Find out how to get what you want from even the most difficult characters. All of us have to deal with difficult people. Whether we’re asking our neighbour to move a fence or our boss for a pay rise, we can struggle to avoid arguments and get what we want. Laurence and Emily Alison are world leaders in forensic psychology, specialising in the most difficult interactions imaginable: criminal interrogations. They advise and train the police, security agencies and top interrogators on how to deal with extremely dangerous suspects when the stakes are high. After 30 years’ work, they have developed a groundbreaking model of interpersonal communication, which they present in their book Rapport. Join them as they reveal how every interaction follows four styles: Control (the lion), Capitulate (the mouse), Confront (the Tyrannosaur) and Co-operate (the monkey). Find out how their approach can help you get what you want and enable you to talk to anyone in any situation.

Professor Alison is Director of the National Unit for Critical Incident Decision-Making and leads the University of Liverpool’s Psychological Resource Network and Chair in Forensic and Investigative Psychology at the university's Institute of Population Health. He has done a lot of work in critical incident decision-making and interviews of high-value detainees (e.g. terrorism suspects). He developed a unique interviewing technique that embeds motivational interviewing, which has its background in addiction therapy, to create a safe space for guilty suspects to open up about what they've done. We will talk about this interviewing technique with him on Thursday.

Laurence Alison, from the University of Liverpool, provides a summary of the messages from his talk at the Centre for Policing Research and Learning conference “Learning from success, near miss and failure” in October 2019. He presented a talk entitled “Decision inertia and failure to act.” He talks about the problems of decision inertia and failures to act within policing, and other settings, as well as the need to devote time to imagining potential future scenarios, to use for short inexpensive training initiatives.

CCTV America is joined by Neil Shortland, expert on terrorist behavior and is with the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts to talk about

Professor Laurence Alison is Director of the Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology at the University of Liverpool. His CREST research examines police and emergency service response during a counter terrorism live exercise, with a specific focus on expertise, team decision making, and command-level inertia.