---
title: "Negotiation, Social Situations and Reading the Other Person — Sami Miettinen on Niinku asia on"
titleOriginal: "Neuvottelutaito, sosiaalisen tilanteen ja toisen ihmisen ymmärtäminen (Sami Miettinen) | #sinnu 50"
description: "Psychologist Sinnu Savola interviews Sami Miettinen on the social side of negotiation: emotional regulation and the amygdala hijack, why personality models are useful even when crude, the alpha–beta–gamma roles in a negotiating team, why the seemingly weak role often gathers the most information, and where negotiation ends and manipulation begins."
format: "podcast"
show: "Niinku asia on"
episode: "#sinnu 50"
hosts: ["Sinnu Savola"]
date: 2021-05-26
duration: "45:37"
language: "fi"
original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGFifW-97PQ
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/sinnu-50-negotiation-and-social-skills/
---

# Negotiation, Social Situations and Reading the Other Person — Sami Miettinen on Niinku asia on

Psychologist **Sinnu Savola** interviewed Sami Miettinen for her podcast *Niinku asia on*
on the social and psychological side of negotiation. The two had recorded an episode for
the Neuvottelija channel immediately beforehand, on personality testing, recruitment and
intelligence; this is the companion half.

**The insight that mattered most.** Asked what has genuinely changed how he negotiates,
Miettinen names the Martti Ahtisaari interview conducted for the first version of the book
while he was living in London. He had assumed strong negotiators worked as self-directed
individuals. Ahtisaari, negotiating independence for entire nations, ran a fifteen-person
team including three specialist lawyers and several political experts. The realisation:
negotiating *as a team* is very hard, many people are good individually and almost nobody
is good in a group. At the time the interview struck him as idealistic and almost naive;
listening back, he considers it the best of the original set, which also included Björn
Wahlroos.

**Emotion as a function of pressure.** The sociability chapter of the book deals with own
emotions, the counterpart's, the team's, the information passing between them, and the
decisions made on that basis over time. Miettinen's mental model is a curve: stress begins
as eustress, which holds you in flow and produces a good performance, and passes a distress
point close to anxiety and to what Daniel Goleman popularised as the amygdala hijack — after
which pressure pushes you into fight-or-flight and instability. The same curve is running
on the other side of the table. Helena Åhman's contribution, from her work on performing
under pressure, is that pressure is not in itself bad: buffalo walk *into* the sandstorm,
and the negotiator's job is to be able to operate at full capacity inside the discomfort.

**Personality models: crude but useful.** Miettinen prefers Big Five as the validated model
while conceding DISC is handier, because a Jungian four-field of introversion and
people-orientation can be read quickly in the room and then used to shape how information
is delivered. He is scathing about Thomas Erikson's *Surrounded by Idiots* as a caricature
that flatters the reader — the author's own "red" type is the task-focused extrovert, while
the introverted, people-oriented "green" is drawn as a doormat.

**Why the weak-looking role can win.** From Simo Routarinne and from Keith Johnstone's
improvisation work, Miettinen took the lesson that the natural role is not alpha. In an
expert organisation, demonstrating superiority is an invitation to be challenged. The
"green" posture that looks like a loser's strategy can be the winning one, because it is
what gathers the most information.

**Alpha, beta, gamma.** The principal, holding the money and the decision, is the quiet
alpha. The agent — Miettinen's own natural role — is the beta: openness at full throttle,
creating options, answering hard questions under pressure without freezing. The gamma is
the observer and scribe, recording both what was said and how people reacted. A practical
trick: ask a difficult question and watch whose way the heads turn, and you have found the
hidden decision-maker. Needing to "check with my principal" is also a deliberate escalation
route. Most teams, he notes, arrive with three people and no agreement about who says what,
and the extrovert simply talks whether or not they should.

**Culture and the trust account.** Rather than broad cultural generalisations, Miettinen
points to in-group and out-group dynamics — strong in China and Brazil — and to how hard it
is for an outsider to rise into the in-group. Japanese hierarchy makes it near-impossible
for a senior figure to adopt the informal beta role even if they wanted to.

**Cameras on.** Citing mentalist Pete Poskiparta on micro-expression analysis, Miettinen
argues that people who keep their camera off in remote meetings give up a real advantage:
if you never build a video-based mental model in other people's heads, your persona there
stays weak. Having produced something like a hundred hours of unevasive speech on his own
channel, counterparties arrive with a strong model of him already formed.

**Negotiation versus manipulation.** The line Miettinen draws is authenticity: *say what
you mean and mean what you say*. Playing a persona purely for effect is manipulation and it
is bad business, because reputation and the trust account run across negotiations. Without
integrity you are selling used cars, and your reputation follows. He is also sceptical of
importing hostage-negotiation technique into business: a hostage taker is usually a person
in psychological crisis, and advice like "wait for the other side's anchor" does not
generalise to a commercial table. Björn Wahlroos's point stands against the stone-faced
ideal — genuine feeling and direction have to show through, with role technique only as
cream on the cake.

**Can it be learned?** Personality is plastic and negotiation is technique plus
self-reflection, so yes — but it is taught almost nowhere, which means people inherit their
supervisor's habits, good or bad. Practise roles where the stakes are low; *fake it till you
make it* until the behaviour integrates and stops being a performance.

The conversation closes on artificial intelligence. Miettinen recalls interviewing **Timo
Honkela**, author of *Rauhankone*, who envisioned AI as a negotiator of meaning — surfacing
the underlying interests each side conceals, so that two such systems could pre-negotiate.
The gamma role, he notes, is the easiest to automate. The dystopian version already exists
where privacy does not, and Harari's *Homo Deus* supplies the frame: dataism, in which the
human defers to the machine because it decides better, against techno-humanism, in which
the human stays in control and the machine makes them better at being human.

Original recording (Niinku asia on): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGFifW-97PQ

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Niinku asia on #sinnu 50 — Negotiation, Social Situations and Reading the Other Person — Sami Miettinen on Niinku asia on, 2021-05-26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGFifW-97PQ. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/sinnu-50-negotiation-and-social-skills/.