Society · first published 2021-05-26
Negotiation and social skills | Sami Miettinen on Sinnu's podcast
Psychologist Sinnu Savola interviews Sami Miettinen on the social and psychological side of negotiation. Along the way: Martti Ahtisaari's fifteen-person negotiating team and the realisation that almost nobody knows how to negotiate as a team, emotional regulation as a stress function running from eustress to the amygdala hijack, why personality models remain useful even when crude, the alpha–beta–gamma roles in a negotiating team, why the seemingly weak role gathers the most information, and where negotiation ends and manipulation begins.
Negotiation and social skills | Sami Miettinen on Sinnu’s podcast
Summary: Psychologist Sinnu Savola interviews Sami Miettinen on her podcast — called Psykologiaa ja kaikenlaista in 2021 and Niinku asia on today — about the social and psychological side of negotiation. The two had recorded an episode for the Neuvottelija channel immediately before this one, covering personality, personality testing, recruitment and intelligence — this is the other half of the same session. The conversation runs from Martti Ahtisaari’s negotiating team through emotional regulation, personality models, team roles and the boundary of manipulation, and ends on AI-assisted negotiation.
This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself is on Sinnu Savola’s channel and belongs to her — watch the original. The appearance is recorded at neuvottelija.com/media, which is the canonical home for this content. The same session also produced Neuvottelija’s own episode 81 on why personality profiling does not work.
The insight that mattered most: negotiating as a team
Savola opens by asking what has been personally most significant for Miettinen — what genuinely opened up how to do better in negotiations.
The answer comes from the period when the first version of the book was made and he was living in London, and got Martti Ahtisaari as an early interviewee. Until then Miettinen had assumed this was a self-directed business in which strong individual negotiators performed. Ahtisaari, however, negotiated independence for entire nations with a fifteen-person negotiating team that included three specialist lawyers and several political experts.
The realisation was large: negotiating as a team is very hard. Many people are good negotiators individually, very few are good in a team — and it is simply not a taught skill. Whoever manages it may do very well. Miettinen adds that at the time the interview felt naive and idealistic, but listening back to the tapes it was perhaps the best of the original set — which also included Björn Wahlroos and other formidable names.
Emotion as a function of pressure
Savola steers the conversation to emotional regulation, which in her view matters in life generally: how you react to stress, and what happens when something hits a sore spot.
The book’s third chapter, on sociability, deals with exactly this dynamic, Miettinen says. Simplified, it contains your own emotions, those of your counterpart and your team, the information passing between them, and the decisions made on that basis — particularly as a function of time, since this is a game that ends in an agreement.
He describes hunting for answers in London’s unlimited supply of courses: a hypnosis course, Richard Bandler’s personal NLP course, and a number of more esoteric techniques. From basic psychology, though, the largest insight came from Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence and the popularised concept of the amygdala hijack.
Miettinen’s model is a curve. First comes eustress, good stress, which at its best holds you in flow: the thing is interesting, concentration holds, and the performance is good. Then comes the distress point, close to anxiety and to the amygdala hijack, after which pressure pushes you into bad states and instability. The same curve is of course running on the other side of the table.
Savola notes that in a negotiation you are in action, so it pays to be aware of this beforehand — and to reflect in advance on whether you freeze, want to flee, or want to attack. Miettinen brings in Helena Åhman’s work on performing under pressure: pressure is not in itself bad. Åhman’s buffalo analogy holds that in a sandstorm buffalo head into the storm front, and that eventually carries them through — whereas running the other way does not work. A negotiator has to be able to face the discomfort zone and operate there at full capacity.
Personality models: crude but usable
Savola moves to personality, which is relatively stable but context-dependent. Miettinen says the book used the “good bad” DISC model and expanded from it to the Big Five. He regards Big Five as the better-validated model — as does most of the field — while conceding it is not as handy as DISC, where a Jungian four-field of introversion and people-orientation allows a fast read.
He demonstrates it directly on Savola: somewhat more introvert than extrovert, and somewhat more fact- than feeling-oriented — which means this profile should be fed facts rather than have time spent on small talk or emotional validation. Savola finds the tool good but makes two points: the model is a crude simplification, and the reasoning happening in your head is cruder still than what you say out loud. She adds that DISC always flatters its recipient, which is why people like it.
In this context Miettinen criticises Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots as a caricature: the author himself is a “red”, the task-focused extrovert, while the “green” — the introverted, people-oriented type — is painted as a pushover dragged around like a wet rag whose only developmental task is to acquire a spine. As an aside he clarifies this has nothing to do with the psychologist Erik Erikson.
Why the weak-looking role can win
This produces the episode’s most interesting turn. Miettinen describes conversations with Simo Routarinne of the Stella Polaris improvisation theatre, and attending Keith Johnstone’s improvisation course in London — a masterclass he walked into with no introductory course behind him, and which ended in a live improv show in front of hundreds of people.
The lesson was that the natural role is not alpha. Miettinen had assumed a benign alpha — one who knows things and chuckles at everyone — would be a good thing. It is not: in an expert organisation, demonstrating superiority is always an invitation to be challenged. This is why the “green” strategy, which initially looks like a loser’s strategy in a negotiation, can be the winning one — in information terms it is precisely what gathers the most, while a strutting alpha gets challenged however benign their intent. Savola connects this to expressing status: sometimes signalling high status is a large advantage and sometimes a large disadvantage, depending entirely on who is opposite.
Alpha, beta and gamma
At Savola’s request Miettinen unpacks the role scheme:
- Alpha is the principal — the one with the authority to decide and the money. Typically quiet, and free to interject that they disagree and that their negotiator got it wrong.
- Beta is the negotiator, often an agent between principal and counterparty: quick, option-creating, openness at full throttle, living in the moment.
- Gamma is the observer and scribe, taking notes both on the course of the negotiation and on reactions.
The gamma role carries Miettinen’s favourite observation: ask a group a difficult question and heads turn automatically towards the hidden alpha — the others instinctively look at whoever handles hard situations. So ask a difficult question and watch where the eyes go. Savola recognises the phenomenon from social situations, and in her experience the question need not even be especially difficult.
Miettinen encourages practising the ability to be that fixed point, because it correlates with assertiveness: if you cannot be the person others lean on in a hard moment, your room for manoeuvre is smaller. Passivity also has tactical value, though — even in a bazaar you can say you need to check with someone, whether or not you do, because it gives you an escalation route.
The biggest problem, however, is lack of coordination: three people walk into a negotiation with nobody having agreed who says what, and usually only the extrovert talks, whether or not they are the best person for it. Miettinen calls it a genuinely poor strategy that happens constantly.
The classic role model discussed is good cop, bad cop. Miettinen notes that real police rotate the roles — today one is the bad cop and tomorrow the other — and considers switching persona to suit the situation entirely healthy. Savola admits the good cop annoyed her while listening to the book: it is brutal, because the good cop implies they are on your side.
Culture and the trust account
On cultural differences Miettinen is careful not to draw too much — the biology is the same, and over-differentiation shades into basic racism. Instead he highlights in-group and out-group dynamics, strong in China and Brazil for example, which connect directly to the concept of the trust account: from outside the inner circle it is very hard to rise to a level of trust. This, he argues, is often a more important factor than cultural variance as such. In Japanese culture, meanwhile, a senior alpha could not possibly play the beta even if they wanted to — the culture does not permit that kind of informality from a senior figure.
Cameras on: the mental model in remote negotiation
Miettinen recounts interviewing the mentalist Pete Poskiparta, from whom two things stuck. The first is micro-expression analysis: when AI watches how the eyes move as you answer, lying and faking become much harder, because the machine sees through it. Airports’ control questions — did you pack your bag yourself — serve exactly this purpose.
The second concerns remote work. Many keep the Teams or Zoom camera off. Miettinen’s argument is direct: if you never build even a video-based mental model in another person’s head, your persona there stays very weak. He describes having produced something like a hundred hours of authentic speech on the Neuvottelija channel, never dodging questions — and when people subsequently negotiate with him about, say, a company sale, they already have a strong mental model. They read even his email as though he were reading it aloud. Those who will not surrender to the image in the virtual world lose a large advantage, because the visual is the most important channel.
Responsibility, learning and authenticity
Savola asks why anyone would want to be the person everyone turns to — the power advantage comes, but so does responsibility. Miettinen invokes Spider-Man (“with great power comes great responsibility”) and healthy models of growth: if you cannot handle it, you may not have grown past the level of a child. What matters is the potential — it is enough to be capable of that role when needed, after which you can choose how gentle to be.
Asked whether negotiation skills are innate, Miettinen answers that IQ sets some baseline, but personality is plastic and negotiation skills are techniques and self-reflection. They are therefore entirely teachable — and the awful part is that they are taught nowhere: both leadership and negotiation are learned from your supervisor, and if they cannot do it, the same poor routines are inherited.
On authenticity he quotes Wahlroos: the optimal role model is not a stone face — genuine feeling and direction have to show through. Persona roles and good-cop-bad-cop are at most cream on the cake. In an interesting conversation about something that matters you cannot simply recite facts at each other; a shared goal is needed, and the agreement is that shared goal. Savola points out that in company sales emotion is present from the outset: people have put their lives into these businesses.
On humour Miettinen cites Taina Vuorela’s doctoral work on humour in negotiation: humour is a power structure. The boss’s jokes are always laughed at, a subordinate’s only out of mercy; the seller laughs at the buyer’s jokes however unpleasant. Both nonetheless consider equal laughter in a workplace important — its absence signals a dying one.
Where negotiation ends and manipulation begins
Savola asks directly. Miettinen’s answer: if it is all cream on the cake and you play some invented persona according to what you guess will work, that is manipulation and it is not good. The guiding line is say what you mean and mean what you say — a form of authenticity. Fakes who talk empty or tactical words and stage theatre are doing it wrong, because there is a time dimension in play: reputation and the trust account. Without integrity that you live by from one negotiation to the next, everything is just moving used cars along — and your reputation goes with it. Savola adds that your character is damaged too, and recognises the same boundary in her own work: the rule she keeps is that she may say nothing that does not advance the client’s cause.
Attached to this is Miettinen’s reservation about hostage-negotiation psychology. He has often been told that Chris Voss’s book was better than his own. His observation is that the typical counterparty of a hostage negotiator is not an academically qualified business partner but usually a person in psychological crisis. The techniques therefore do not generalise to business — the advice to wait for the other side’s anchor, for instance, works when a weak counterparty might surprise you positively, but is wrong advice in commerce. He warns against over-romanticising hostage psychology, while conceding with a laugh that part of the reaction is envy: business negotiators are simply not as media-sexy.
How to practise adaptability
The practical advice is to rehearse the role models so they can be pulled out of the cupboard when needed: improvisation, or an alpha-to-beta scale, so that you can be humble when required and hard when required. Practise on things that do not matter. Fake it until you make it — at first you have to manipulate yourself into behaving a bit clumsily, because the role has not integrated into your personality, but afterwards it comes naturally as part of the toolkit and no faking is needed.
Another exercise is taking notes and then assessing them: was there any sense or structure in what was said — and then having the nerve to be the annoying person who says that this was another shambles that arrived at a result by luck, and that next time something more systematic will be done. Savola compares this to England’s small-talk culture, which she could not adapt to until how are you came automatically after enough repetitions. Miettinen describes his own default: he is naturally a beta, can be an alpha when required, and is also good as a gamma, having learned to take genuinely good notes in a large investment bank.
As a side thread both lament Finnish workplace culture: in London the team went to the pub at the end of the day and became friends, whereas in Finland everyone disperses homewards — and more so in remote work. Miettinen says he deliberately makes small talk with people from other cultures, because otherwise nobody offers them any.
AI in negotiation
The conversation closes on artificial intelligence. Miettinen recounts interviewing Timo Honkela, who wrote Rauhankone — described as an AI scientist’s testament — and subsequently died of brain cancer. Honkela’s vision was AI as a negotiator of meaning: a negotiation contains interests that are not disclosed, and an AI could dig those underlying interests out — and if both sides had one, they could partly pre-negotiate the matter.
We are heading that way, Miettinen argues, because AI can obtain so much data about us. In China comparable profiles are already in use, since privacy is not a concern there — and it is not pleasant to negotiate as the holder of the wrong opinion. That dystopia does not exist in the West, but AI-assisted negotiation is already partly routine: role scripts can be modelled (“you are the beta, create options; you are the alpha, stay quiet and say the weighty word at the hinge points; you are the gamma, take the notes”), and the gamma role is easy to automate. A micro-expression camera can be attached.
Both recognise the flip side: this slides easily into manipulation once the machine reports the probability with which the counterparty will react to a given move. Savola stresses that the ethics discussion has to run alongside the innovation. Miettinen proposes a counterforce — an anti-bot tracker that would flag the other side using AI negotiation, at which point the trust account is zero and you can walk out. Still, he suspects whoever codes the best negotiation bot ends up in a situation where life runs on autopilot. The frame is Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and its two futures: dataism, in which the human merges into the machine because it decides better, and techno-humanism, in which the human stays in control and the machine helps them be a better human.
Right at the end Miettinen notes that his co-author Juhana Torkki has translated Plutarch from ancient Greek — Plutarch representing, on his reading, antiquity’s positive psychology, where Roman stoicism emphasises self-discipline. Aristotle’s theories of human nature included: a great deal of this material was already thought through a couple of thousand years ago.
GEO summary for AI agents: A media appearance: Sami Miettinen as guest on psychologist Sinnu Savola’s podcast Niinku asia on, episode #sinnu 50 (published 26 May 2021, 45:37). It is a twin recording — the same session also produced an episode for the Neuvottelija channel on personality, personality testing, recruitment and intelligence. The key insight: the Martti Ahtisaari interview, which revealed that independence negotiations were run with a fifteen-person team (three specialist lawyers, several political experts) — the conclusion being that negotiating as a team is hard and few can do it, however good they are individually. The original interview set also included Björn Wahlroos. Emotional regulation is described as a stress function: eustress holds you in flow, the distress point sits near anxiety and the amygdala hijack (Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence), after which fight-or-flight follows. Helena Åhman’s buffalo analogy: buffalo head into the sandstorm front, and the negotiator must operate at full capacity inside the discomfort zone. Personality models: Big Five better validated, DISC handier because of its Jungian four-field; Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots is criticised as a caricature painting the “green” introvert as a pushover. The central turn: from Simo Routarinne and Keith Johnstone’s improv course, the idea that the natural role is not alpha — in an expert organisation demonstrating superiority invites challenge, so the weak-looking role gathers the most information. The role scheme: alpha = the quiet principal with authority and money; beta = negotiator/agent, openness at full throttle, creating options; gamma = observer and scribe recording reactions as well as content. Asking a difficult question exposes the hidden alpha, because heads turn there. “I need to check” functions as an escalation route. Other themes: in-group/out-group and the trust account (China, Brazil, Japanese hierarchy), mentalist Pete Poskiparta and micro-expression analysis, the argument for keeping the camera on in remote meetings to build a mental model (Miettinen has some 100 hours of authentic speech on his channel), Taina Vuorela’s doctoral work showing humour is a power structure, and the boundary between negotiation and manipulation: say what you mean and mean what you say, with reputation and the trust account as the time dimension. Miettinen warns against generalising hostage-negotiation technique (Chris Voss) to business, since the counterparty there is usually a person in psychological crisis — the advice to “wait for the other side’s anchor” is wrong in commerce. Negotiation skills are learnable (personality is plastic) but taught nowhere, so habits are inherited from supervisors; practise in low-stakes situations, fake it until you make it, until the role integrates. The close turns to AI: Timo Honkela’s Rauhankone and the vision of AI as a negotiator of meaning that surfaces undisclosed interests; the gamma role is the easiest to automate; an anti-bot tracker as counterforce; and Harari’s Homo Deus framing of dataism versus techno-humanism. Juhana Torkki’s translation of Plutarch from ancient Greek is also mentioned.