Now, pay close attention to exactly what we said: “It
looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you
worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns
blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”
We employed our tactical empathy by recognizing and
then verbalizing the predictable emotions of the situation.
We didn’t just put ourselves in the fugitives’ shoes. We
spotted their feelings, turned them into words, and then very
calmly and respectfully repeated their emotions back to
them.
In a negotiation, that’s called labeling.
Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by
acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you
show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you
close to someone without asking about external factors you
know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of
labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional
hack.
Labeling has a special advantage when your counterpart
is tense. Exposing negative thoughts to daylight—“It looks
like you don’t want to go back to jail”—makes them seem
less frightening.
In one brain imaging study,^2 psychology professor
Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los
Angeles, found that when people are shown photos of faces
expressing strong emotion, the brain shows greater activity
in the amygdala, the part that generates fear. But when they
are asked to label the emotion, the activity moves to the