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Chapter 9. Achieving influence through negotiation

An argument for developing pragmatic awareness
  • Dawn Archer , Rebecca Smithson and Ian Kennedy
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Legal Pragmatics
This chapter is in the book Legal Pragmatics

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a now-infamous case involving 20-year old Grant Sattaur and a Californian Police Negotiator. We focus, in particular, on the last four minutes of their two-hour conversation in 2007, prior to Sattaur taking his own life. We demonstrate that, by this point in their discussion, the Negotiator was not making effective use of recognised crisis negotiation procedures as set out within models such as the behavioural staircase (Vecchi et al. 2005) and SAFE (Hammer 2007). We then go on to demonstrate that, had the negotiator had an awareness of some of the pragmatic principles of communication, he might have been more able to (re)instate components of the negotiation staircase and/or SAFE – even at this late stage in the conversation. This work reflects a larger project, via which the authors explore the linguistic “how to” of influence (Archer and Smithson 2016) with UK police negotiators, in ways that complement their existing knowledge of the psychology of influence (e.g., Cialdini 2008). Police negotiators are particularly encouraged to reject any notion of mythical ‘verbal magic bullets’ (Burleson and Goldsmith 1998: 259), which work regardless of context and/or an interlocutor’s resistance, because of the complexity of crisis negotiation, communicatively speaking.

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a now-infamous case involving 20-year old Grant Sattaur and a Californian Police Negotiator. We focus, in particular, on the last four minutes of their two-hour conversation in 2007, prior to Sattaur taking his own life. We demonstrate that, by this point in their discussion, the Negotiator was not making effective use of recognised crisis negotiation procedures as set out within models such as the behavioural staircase (Vecchi et al. 2005) and SAFE (Hammer 2007). We then go on to demonstrate that, had the negotiator had an awareness of some of the pragmatic principles of communication, he might have been more able to (re)instate components of the negotiation staircase and/or SAFE – even at this late stage in the conversation. This work reflects a larger project, via which the authors explore the linguistic “how to” of influence (Archer and Smithson 2016) with UK police negotiators, in ways that complement their existing knowledge of the psychology of influence (e.g., Cialdini 2008). Police negotiators are particularly encouraged to reject any notion of mythical ‘verbal magic bullets’ (Burleson and Goldsmith 1998: 259), which work regardless of context and/or an interlocutor’s resistance, because of the complexity of crisis negotiation, communicatively speaking.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part 1. Historical pragmatics
  5. Chapter 1. Pleading for life 21
  6. Chapter 2. “How came you not to cry out?” 41
  7. Chapter 3. Implicatures in Early Modern English courtroom records 65
  8. Chapter 4. Literal interpretation and political expediency 81
  9. Part 2. Pragmatics of legal writing and documents
  10. Chapter 5. Making legal language clear to legal laypersons 101
  11. Chapter 6. Interpreting or in legal texts 117
  12. Part 3. Discourse in the courtroom and in police investigation
  13. Chapter 7. The nature of power and control in the interrogative patterns of selected Nigerian courtroom discourse 133
  14. Chapter 8. The language of Egyptian interrogations 157
  15. Chapter 9. Achieving influence through negotiation 181
  16. Chapter 10. “I really don’t know because I’m stupid” 203
  17. Part 4. Legal discourse and multilingualism
  18. Chapter 11. On the balance between invariance and context-dependence 231
  19. Chapter 12. Contextuality of interpretation in non-monolingual jurisdictions 257
  20. Legal pragmatics - subject index proposal 277
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.288.09arc

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part 1. Historical pragmatics
  5. Chapter 1. Pleading for life 21
  6. Chapter 2. “How came you not to cry out?” 41
  7. Chapter 3. Implicatures in Early Modern English courtroom records 65
  8. Chapter 4. Literal interpretation and political expediency 81
  9. Part 2. Pragmatics of legal writing and documents
  10. Chapter 5. Making legal language clear to legal laypersons 101
  11. Chapter 6. Interpreting or in legal texts 117
  12. Part 3. Discourse in the courtroom and in police investigation
  13. Chapter 7. The nature of power and control in the interrogative patterns of selected Nigerian courtroom discourse 133
  14. Chapter 8. The language of Egyptian interrogations 157
  15. Chapter 9. Achieving influence through negotiation 181
  16. Chapter 10. “I really don’t know because I’m stupid” 203
  17. Part 4. Legal discourse and multilingualism
  18. Chapter 11. On the balance between invariance and context-dependence 231
  19. Chapter 12. Contextuality of interpretation in non-monolingual jurisdictions 257
  20. Legal pragmatics - subject index proposal 277
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