A PILOT STUDY OF NATURALLY OCCURRING HIGH‐PROBABILITY REQUEST SEQUENCES IN HOSTAGE NEGOTIATIONS

In the current study, the audiotapes from three hostage‐taking situations were analyzed. Hostage negotiator requests to the hostage taker were characterized as either high or low probability. The results suggested that hostage‐taker compliance to a hostage negotiator's low‐probability request was more likely when a series of complied‐with high‐probability requests preceded the low‐probability request. However, two of the three hostage‐taking situations ended violently; therefore, the implications of the high‐probability request sequence for hostage‐taking situations should be assessed in future research.