotiators, frontline police officers, crisis workers, and university students. In an effort to move the study’s validity beyond the limits of samples from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, the study acquired participants from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hong Kong.
The findings of this mixed-method, multi-study research project have already and will further provide meaningful insight into the dynamics of de-escalation and rapport-building. The corresponding tangible and actionable lessons can be easily implemented into de-escalation, communication, and interpersonal skills training. Especially at the basic (academy) training level, the content of these trainings has not changed significantly, since the incorporation of basic crisis intervention principles, such as active listening and the use of hooks and triggers. The presentation will present an additional (analytic) layer of interpersonal communication and its practical implications for all police officers in an engaging, interactive way.
Biography
Benni Zaiser is part of the University of Liverpool’s Tactical Decision Making Research Group and a PhD student at the University’s Department of Psychological Science. He is also part of the editorial team of the forthcoming Palgrave MacMillan multi-volume book series Police Conflict Management. His research interests are at the intersection of how what we think and how we say it. He is an active duty frontline and mental health support/crisis intervention officer with one of Canada’s largest police services and former crisis negotiator with Germany’s federal crisis negotiations team.