4 The Art and Science of
Motivating Conversation

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

—Epictetus

After decades of service in the field, Peter Earnest returned to the United States to continue to serve at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. One of his assignments was covering the Senate staff for the CIA on Capitol Hill, and he became friendly with Mike Epstein, a staffer on the Senate Oversight Committee. When two women joined the committee as fellow staffers, Epstein told them, “You have to meet Peter Earnest. He’s our main liaison to the CIA.” He brought the women to Langley, where Peter chatted with them and gave them a tour of the lobby. On the way back in the car, the two women were talking about their experience. Peter recalls: “Mike told me that one of the women remarked, ‘And Peter Earnest—wasn’t he charming?’ Mike said, ‘Remember: He’s paid to be charming.’”¹

After the attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, some CIA personnel didn’t seem so charming when they were linked to physical abuses such as waterboarding. Nonetheless, for the most part, the image of a charismatic spy à la Sean Connery’s James Bond has prevailed as the image of someone in the clandestine service.

Contrast this with the stereotypical persona of the military interrogator, trained to use the tools of fear and intimidation that one would never associate with a charming individual. In some ways, however, the two are close cousins. Both have skills in motivating conversation that, at their core, are very similar in nature.

In this chapter, I’ll take a look at military and non-military ways we might talk about motivating conversations, including how they might be combined and how to match personal style with the motivators.

Military-Style Motivators

The U.S. Army Field Manual (FM) issued in 1992 listed 14 interrogation techniques, which are defined as approaches to help establish rapport. When you go through them, you’ll realize that “rapport” is used in a broader sense than the way I’ve previously defined it—that is, an affinity for another person. In the context of a military interrogation, rapport may mean an understanding and cooperation that takes shape despite the reluctance or hostility of the source. Thinking in terms of military-style motivation as captured in the approaches can be useful when your source doesn’t really want to come clean—a situation that is explored in Chapters 8 and 9 of the book.

When the FM was revised in September 2006, it listed 19 approaches, with two new ones requiring special approval from someone in command, and the other additions just variations on the themes already captured in the original group. The approaches with the official descriptions² (many paraphrased) are:

» Direct: The interrogator asks questions directly related to information sought, making no effort to conceal the interrogation’s purpose.

» Incentive: The incentive approach is based on the application of inferred discomfort upon a source who lacks willpower. He wants something and will talk to get it. It could something immediate, such as having assurance that a buddy is okay, or it could be something more long-term, such as political asylum.

» Emotional: In the Field Manual of 2006, this became a category of approaches that encompasses seven different techniques. I think the earlier version has clearer distinctions, however, and will rely on those. In the previous FM, the emotional approach has two versions: emotional love and emotional hate. The interrogator uses verbal and emotional ruses in applying pressure to the source’s dominant emotions.

The emotional love approach is useful with a source who has a great love for his unit and fellow soldiers. The interrogator may take advantage of it by telling the source that by providing salient information, he may shorten the battle and save the lives of his friends.

The emotional hate approach takes advantage of the inverse relationship of the source to his comrades. It could rise out of a feeling of being left behind to be captured, for example. The interrogator then gives him an opportunity for revenge.

» Fear Up: This approach is the exploitation of a source’s pre-existing fear during the period of capture and interrogation—a fear that may be justified or unjustified. It’s certainly justified if he knows that his captors saw him shoot one of their own.

Fear Up Mild heightens fear by making the source realize the unpleasant consequences of not cooperating. It doesn’t involve the yelling and banging that would characterize the fear up (harsh) approach.

Fear Up Harsh involves displays of physical power and voiced threats. It does not mean that the interrogator perpetrates physical abuse, though.

» Fear Down: This technique is nothing more than calming the source and convincing him he will be properly and humanely treated, or telling him the war for him is mercifully over and he need not go into combat again.

» Pride and Ego: The strategy of this approach is to trick the source into revealing desired information by goading or flattering him. It’s considered most effective with sources who have displayed weakness or feelings of inferiority.

Pride and Ego Up: The source is constantly flattered into providing certain information in order to gain some kind of special benefit or credit. This is one instance when the Field Manual even provides body language cues that the approach is working. It instructs interrogators to watch for the source raising his head, getting a look of pride in the eyes, a swelling chest, and stiffening of the back.

Pride and Ego Down: This approach is based on attacking the source’s sense of personal worth. Any source who shows any real or imagined inferiority or weakness about himself or his loyalty to his unit, or perhaps was captured under embarrassing circumstances, would be a prime candidate for this approach.

» Futility: In this approach, the interrogator convinces the source that resistance to questioning is futile; she’s just playing on doubts that already exist in the source’s mind. It’s a way of confirming that there is no way of escaping, reinforcing his suspicion that the battle is lost anyway and all of his buddies are in the same situation, or using any other scenario of hopelessness to get him to cooperate.

» We Know All: In this approach, the interrogator walks in with as much information as possible about the source. The problem is, unless he has enough to go on to sustain detailed questioning, the source will see right through him. There’s another version of this called “file and dossier,” which means the interrogator walks in with a paper file on the source. He might be flipping through blank pages, but he has to make it look like there is a lot of information. Even when the Field Manual was updated in 2006, this approach was described as involving a paper file, but one can only assume that with the proliferation of mobile devices and the disappearance of paper files, the model for “file and dossier” will change.

» Establish Your Identity: This is a great trap that law enforcement personnel use as well. The interrogator insists that the source has been correctly identified as an infamous individual wanted by higher authorities on serious charges, and that he is not the person he purports to be. In an effort to clear himself of this allegation, the source makes a genuine and detailed effort to establish or substantiate his true identity. In the process, he may provide the interrogator with information and leads for further development.

» Repetition: The interrogator repeats the question to erode resistance—sometimes through sheer boredom. An upscale version of this is rephrasing the question and repeating it.

» Rapid Fire: This approach involved a psychological ploy based on the principles that (1) everyone likes to be heard when he speaks, and (2) it’s confusing to be interrupted mid-sentence with an unrelated question. One or two interrogators ask a series of questions in such a manner that the source doesn’t have time to answer one completely before being driven to the next one. The source tends to contradict himself because he has no time to consider his answers thoughtfully; this gives the interrogator an opportunity to point out inconsistencies. In countering with information to explain himself, the source may end up releasing more than he had intended.

» Silent: The interrogator says nothing; he just makes unfliching eye contact with the source. It’s normal human behavior to want to fill a void with words, so the source ultimately might say something like “What do you want from me?”

» Change of Scene: The idea in using this approach is to get the source away from the atmosphere of an interrogation room or setting. This was one of Scharff’s techniques: He would take prisoners out for walks in the forest or even give them a ride in a German aircraft.

   In addition, the two in the 2006 version of the FM that have to be authorized are:

Good Cop/Bad Cop, which is also known as Friend and Foe, or Mutt and Jeff (the latter named after the comic strip characters who were physical opposites, one tall and the other short). This involves a team of two interrogators, one who is strict, or even harsh, and the other, sympathetic.

False Flag, in which the interrogator tries to convince the source that he’s been detained by forces other than U.S. forces; the idea is to get him to feel more inclined to cooperate with Americans.

In the following section, you will see how most of these approaches relate to the eight categories of conversation motivators that fit the mentality of a questioner who is not in the battlefield.

Non-Military Motivators

These conversation motivators have a foundation in military approaches and the psychological levers inherent in them, but the focus here is more broadly on human nature, neurobiology, and day-to-day applicability. In general, they also aren’t meant to heighten the anxiety of a source—what I would call a “push approach”—but rather to draw the source toward you—a “pull approach.”

In synthesizing all I’ve learned from various intelligence professionals, I have settled on eight motivators:

Childlike curiosity.

Incentives.

Emotional appeal.

Boosting ego.

Deflating ego.

Easing fears.

Certainty/uncertainty.

Silence.

Childlike Curiosity

A good questioner is purposeful and provocative. The questions lead somewhere and they stimulate interest in the person being questioned. In terms of seeking the truth, therefore, we can view curiosity as a two-way street. You are driven to know something, but the person who is your source of that information will probably have questions rushing through her brain as well: “Why do you want to know?” “Who told you I knew anything about this?” “What else do you want to know?” The list goes on and on. You can exploit the fact that your questions arouse curiosity in your source. You may be asking the questions, but those questions suggest you may know something that she wants to know, too.

Behavioral economist George Loewenstein did breakthrough studies of human curiosity and is probably best known for his gap theory of curiosity. He postulated that curiosity flourishes when we feel there is a gap in our knowledge; it’s an itch we have to scratch. That chasm between what you know and what you want to know drives your questions.

Loewenstein begins a famous paper titled “The Psychology of Curiosity” by reminding us what a powerful role curiosity plays in our lives:

Curiosity has been consistently recognized as a critical motive that influences human behavior in both positive and negative ways at all stages of the life cycle. It has been identified as a driving force in child development and as one of the most important spurs to education attainment…. Curiosity has also been cited as a major impetus behind scientific discovery, possibly eclipsing even the drive for economic gain.³

Broadcast journalists often have a five-days-a-week challenge of posing direct questions to guests they hope to engage, while sustaining the curiosity of listeners. They want people hearing the Q&A to crave the next question and feel satisfied at the end of the interview that some gap in their knowledge had been filled. Part of the job is choosing subjects that listeners and viewers care deeply about. When the broadcasters get it right, they exploit one of the most powerful determinants of curiosity: the intensity with which the audience wants to resolve their uncertainly about the issue.

Brian Williams’s interview with Edward Snowden not only attempted to fill a knowledge gap about an issue that’s inflaming passions, but also to create a narrative arc so viewers sensed that there was a story unfolding. After introducing the interview with the backstory of Snowden’s release of classified documents, he began with a statement to which Snowden responded with a question. That opening gave the impression that this might be an interview filled with Snowden grandstanding unless Williams started charging hard down a path with his own questions—which he did.

Williams:	A lot of people would say you have badly damaged your country.
Snowden:	I’d say, can you show that? Is there any demonstration?

Shortly thereafter, the questions began and a story unfolded. Focusing on the relationship with Russia was like putting a pin into a map for viewers. Instead of a disembodied head, as he’d appeared in “live” interviews since his exile began, Snowden was a physical being located in a country with which the United States has tepid relations. The questions then got Snowden moving back and forth between actions and motivations, with Williams ratcheting up tension as he questioned. Then he zeroed in on what surveillance involving personal computers and mobile devices really means. Suddenly, it was our lives that were being discussed; we were in the story, and we cared—one way or the other—about what happened to Edward Snowden. The finale again gave us a pin on a map. Whistleblower or traitor, there he is in Russia, and chances are good that’s where he’ll stay for a while.

In short, curiosity is a vital tool in seeking the truth, regardless of what other motivators are employed.

Incentives

The U.S. Army manual references both short- and long-term incentives as techniques to gain cooperation, but that may not be as valid in day-to-day life as it is during war. Whereas political asylum may be a strong motivator for a prisoner of war, neuroscience tells us that human beings are more inclined to want immediate gratification rather than wait for an incentive that comes later—even if it’s better than the quick choice.

A team of researchers that included the curiosity guru, George Loewenstein, as well as Jonathan Cohen, a Princeton University professor known for his study of decision-making, found that people don’t like to delay their rewards. In one study, they had subjects undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while considering certain incentives. They had a choice between Amazon.com gift certificates ranging from $5 to $40 in value, and certificates worth larger amounts that they could get only by waiting anywhere from two to six weeks. The brain scan indicated that decisions about the possibility of immediate reward activated parts of their brain associated with emotion. Consideration of the long-term option activated brain systems associated with reasoning. For a lot of people, the emotion-related parts of the brain won out over the reasoning-related parts of the brain.

Loewenstein explained, “Our results help explain how and why a wide range of situations that produce emotional reactions, such as the sight, touch or smell of a desirable object, often cause people to take impulsive actions that they later regret.”⁴ Psychological cues such as these trigger dopamine-related circuits in the brain similar to the ones that responded to immediate rewards in the study he did with Cohen. An interesting corollary to Lowenstein’s conclusion relates to what he has said about curiosity as well, namely, that “curiosity is associated with behavior disorders such a voyeurism and has been blamed for nonsanctioned behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, early sexual experimentation, and certain types of crime.”⁵

An important thing to note about the first two motivators, then, is that both often relate to satisfying a desire for something as soon as possible.

Another important link between them is that one of the strongest incentives is sometimes providing information that satisfies your source’s curiosity. This is the foundation of the quid pro quo, a Latin phrase meaning “something for something.”

Imagine that you are interviewing a young woman for a position in your company’s human resources department. Although she has said that she adhered strictly to her current employer’s company policies, you need to find out if her record is as flawless as she asserts. Your incentive to move her toward greater candor is to tell her a secret of yours. You mention that it’s hard to do everything by the book all the time when you’re dealing with human beings and their varied circumstances. You confess that at one point early in your career in HR, you stretched the definition of a sick day to allow an employee to be with her child on his fourth birthday. Her trust in you escalates because you opened up to her. She, in turn, tells you there were a couple of experiences during the three years she’s been in HR that she has bent the rules to accommodate an employee need. You accomplished your mission to get a less-sanitized version of her job performance by using a straightforward quid pro quo.

Note that in this scenario, as in every judicious use of quid pro quo, the questioner gives up relatively inconsequential information as compared to that of the source. Leak your secrets thoughtfully so you retain control of the conversation.

Emotional Appeal

Move away from the military discussion of “love of” and “hate of” when it comes to emotion-related conversation motivators. Instead, think in terms of positive emotions and negative emotions and how you can use your awareness of them in others to get them to tell you the truth. Also think in terms of a desire for pleasure versus an aversion to punishment.

Aaron Ben-Zeév, one of the world’s leading experts in the study of emotions, has looked closely at whether positive or negative emotions have greater importance in a person’s life. His insights suggest that the answer is that, overall, positive emotions—especially love—have more importance, but there are plenty of situations in which the negative ones rule. There’s a big reason why it may be easier to get your source to cooperate if he’s motivated by anger, disgust, hurt, or anything else in the family of negative emotions: “People ruminate about events that induce strong negative emotions five times as long as they do about events that induce strong positive ones. Hence, it is no wonder that people tend to recall negative experiences more readily than positive ones.”⁶

Ben-Zeév further explains that the reason why negative emotions may prevail over positive ones is that the repercussions of responding inappropriately to negative events exceed those of responding inappropriately to positive events, “since negative events can kill us while positive events will merely enhance our well-being.”⁷

Reconfiguring the example of the young HR professional previously mentioned, we can come up with two scenarios wherein negative emotions play the critical role in her coming clean:

1. She’s having a similar conversation with a senior executive at her company—her manager’s boss. He suggests that some of the policies that the manager put in place are excessive and costing the company too much money to enforce. If he had any evidence that these policies were wasteful and unnecessary, he would order the manager to change them. The young HR professional dislikes her boss and finds she can’t resist the temptation to share her violations of those very policies with the senior executive.

2. She’s having a similar conversation with her boss, but this time, he suspects she has violated company policy and says simply, “To me, it’s worse if someone lies than if there’s a little step over the line. Frankly, I wouldn’t hesitate to fire a liar.” The statement does not give her a guarantee that if she comes clean about her transgressions that she will keep her job, but she knows that being caught in a lie will doom her. Being honest won’t bring her pleasure, but it will potentially avert pain.

On the positive side of the equation, love is thought by many experts to be the most powerful motivator of all. But not just any love—the kind of love that stimulates the same reward centers of the brain as cocaine is romantic love, not selfless love like the kind the Sisters of St. Joseph gave us in elementary school. In fact, Yale University researchers found that the selfless brand of love—an abiding and sincere desire for others to be happy without any expectation of personal reward—actually turns off those same areas of the brain that romantic love turns on. It’s the anti-fix.

Romantic love is an addiction, and we all know what diehard addicts will do to get a fix: anything. Sometimes “anything” means telling the truth.

Of course, romantic love and selfless love are not the only varieties of this emotion. There is a branch of study called interpersonal neurobiology, which is associated with Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California who explore what love looks like in the brain. Their work is premised on the fact that human relationships, from birth to death, alter our brain circuits related to memory and emotion.⁸ From the time we’re babies, we lay down neural patterns that affect our later behavior and choices.

How much or how little we respond to psychological levers related to love, therefore, has its roots in the degrees to which we felt linked to our mommy.

Boosting Ego

Scientific American began its January 12, 2010 article titled “Flattery Will Get You Far” with this paragraph:

Here at Scientific American we understand the wisdom of our readership. Your intellect sets you apart from the rest of the population, and we are gracious to have you as visitors to this website. As someone of exceptional judgment, we know you will be interested in subscribing to our exclusive online material, appropriate for only the most discerning intellectuals, and available to you for only $9.99/month.⁹

You may choose to be cynical and say that this kind of supercilious junk doesn’t work, but it does—time after time. In 2010, two Hong Kong University of Science and Technology researchers published a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research titled “Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective.” The paper discusses when and how flattery is a tactic that makes people more positive about and cooperative with the source of compliments.

Elaine Chan and Jaideep Sengupta asked participants in their study to evaluate the merits of a new department store based on a store advertisement. The ad described what the store had to offer, praising readers for the kind of good taste and fashion sense that would draw them to the store. Study participants were not fooled; on a conscious level, they recognized that there was attempt to manipulate them in the same way the opening paragraph of the Scientific American article was blatant flattery. But Chan and Sengupta were more interested in how the participants’ attitudes would be influenced subliminally. They set out to determine whether or not participants would develop a subconscious positive association with the store, even though they saw the ad as obvious pandering. Further, they wondered if such an implicit reaction would be a better predictor of decisions to do business with the store down the road. Would they be more inclined to show up at the store and make a purchase at some point?

Flattery turned out to be a more powerful motivator than they had realized. The implicit attitudes toward the store prevailed; they were more positive than explicit attitudes. They also served as reliable predictors of how likely participants would make purchases in the future. So even though participants immediately saw through the ploy, dismissing the ads on an explicit level, Chan and Sengupta concluded that “the flattery was exerting an important effect outside their awareness.”¹⁰

At the heart of this phenomenon is the simple fact that people enjoy feeling good about themselves. Our brains are fertile ground for compliments, and people who understand how and when to plant those compliments gain a psychological advantage over others.

The researchers then probed more deeply into the relative effects of flattery. They wanted to see to what extent participants’ self-esteem at the moment affected their receptivity to insincere flattery. They asked participants to write about two things: (1) an aspect of their personality that they’d like to change and (2) a personality trait they valued. The outcome was predictable: Those who had an easier time finding fault with themselves were more susceptible to the subliminal influences of flattery than those who focused on their strengths.

So, if your source shows signs of insecurity or questionable self-esteem, add “boosting ego” to your mix of techniques to move the conversation in the direction you desire. In your case, try to make the flattery valid on both an explicit and an implicit level—that is, make the compliment as relevant and believable as you can.

Returning to our young HR professional, if the person interviewing her for the job used an ego-boosting strategy, here is how it could fit: He might observe that she is a little nervous around him—normal for a job interview—so he decides to use an ego-up strategy to make her feel more empowered to talk with him candidly. “You’ve given great answers to my questions,” he says, “and your track record shows you have a wonderful grasp of the complexities of a position in HR.” After that, he could pose the question of whether or not she ever deviated from company policy and she might hear it positively. She might assume he expects her to say yes and explain what happened as a sign that she exercised good judgment in a tough situation.

Deflating Ego

Done well, attacking a person’s sense of self-worth enables you to move the person into a vulnerable emotional state and make him more compliant. It’s often best used in conjunction with another technique that later makes him feel better. You use the desire to reconnect with you to get your information, and then you bring him out of his self-esteem slump.

Done poorly, you could easily alienate the individual if you’ve misjudged how far to go with that person. And you might get pummeled by crossing the line from ego deflation to insult.

Looking at the worst-case scenario first, I’m reminded of a study done in the mid-1990s that concluded, “Don’t ever insult a Southern man.” The essence of it is that men from the Southern United States (not all men, of course, but Southern men in general) have a “culture of honor” that compels them to take action when insulted.¹¹ The study involved a group of men from the North and a group of men from the South, with individuals in both groups having someone bump into them and call them an asshole. Not only did the researchers observe body language and hear verbal responses among the Southerners that indicated they were more bothered by the insult than the Northerners, but they also measured testosterone levels, which markedly elevated among the Southern men. So maybe think carefully about how to moderate your deflating-ego technique when you try it out on a Southern man.

Normally, what happens is that puncturing someone’s ego affects his comfort level with social interaction. You have to manage carefully what happens after that to accomplish your goal of motivating the conversation in a manner that’s productive. A 2007 experiment with young men and women at Florida State University and San Diego State University spotlights the immediate effect of damaging someone’s ego, and illustrates how you lose someone’s cooperation completely if you don’t follow up with some action or remark to help him boomerang back to you.

The researchers set out to determine how the students would respond to being evaluated on their social skills. The 20 participants were given name tags and put into small, same-sex groups. They were supposed to learn the first names of the other three to five people in the group, and talk with them for 20 minutes. The researchers then took participants into separate rooms and asked them to pick two of the people in their group they’d like to work with.

But the evaluations were rigged. The researchers arbitrarily told some of the students that everyone wanted to work with them. They told others that nobody wanted to work with them. So some heard these exact words, “I have good news for you—everyone chose you as someone they’d like to work with.” Others heard, “I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with.”¹²

Then one of the members of the research team took each person aside and said that there was a reason why he or she could not move on to the next task—such as the groups were full—but not to worry, there was another opportunity to participate. Each one was told, “You can either leave now and get the hour credit for the experiment, or if you think you can help out me and the other experimenters, you can do some other experiments for us—each takes about 15 minutes and you could do one, two, or three. Doing the other experiments won’t affect the amount of credit you get. What you do is up to you.”¹³

Participants who thought they’d been rejected by their peers volunteered for far fewer experiments than those who’d been accepted. The difference in cooperation was remarkable: Whereas 90 percent of the accepted participants volunteered, only 20 percent of the rejected ones said they would help.

The team doing the experiment thought they might see more of the rejected participants willing to come back and help because they would want to generate some kind of favorable response to their contribution. Not so. Whether they resented what happened, or just had such a profound sense of embarrassment over being rejected, most of the rejected participants walked out.

Watch the body language of someone you use a deflating-ego technique with. If you see the person close up—arms folded in front as though she’s hugging herself, slight slump of shoulders, head down—you know you’ve succeeded in undermining her sense of self-worth. At that point, give her an immediate path to reconnect by providing you information, and then go back to your rapport-building techniques.

In contrast, the researchers simply asked the rejected students to perform a task; there was no psychological or emotional reward associated with doing it.

Putting the deflating-ego technique in the context of a real situation will show that it doesn’t have to be nearly as harsh as “no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with.” For example, if the person interviewing the young woman for the HR position suggested that her minimal experience in the field might be a problem in the new job, she would likely feel uneasy and want to prove herself. Again, his aim is to find out if she has deviated from company policies in the past, so he might say, “Our company prides itself on intelligent, and even customized, handling of human resource issues. We are very tuned into our employees’ needs. I’m sorry to say that I’m concerned you just don’t have the breadth of experience yet to make those mature choices.” In this instance, she feels she can prove him wrong by citing instances when she deviated from policy in the interest of employee morale or to help someone avert a personal crisis. Even just a nod or other look of approval from the interviewer might give her the validation she seeks and put her at ease once again.

Easing Fears

Eric Maddox, the distinguished Army Sergeant whose interrogation and analysis led to the capture of Saddam Hussein, contributed many insights for this book, and they are primarily featured in Chapter 9. He has several stories in his book Mission: Black List #1 that illustrate his use of an easing-fears approach; this one places us toward the end of Maddox’s journey—having interviewed more than 300 people—to extract the truth that would lead him to Saddam Hussein. At this point, he is facing Muhammad Khudayr, the person who can take him to Muhammad Ibrahim, leader of the insurgency and the direct link to the former dictator.

At the beginning of the interrogation, the prisoner had denied even knowing Muhammad Ibrahim. Now he was telling me how afraid he was of the man. His fear was well founded. If it were discovered that he was cooperating with us, his life and the life of his family would be in jeopardy. I needed to find a way to help him with that problem.

“I tell you what,” I offered. “You take me to Muhammad Ibrahim and I’ll make sure that everyone knows that Muslit, his son, was the one that helped capture him. He’s scheduled to be shipped off to Guantánamo Bay in a few days. Once he’s gone, we can blame it all on him. You’ll be in the clear.”¹⁴

Maddox eased the fears of Muhammad Khudayr, who succumbed to the seduction of being protected. Maddox watched his body language—face sagging and shoulders slumped—and realized that the ploy had worked. It was a ploy he described as “pure bullshit,”¹⁵ but it worked.

Mitigating or removing the fear of someone that you want to confide in you is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal of conversation motivators. Gregory Hartley, my coauthor on How to Spot a Liar, told a personal story to illustrate the technique in the first edition of that book. He rear-ended a woman’s sedan with his one-ton pickup truck and crushed the trunk region of her car. She jumped out crying and screaming. He hugged her and apologized, a combination of actions that calmed her down immediately. She was far less inclined to run to a lawyer, and far more inclined to share with him that it was really some other stress at home that made her react so wildly rather than the car accident.

Physicians in fields such as oncology and cardiology commonly face patients who have tremendous anxiety about a diagnosis or the outcome of a proposed procedure. They need the conversational tool of easing fear to get the patients to talk openly about how they feel, lifestyle issues that might impede treatment, and so on, in order to help them. There are also many possible situations at a workplace where someone’s competence or honesty comes into question, and the prospect of being fired makes him close up and not want to divulge anything about himself or others out of fear.

Offer protection—emotional, psychological, and, if necessary, physical—to help boost the person’s feeling of security and trust in you, and then carry on with the conversation.

Certainty/Uncertainty

Projecting certainty about what you know can another person to talk openly. This is the value of doing your homework about your source: You can go into a conversation with a level of detail on at least a few issues that suggest you know more about the person than you do. This is often how Hanns Scharff got his prisoners to talk about military capabilities. He convinced them he already had the information, so they felt there was no reason to hold back in conversation.

Immediately before Eric Maddox’s encounter with Muhammad Khudayr, described previously, Maddox used certainty, or we-know-all in military terms, to move his prisoner to acknowledge that he knew the target, Muhammad Ibrahim, and his whereabouts. He told his prisoner: “I know you are lying to me because you think I am unsure of my information. But you are wrong. I know everything about you. I know all the crimes you have committed. And I know that the only way you can escape punishment is to take me to Muhammad Ibrahim.”¹⁶

The ploy worked, with Muhammad Khudayr immediately protesting that if he took Maddox to Muhammad Ibrahim, he would be killed. Maddox then closed the deal by using his easing fears approach to assure him that wouldn’t happen.

Uncertainty on the part of the source can also help you motivate the conversation. A person feels a little off balance and out of control in the face of uncertainty. Jim McCormick, author of The Power of Risk, has done research about how to mitigate uncertainty; he suggests turning what he tells his audiences and readers upside down in order to engender it: “If the person perceives that he’s facing a greater risk than he can handle, the level of uncertainty will escalate. It could be any kind of risk: physical, career, financial, social, intellectual, creative, emotional, or spiritual. At that point, the person’s rising emotions make him less able to make well-reasoned choices.”¹⁷

If your source is in that state of mild confusion—not completely disoriented, but a little off balance—the information you’re after may leak out because the person has less control over what he says. In addition, if you project certainty while asking your questions, you potentially get cooperation; you’re pulling the person toward more solid ground.

Silence

Japanese call it shiin. It’s that awkward silence in a conversation that causes people to glance at their laptops, shift their posture, and look at the door as though they hope someone will enter the room and end the tension. Finally, someone can’t tolerate it any longer and says something, anything.

Michael Handford, a professor of linguistics and international communications consultant, has researched how cultural orientation affects how soon we reach the point where we hope someone breaks the silence. Spanish speakers have the lowest tolerance, at just a second or two. English speakers are up to three or four seconds. Japanese speakers have a rather high tolerance at five or six seconds.¹⁸ The foundation for his conclusions is records of about a million words of business meetings. More than 25 companies in England, Germany, Ireland, and Japan allowed him to bring his microphone into their meetings to collect the data.

A first consideration in using silence as a conversation motivator, then, is to have some basic sense of your source’s tolerance for a conversation lull.

Creating silence in the modern world is intentional. Even in a room full of people experiencing shiin, anyone has the option of speaking up, even if it’s just to beg, “Will somebody please say something!” To many people, if not most, silence is unsettling, and someone will say something; it may even contain some substance.

The modern human’s aversion to silence can be so strong that it arouses fear. When there is no tapping on a keyboard, no humming of an air conditioner, no traffic noise in the distance, people can feel alienated from their environment. Drawing on six years of research involving 580 undergraduate students, Bruce Fell of Charles Sturt University in Australia concluded that they had a “need for noise and their struggle with silence is learnt behaviour.”¹⁹

The military tactic of using silence as an approach is for the interrogator to remain silent, perhaps while maintaining penetrating eye contact. Ideally, the source feels uncomfortable or even fearful, and starts blurting out things to establish or restore some kind of connection. Outside of that context, using silence would look at lot different unless you are grilling a suspect. Either maintaining a stare or turning away, so that your body becomes a barrier, indicates hostility, disgust, or some other negative response. That effect wouldn’t work well if you’re a therapist or social worker trying to get your client to tell you the dark secrets of her horrible childhood. You would have to remain silent while projecting the message through your body language that you want the person to speak.

To get a little more sophisticated about using silence as a conversation motivator, consider that silence in a conversation can be much more than the absence of speech. How you introduce the silence can have huge significance. Composer John Cage has a famous piece called 4’33”, meaning four minutes and 33 seconds. By my watching, at two minutes and 44 seconds after coming on stage, he lifts his baton.²⁰ The orchestra has some movement of pages and lifting of instruments. Tension mounts in the audience, with some nervous coughs interrupting the silence. Cage turns a page and wipes his brow. He resumes an almost Buddha-like posture and then lifts his baton again. The camera moves to a page in a bassoon player’s sheet music. It says, “Movement 2—Tacet,” which indicates that the instrument is silent. More nervous coughs erupt in the audience. Cage is watching a clock on his podium with the seconds ticking away. At precisely the right moment—he turns a page and all of the musicians shuffle, scratch their jaws, or stroke their instruments. And then, four minutes and 33 seconds after the performance began, John Cage leaves the stage and the audience erupts with wild applause.

John Cage introduced silence as a musical experience. 4’33” has been something that arouses fascination, passion (positive and negative), appreciation, and curiosity among those who have performed it and “heard” it since it premiered in 1952.

The range of applications that silence can have as a motivator of verbal and non-verbal response is expansive. There is the military interrogator’s silent approach as a technique of intimidation on one end. And then on the other, there are conversational equivalents of Cage’s provocative and inviting use of silence, such as the relaxed way a college professor might pose a complex question and then wait patiently until a student formulates an answer. Silence can also frame an experience to get people thinking about what they just said and what they are about to say. This is a common experience in religious rituals like the Catholic Mass.

Choosing Your Motivators

The Army Field Manual containing the approaches described earlier reads, “With the exception of the direct approach, no other approach is effective by itself. Interrogators use different approach techniques or combine them into a cohesive, logical technique…the combinations are unlimited.”²¹

The way Eric Maddox combined the use of certainty with easing his prisoner’s fears efficiently drove his source toward answers. Maddox was running out of time because he was about to be transferred, so he had to choose his approaches carefully to get the job done quickly.

If you’re a person who is “paid to be charming,” like Peter Earnest or Jack Devine, motivators might take the conversation in a more circuitous path, with incentives such as quid pro quo and ego-boosting comments used to establish a trusting, and even friendly, relationship.

Fundamental to choosing what techniques you use is how comfortable you are with them. Some people could never use a deflating ego approach without feeling mean; others would get so nervous trying to use silence that their fidgeting would ruin the effect. Do what’s natural for you and for the circumstance. Pay attention to the person from whom you want information and get your cues on your next move from what she says and what her body language tells you about her emotional state.