36 pages • 1 hour read
Chris VossNever Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The New Rules”
Fifteen years into a career as a hostage negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Voss visits Harvard. When he arrives on campus, two professors who study negotiation invite him for a chat that turns into a hostage-negotiation roleplaying session; the professors, who demand a ransom for the return of Voss’s son, become flustered as Voss responds with a series of open-ended questions. Eventually, one admits that “the FBI might have something to teach us” (4). A year later, Voss takes a negotiation course at Harvard. During the first few days of class, the students pair off to negotiate practice scenarios; with his improvised, “emotionally attuned” approach, Voss manages to get better deals than the other students, who rely more on scripted techniques.
Voss reviews the history of negotiation. “Brute force” prevailed as a tactic until a series of high-stakes hostage negotiations in the 1970s ended poorly, leading to scrutiny of the FBI’s response. During the 1980s, academic study of negotiation expanded with the establishment of the Harvard Negotiation Project; the project’s founders published Getting to Yes (1981), an influential book that characterizes negotiation as a rational process leading to win-win solutions. Meanwhile, professors working at the University of Chicago demonstrated that people’s emotions usually take precedence over rational thought. Around the same time, the FBI established a hostage negotiating team. Following a series of setbacks in the 1990s, the team began to incorporate psychological techniques designed to establish emotional rapport after realizing the limitations of a strictly rational approach.
Voss concludes by emphasizing negotiation’s central role in everyday life. He also provides a chapter-by-chapter overview of the rest of the book.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Be a Mirror”
In September 1993 two men break into a bank in New York City and take several hostages. A combined force of local and federal officers set up base near the bank, along with a SWAT team. Voss, who is just beginning his career as a hostage negotiator, coaches an officer through his phone call with the robber. Throughout the call the robber tricks Voss and the police into thinking that he has more accomplices and hostages than he does.
After several hours, Voss takes over as speaker and uses a deep, reassuring voice. He employs a technique he calls mirroring, or repeating back three or so key words. By doing so, he induces the robber to reveal more information about his plan, including mention of a driver who got away. When Voss calls the robber by his name, Chris Watts, which the police discovered by checking nearby license plates, Watts gives the phone to his accomplice, Bobby Goodwin. After speaking with Voss, Bobby agrees to leave the building. The police later learn that Bobby only expected to rob an ATM, not to take hostages and rob the bank. Speaking with a third negotiator, and trying to buy time, Watts agrees to release two hostage tellers in turn. At length, he leaves the bank himself and is arrested. No one is harmed.
Drawing on this experience, Voss explains that each negotiation is a process of discovery in which assumptions can be misleading. Hypotheses must be confirmed or rejected as new information becomes clear. Actively listening to your counterpart (Voss’s term for the other party in any negotiation) is more important than thinking about what you’ll say. Voss highlights several techniques to calm down a tense counterpart, including using what he calls a “late-night FM DJ voice” (44), starting sentences with “I’m sorry,” mirroring, and following up mirror statements with a few seconds of silence. Voss concludes with a story about one of his students who avoided a week of busywork by mirroring her boss, forcing him to reconsider his requests.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Readers may question Voss’s decision to open his book with an account of a roleplaying session rather than a high-stakes negotiation. In context, however, Voss’s encounter with the Harvard professors fills an important role, demonstrating just how much Voss’s approach differs from the one practiced in academia at the time. His subsequent overview of the history of negotiation further sets the stage for the rest of the book by introducing the foundational assumption underlying each of Voss’s tactics: that people are irrational, emotional beings, and negotiation strategies should reflect that understanding. Chapter 2 continues this theme with a look at mirroring, a technique that facilitates emotional connection between negotiator and counterpart. Although most of Voss’s techniques can be applied in any order, it makes sense for him to start with mirroring because it is widely applicable and appears frequently in later chapters.
Just as Voss encourages readers to adopt a confident, upbeat tone in negotiations, he presents a similar persona in the text, which is written in first person. Occasional jokes pepper the text, as when he refers to himself and his FBI colleagues as “meatheads” compared to the professors who study negotiation. As is typical of self-help books, Voss frequently addresses readers directly (using phrases like “you’ll learn”) when he wants to emphasize the personal value of the principles he teaches. For maximum ease of reading and reference, Voss divides each chapter into small sections with titled headings and bulleted lists of main ideas at the end. These organizational choices demonstrate Voss’s awareness that his role as an author mirrors his work as a negotiator in many ways.
Throughout these chapters and beyond, Voss makes various claims about the ways people typically think and respond to certain types of stimulus in negotiation. To support his claims, he often cites psychological studies as well as anecdotes. For instance, when he first introduces mirroring, he cites a study showing that waiters who mirror their customers earn higher tips before telling the rest of Watts’s story. Not every point Voss makes has a study to match, but supporting the main concepts with research lends his argument more credence. The anecdotes are less useful for demonstrating universal principles, but they offer vivid illustrations of negotiation in action.
