Build instant rapport with almost anyone so they’ll be more likely to agree to your request.
Now that you’ve established the context for a social encounter, it’s time to initiate that interaction to your best advantage. I’ll introduce a process you can apply at cocktail parties, professional conferences, stores, and anywhere else to convince people instantly that you are a safe, trustworthy member of their tribe. Imagine being able to walk up to friends, acquaintances, and even perfect strangers, saying just the right thing so that they like you and feel more inclined to help you.
I’m not a smoker. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. But I do know one thing: smokers tend to bond with one another over their habit, especially with all the public censure that surrounds smoking these days. Not long ago, this bit of common knowledge helped me break into the central administrative headquarters of a major health care provider.
My client had challenged me to access the executive floor and find sensitive material lying around the office. While researching the company, we had learned that a construction project in the area had triggered an invasion of tiny spiders in surrounding buildings. I dressed up as a pest control guy, complete with a real spray canister, walked up to a public entrance, and mobilized many of the tricks I’ll show you in this book to bypass security and enter the building. None of it worked. “Look,” security personnel explained, “your name isn’t on my list, so you can’t get in.” I tried again at a second entrance and got shut down again. It was a total bomb.
Although I felt a little dejected, I was happy to see that my client had stopped me so quickly. But I had to come up with a plan to try again, as that is what they had hired me to do. I exited the building and meandered around the side, unsure how to proceed. Spotting five or six employees sitting near a side entrance and smoking, I got an idea. Carrying my pest control gear, I approached them and said, “Hey, mind if I stand here and breathe in the fresh air?” That got a chuckle out of them as well as an inquisitive look or two. “Yeah, man,” I said, “I just quit for, like, the tenth time.”
“I know what you mean, brother,” one of the employees said to me. “I’ve tried to quit fifteen times myself.”
“I’m not even trying to quit,” another said. “I’ve quit quitting!”
A third employee held out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”
I waved him off. “No, I’m really trying to quit this time, but maybe if I just stand here the smell will kill my urge.”
“Sure,” they said, “no problem, you can stand with us.”
And like that, within no more than sixty seconds, I became a member of their in-group. I hung out with them for the next five or six minutes. When their smoking break ended, they strolled together back to the entrance, with me in tow. When we reached the side door, which was only accessible to employees with a badge, they opened it and walked into the building, allowing me to enter without giving it a thought. Bingo—I was in. Just a few minutes later, I was up on the executive floor, rifling through all kinds of sensitive documents.
In this instance, I improvised a believable pretext for myself, that of the veteran smoker struggling to quit, but this move only enabled me to begin a conversation. To achieve my goal, I had to pursue the conversation in a way that continued to answer the four baseline questions people instantly and unconsciously pose when they first meet a stranger (Who is this person? What does this person want? How long will this encounter take? Is this person a threat?). I did that by building quick rapport with these unsuspecting smokers. With just a bit of carefully crafted banter, I could affirm to these strangers that I didn’t pose a threat but was rather a perfectly innocuous and friendly member of their tribe. We were just one big, happy family of smokers. When the time came to return to work, they thought nothing of letting me into the building. In their eyes, I was one of them.
Building rapport might not seem especially complicated at first glance. It’s not complicated at second glance, either. We might live in a world of smartphones and skyscrapers, but our brains are wired as they were when we subsisted in tribal groups roaming woodlands and foraging for food. We feel more inclined to help others with whom we maintain some kind of communal attachment, whether our bond is based on a shared social class, profession, ethnicity, belief, life stage, affinity, or experience.1 If you want someone you’ve just met to comply with your wishes, you stand a far better chance of succeeding by first establishing common ground, making them feel like they’re interacting with a fellow group member.
In my classes, I introduce the concept of rapport by asking would-be human hackers to remember what lunchtime was like at their high school cafeterias. If your high school was anything like mine, you and your fellow students sat with your respective tribes—the jocks, nerds, punks, skaters. Everybody knew where they belonged, openly identifying with a tribe through insider language, demeanor, and dress (fact: I was part of the skater tribe, which meant I wore baggy pants and a chain wallet). Such identification served to establish at least some kind of initial rapport between students who might not have otherwise known one another very well. If the new kid at school who happened to dress like a skater sauntered up to the nerd table and posed an innocent question about, say, the upcoming school dance, the four baseline questions would have posed a hurdle, because the nerds didn’t know the skater. These nerds would have wondered: Why are you here? What do you want? How much of my valuable time will you take up? Are you a threat? But if the skater approached the skater’s table and, affecting boredom and nonchalance, asked the same question, most or all of those questions would have been answered in the skaters’ minds, because they would have accepted the new kid as a member of the tribe based on visual appearance alone.
As researchers now know, these annoying high school social dynamics are rooted in human biology. Rapport building helps trigger the release of a powerful hormone called oxytocin. In a series of studies, researchers linked the presence of oxytocin in the brain to experiences of trust and acts of generosity. As they also found, arousing feelings of empathy in people prompted their oxytocin levels to rise, which in turn led to generous behavior. In one study, researchers elevated oxytocin levels by exposing people to a video that portrayed a child desperately ill with cancer. Those higher levels of oxytocin in turn “predicted larger donations to the charity that produced the video.” Oxytocin has also been linked to other “positive social behaviors,” like making eye contact or recognizing other people’s emotions.2
When we build rapport, whether it’s in high school cafeterias or in our homes or workplaces, the sense of connectedness we establish produces a tiny hit of oxytocin in others, leading them to feel trust, connection, and generosity toward us. It’s a powerful dynamic and one that shrewd operators deploy to induce potentially reluctant targets to do their bidding. Shady salespeople don’t just approach you at the car dealership and ask you flat out to buy a car that’s overpriced and well beyond what they know you can afford. No, they chitchat with you, get to know you, offer you coffee, rejoice in the fact that you both attended the same high school or love the same football team. Seasoned politicians don’t just come out and ask for your vote. They flash their million-dollar smiles, shake your hand, hold your baby, or make a comment that suggests their familiarity with your local culture—all attempts to make you feel like you’re a fellow tribesperson, if not a close, personal friend. And of course, successful scammers rely heavily on rapport to get unsuspecting victims to willingly hand over their money, information, or other valuables.
In one common scam, crooks pretending to be from companies like Microsoft or Apple call people up, claiming they want to help them resolve a computer software problem. If the victim provides certain information or clicks on a seemingly innocuous link, they inadvertently provide the scammer access to personal information like bank accounts, passwords, and the like; the scammer might even hijack the computer and demand a ransom.3 To build rapport, scammers will seem friendly and polite, engaging victims in light conversation. In the United States, they’ll usually come across, via their accents and tones of voice, as being females from India. Since people in general tend to regard women as nonthreatening, and Americans tend to associate Indians with customer support roles, victims think nothing of doing as these scammers ask. They assume that the stranger on the other end of the line shares their basic sense of decency and have no reason to think otherwise. Having deftly established this common ground, the scammers have the oxytocin flowing in their victims’ brains. Rapport equals oxytocin equals trust equals a first-class ticket into a victim’s bank account.
Expert hackers of humans need only a few seconds of well-tailored interaction to build rapport. That’s because we humans aren’t merely tribal. We also tend to make snap decisions about people we encounter based on stereotypes. And we make these judgments by assessing a few key factors that are primarily nonverbal, such as dress, hairstyle, skin color, and so on. To build rapport, you must quickly size people up, arrive at a clear but superficial understanding of who they are and what tribe they might belong to, and find a way to connect personally. You’re not establishing a deep or enduring friendship, just enough of a bond so that people don’t raise their psychic force fields and begin questioning your motivations.
As with pretexting, you can use body language as well as words to establish common ground. Bestselling author and former FBI behavioral expert Joe Navarro told me of a memorable occasion in which he had to take over the handling of an informant (or in FBI lingo, a “human asset”) from another agent. It was a delicate business: informants risk their lives to cooperate with the FBI and provide evidence against criminals. They depend on the trusting relationship they have with their handlers. Disrupt that relationship, and the informant might disappear or stop cooperating, fearing for their safety. Joe had to establish a strong working relationship with the informant, somehow retaining and even building on the trust that the previous agent had established.
The challenge was especially great given that the informant—I’ll call him Boris—was a Russian-speaking man in his eighties, and his previous handler at the FBI was an experienced agent in his mid- to late fifties. Joe, meanwhile, was all of twenty-five years old, a recent recruit to the bureau. How would he possibly establish common ground with a man from a different cultural and linguistic background who could have been his grandfather? “I had a plan for building rapport,” Joe said, recalling their initial meeting, “but when I walked into the room to meet him for the first time, everything changed.” Sizing Boris up, Joe realized that the standard approach that an agent in this situation might take—projecting his professional authority, speaking very formally to Boris and assuring him that he would remain safe—wouldn’t work. “This guy was obviously an accomplished individual,” Joe said. “He had lived through the Soviet occupation [of his country]. He knew how to read me—what was pro forma and what was from the heart. And he knew that as a twenty-five-year-old, I barely knew my job. So, as they say, don’t deceive a deceiver—and in this instance, I wasn’t about to do that.”
Joe perceived that Boris had an old-world mentality; respect and deference shown to one’s elders mattered. Instead of projecting his authority as an agent, he bowed his head slightly while first shaking Boris’s hand, avoided eye contact, and sat down at an angle to him—all of which suggested deference on his part rather than an attempt to assert dominance or control. When Boris requested tea, Joe did the same, even though he preferred coffee. Instead of refraining from divulging personal information during their conversation, as an agent would normally do, Joe spoke openly about his family’s painful history—how his relatives had barely escaped Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and how his father had been arrested and tortured. “I could see his facial muscles begin to relax, and it was then that I came over to the couch and sat with him,” Joe said. In just a minute or two of conversation, he had established rapport. “I humbled myself before him and then just proceeded to let him know that in my eyes he was venerated.” It was the beginning of a successful, three-year relationship between the two men.
Reading a story like this or learning about my own experience making friends with smokers, you might find yourself harboring some of the same concerns about rapport building that people sometimes have about pretexting. Wasn’t Joe being “fake” by approaching his encounter with Boris so strategically? He wouldn’t normally show such extreme deference to informants. He also asked for tea even though he preferred coffee. As for me, I perpetrated an outright lie in passing myself off as a smoker pretending to quit. In both of these instances, it seems that the builder of rapport was deploying guile and deception—not something most of us would want to do in the course of our everyday dealings.
I’m not advocating that you lie to build common ground—I was only doing so in the context of a professional engagement that permitted this kind of subterfuge. In everyday life, anything you say or do in the course of building rapport should be at least rooted in truth, and it should leave people better off for having met you. A scammer who is making small talk with you while pretending to be a customer service representative is breaching an ethical line (not to mention a legal one), as is the unscrupulous car salesman who can’t stand football but who pretends to love your favorite team to make the sale. In both cases, lies are told and the person building rapport isn’t leaving their target better off for having met them. This is exactly the kind of conduct that good, law-abiding people like you and me must avoid.
By contrast, Joe Navarro might not have ordinarily shown such deference to an informant, but he did show deference to elders in other areas of his life, so doing so was not inherently at odds with his authentic self. Even if he preferred coffee over tea, he didn’t absolutely detest tea. Partaking of it was a small gesture of kindness on his part, an offering made with the simple intention of helping Boris feel venerated. Joe might have ventured a bit out of his comfort zone, but not too much. And his actions left Boris better off while also inclining him to comply with Joe’s wishes. With that hit of oxytocin coursing through his brain, Boris felt happier and more connected than before their interaction. The two of them were now both in a position to possibly deepen their level of rapport over time.
Like pretexting, rapport building involves the application of a certain amount of strategizing or posturing. But here again, that strategy is: a) unavoidable and b) a good thing. Most of us naturally try to build relationships with others in the course of our daily lives, whether it’s engaging in a bit of friendly banter with our next-door neighbors, schmoozing with our business colleagues before the start of a meeting, or smiling and asking a grocery clerk how they’re doing as they weigh our deli meat. By mastering the skill of rapport building, we’re just doing this work of connecting emotionally with others more deliberately and often. While we might have a selfish purpose in mind, we’re still making life just a little bit better for those we encounter, both strangers and people we already know.
So often, we go about our day distanced from others and oblivious to their needs. We bury our noses in our phones and forget to interact as we step into an elevator. Sealed away in our comfortable media bubbles, we find social, cultural, and political differences so daunting we don’t even try to negotiate them. By becoming skilled at rapport building, however, we can train ourselves to think about others and reach habitually across the chasm to make or deepen a connection. We can make a habit of building common ground rather than ignoring or trying to persuade others who don’t espouse our beliefs. Our violently polarized society needs more rapport building, not less. As we’ll invariably find, just a little bit of social nicety goes a long way when it comes to getting people to comply with our wishes.
It might not always seem clear how far to go when trying to ingratiate yourself with someone. When I’m hacking professionally, targets sometimes ask me in the course of my rapport building to agree with opinions I find abhorrent or to behave in ways that violate my religious beliefs. It’s an occupational hazard of being a security professional. Although it would certainly help me to swallow hard and behave as my target expects, I will always decline and try to find another way to establish common ground. Once when posing as an employee of a particular company, I had to approach a group of employees at that company to try to obtain information from them. Before engaging them in conversation, I heard them complaining about “Kathy,” a female boss at the company, calling her a “stupid bitch” and much worse. When I introduced myself, they not only continued to denigrate this boss but invited me to join them in thrashing women in positions of power. “Thank God Kathy isn’t your boss,” they said. “She’s such a [fill in with the swear word of your choice].”
I might have easily and instantly joined their tribe of angry men by agreeing with them and hating on female bosses I’ve had in the past, but I couldn’t allow myself to do that. Our code of ethics and my own personal beliefs prevent me from making “offensive comments (verbal, written, or otherwise) related to gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability.”4 Having encountered similar situations in the past, I also knew I could continue to build rapport with them without compromising myself. And that’s what I did. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “I had a boss like that. This guy I worked for at my last job, he was terrible. That’s why I started to work here.” Rather than find a common ground rooted in misogyny, I found one rooted in a frustration with bad bosses irrespective of their gender.
Think of a situation in which you might find yourself in a quandary when trying to build rapport. Maybe you’re in a locker room trying to connect with a bunch of guys without engaging in sexist locker room banter. Or maybe you’re at a gathering with your family, most of whom think differently about politics, or religion, or any other topic, than you do and are quite vocal about it. How might you engage creatively to build rapport?
It’s often hard in social situations to defy others’ expectations, especially if you’re engaging with a group of people. We tend to fear we’ll be excluded from the tribe if we don’t “go along,” and so we find ourselves sacrificing our beliefs to conform. With practice, however, you can train yourself to step back from your fears in the moment, so that you can quickly look for and find an alternate way of building common ground. You can also pre-plan for difficult social situations that might arise, thinking through how you’ll handle them.
On one occasion, I was breaking into a building (at a client’s request) and encountered employees in the lobby heatedly debating whether to allow teachers in schools to arm themselves. I was trying to build rapport and become a member of their tribe, but I realized I was in a no-win situation. It wasn’t that I had strong beliefs about gun control—I can identify with people on both sides of this issue. Rather, I sensed that anything I might have said for or against gun control would have risked alienating half of the group. At one point, someone turned to me and asked point-blank (no pun intended) what I thought. I paused for a few seconds to think. Finally, I said, “You know what I think? I think dead children in schools are the worst thing that can happen in this country. And having to send your kids to school worried about them dying is a horrible, horrible place to be.” The whole group went silent. Although they were bitterly opposed on this issue, there was indeed a common ground to be found—and I had found it.
Chances are you have a relative, neighbor, or business colleague who subscribes to some belief you find abhorrent or who you feel shares little in common with you. Rather than avoiding these people, you can learn to extend a hand, without sacrificing your core values. Since you already know these people, you can use rapport-building skills to increase the (relatively low) level of rapport that already exists, whether or not you have a specific request with which you’d like them to comply. If you’re shy or fearful in social situations, you can become far more confident and outgoing, again regardless of whether you have an agenda of your own. Why wait for someone to bring you out of your shell? Learn how to bring them out of theirs. The more you develop a discipline around rapport building, the more you realize that the seemingly impossible distances that keep us from others are in fact usually bridgeable. Furthermore, you realize that it’s not necessarily these other people who are preventing us from making or deepening a connection—it’s us.
Think of someone in your life with whom you have a difficult relationship. Perhaps you’re estranged, or perhaps you’re in contact but some long-standing grievance is weighing down your relationship. Think of three ways you might establish common ground during your next interaction, while still remaining true to your beliefs and values.
Here’s a challenge for you. Go into a Starbucks and speak to a stranger sitting at a table or standing in line. Don’t look for someone your age or who seems to share your race or socioeconomic background. Pick someone at random and try to become a member of their tribe. Can’t think of anything? Do what I do and fall back on your smartphone. Let’s say you have an Android phone. Walk up to someone with an iPhone and say, “Hey, I’m thinking of switching from Android to iPhone. What do you think of your phone?” In my experience, iPhone users will blab your ears off telling you why their phone is a million times better than an Android. As you ask them why and show interest in what they’re saying, you validate them as a person, if only in a small way. You’ve established common ground. No, you’re not both iPhone users, but you’re both in the tribe of people interested in talking about why iPhones are so great.
Confronted with a challenge like this, students of mine often ask for some easy rules or guidelines for developing rapport in social situations, whether spontaneously or in pre-planned encounters. They want me to tell them something like: “When you’re trying to talk to a member of the opposite sex, do these five things,” or “To connect with a millennial, say this.” Sorry, there are no rules I know of that apply broadly. Each situation is different, and you have to think on the spot, devising your own strategy for building rapport. That might seem daunting, but it really isn’t. The thought process I follow boils down to six simple steps, what I call ENGAGE:
ENGAGE might sound like a lot to remember, especially since you need to run through these steps in a matter of seconds during an unplanned encounter. To help you master ENGAGE, go to the resources section at www.HumanHackingBook.com and download a small, wallet-sized card printed with the six steps; you can carry it with you and consult it just before entering social situations. After you practice rapport building four or five times, these steps will begin to feel second nature. Think of the ENGAGE framework as mental training wheels that readily fall off as you practice rapport building. But you do need to practice—starting now.
Of all the steps in ENGAGE, beginners struggle most with the fifth, “Give it a try.” As you frame your next interaction, borrow some wisdom from bestselling author and former FBI behavioral expert Robin Dreeke. Here are eight killer techniques for rapport building to bear in mind when seeking common ground with others in everyday situations:
You know from reading this book that time matters in social situations—it’s one of the four items that automatically arise when someone first approaches us. If we sense we won’t be able to help someone in the limited time available to us, we’re more inclined to refuse the request. Many social encounters have natural time constraints. If you start a conversation with someone in line at Starbucks, they’ll feel pretty sure that the interaction will only last until one of you has paid and has gotten your coffee. That expectation might make a stranger more willing to spend a minute or so talking with you.
In situations where time constraints aren’t natural or obvious, you can facilitate your efforts to build rapport by subtly inventing artificial ones. You might say something like: “Hey, can I bother you for two minutes? I’m new to the area, and I just want to find a good diner to eat at.” Make the time constraint realistic—if you ask for two minutes, be prepared to spend only two minutes, knowing that you’ll extend the conversation if you sense that your person of interest wishes. Don’t just ask if someone has “a second,” because that isn’t realistic—the second has already passed. You can also implicitly calm a person of interest by making a statement like “I’m just heading out but . . .” or “I was about to meet someone but I’m wondering . . . ,” since both of those imply a conversation of short duration.
When I visited my sister in Tennessee, we went to a barbecue restaurant for dinner. The waiter came over and asked if we were ready to order. “I’ll take an iced tea,” I said, “and the ribs, and a side of corn bread.”
“Whoa, whoa,” the waiter said, “slow down, city boy.”
I placed my order again, speaking more slowly. I will admit, I was somewhat miffed, perceiving that the waiter was disrespecting me and trying to put himself in a position of dominance. As I thought about it, I realized I had ignored an important fact about communications. We all talk at different speeds depending on our personality, age, regional dialect, and larger social context.5 Americans residing in the Deep South speak slower than some of their northern counterparts.6 There’s nothing good or bad about that—it’s just reality.
When trying to build rapport, it helps to think about the person you’re interacting with and tailor your speech at least somewhat to them. You don’t want to overcompensate the way people sometimes do when speaking with a child or someone from another country. That will only insult or confuse them. Try to be considerate of the other person’s needs as you speak, with an eye toward making them more comfortable. And if you’re one of those verbose New Yorkers who look down on people who speak more slowly, or one of those slow-talking southerners who like to take their time, you’re in luck: as linguistic specialists have observed, people who speak more rapidly tend to be more authoritative and persuasive, while slow talkers often strike us as friendlier or more approachable.7
Humans are altruistic creatures—we naturally want to help others in need. In fact, one of a social engineer’s most powerful phrases is a simple “Can you help me?” That said, we must take care not to ask for too much lest our person of interest find the request—and our very presence—threatening. As a general rule, tailor any request for help to the level of preexisting rapport. If you’re interacting with a stranger, make your request for help simple and light. When I show up at a building seeking to hack into the server room, I can’t just say to the receptionist, “Hey, would you mind showing me into the server room?” I need to start small—I’m just trying to get the initial gatekeeper to let me pass so that I can go on to the next gatekeeper. I’ll ask a simple, innocuous question: “Hey, I’ve forgotten my badge, can I just use this ID?” or even, “Hey, I’m here to see so-and-so, but I don’t know who her assistant is. Can you help me?” Maybe the receptionist will simply identify the person’s assistant and leave it at that, or maybe he or she will tell me the assistant’s floor and let me through so I can chat with the assistant in person.
Take care not to make these requests in a flirtatious or sexually suggestive way. Students of mine who happen to be physically attractive will try to do that, and as I explain, flirting usually won’t make the other person feel better off for having met you. Once they realize you aren’t really interested in them in that way but are trying to achieve some objective, they’ll feel used or tricked. As most of us know, that isn’t so fun.
Broadly speaking, Western societies are much more individualistic than their more collectivist-minded Eastern counterparts.8 Such cultural tendencies carry over into professional contexts in which Westerners find it difficult to suspend their own egos and prioritize others. Associating humility with weakness and confidence or competence with strength, they feel like they have to know everything and project authority and control. That’s precisely the wrong approach when it comes to hacking humans. Think of someone in your life who is good at suspending their ego, to the point where they come across as genuinely humble. When you’re with this person, how do they make you feel? Chances are words like “affirmed” or “validated” pop to mind. Humble people have the ability to make us feel great about ourselves. When you’re trying to get someone to comply with your wishes, that’s strength, not weakness.
To build rapport, suspend your need to be “right” or in charge. Don’t try to change people’s minds. Let them see the world as they want or need to without feeling threatened. You’ll have a much easier time reaching common ground, because you aren’t implicitly separating yourself from others by placing yourself above them. When Ronald Reagan was president, people criticized him for being too old for his office. He could have been offended, reacting defensively by attacking his attackers. Instead, he chose to suspend his ego and joke about his age. While debating another candidate for president, for instance, he began his opening comments with the famous line: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”9 A quip like that got everyone laughing, including his opponent, instantly building rapport. Some observers even believe Reagan essentially won the 1984 election with that answer. If you can avoid getting into a subconscious “battle of egos” with your target, you implicitly put him or her at ease.
It’s not always easy saying things like “I don’t know” or “I’m sorry,” nor is it easy to take words like “I” or “me” out of the equation. If you spent years earning a medical degree, it may seem strange not to introduce yourself as “Doctor.” It might seem difficult to refrain from offering an opinion and instead solicit opinions and feedback from others. But the more you can behave in these ways, the easier it will be for you to connect with others.
Suspending your own ego is a good first step toward helping others feel good about themselves and thus more inclined to help us, but you can build on that by actively listening to others, affirming their ideas and opinions, and offering compliments. Of course, you’ll always want to behave in ways appropriate to the existing level of rapport. Guys make mistakes all the time here, trying to establish rapport with women by complimenting their physical appearance. It comes off sounding condescending or creepy, because the guys in this situation haven’t built up enough of a friendship. Be kind, but try as well to put yourself in the position of your person of interest. What might they like to hear? And what might they find awkward or offensive coming from someone they don’t know very well?
As a professional hacker of humans, I might seek to get someone to divulge sensitive information. Instead of bluntly asking for that information, I often volunteer some innocuous information of my own. Let’s say I’m coming up to a receptionist’s desk and want her to tell me where the server room is located. If I notice a photograph of her family on the beach during their vacation, I might invite her to converse with me by saying something like: “Hey, I’m about to take my two sons on their first beach trip. I don’t know anything about beaches. This one looks great!” Later on, when I ask her in passing about the server room, she’ll feel more comfortable divulging it because I’ve already told her something personal about myself. In addition, I’m implicitly asking her for advice about beaches, which validates her and puts her in a position of authority. I’ve given her something, and she can now give me something. Quid pro quo, baby.
Shrewd hackers of humans take quid pro quo to the next level by seeking opportunities to bestow gifts on others. The idea is called “reciprocal altruism”: many animal species, like human beings, feel inclined to do something nice for others who behave kindly toward them. Even rats do this.10 Sometimes the gift you give can be a physical good, but just as often a nonmaterial gift of kindness or consideration will work.11 The key is to make sure the gift has some value to the other person, whether or not you happen to find it valuable.
On one occasion, Robin Dreeke and I were renting a car to go to a training. The model we’d rented was ridiculously small—I couldn’t even fit my legs into it. We headed toward the counter seeking an upgrade. Upon arriving, we noticed many customers were having problems with their cars. Some were even screaming at the middle-aged, female customer service representative, who remained calm but seemed frazzled.
We stood in line, and when our turn came up, Robin did something absolutely genius. Instead of just asking the customer service rep for an upgrade, he said, “Ma’am, it looks like you’re having a really bad day. Why don’t we just stand here for a minute? You can take a quick break.”
Just like that, the muscles in the woman’s face relaxed. “Really?” she asked, glancing over at her supervisor. “You would do that?”
“Sure,” Robin said. “Everyone’s been screaming at you.” He pointed at her water bottle, which was standing behind her on a table. “Why don’t you just go over and take a drink, and we can pretend we’re talking.”
It was as if we’d given her the greatest gift on planet earth. Boom—instant rapport. A few moments later, when she had collected herself, she asked us what we needed. We mentioned we wanted to buy an upgrade, and not only did she find a really nice luxury car for us on short notice, she gave it to us for free—without us even requesting it. We had given her a gift that was immensely valuable to her in the moment. Afterward, it felt far more natural for her to do something special for us.
There’s an awful term in the social engineering world, the “kill shot.” You’ve been working hard to get “in” with someone, making a connection, building rapport, inching closer to your ultimate goal: obtaining a piece of information, say, or having the person buzz you into a secure facility. The “kill shot” is that final action or speech that prompts your target to give you what you truly want. You’ve gone in for “the kill” and nailed it.
“Kill shot” sounds so heartless. I like to think of myself as a nice, caring guy, not a hired assassin. Besides, such an approach is totally counterproductive. Second-rate hackers of humans obsess about their end goal when building rapport. They’re constantly looking for the “kill shot.” As a result, they tend to rush, overly eager to get what they want and leave. They make mistakes, say the wrong thing, and wind up alienating their “targets.” These hackers would be better off managing their own expectations, forgetting about their end goal, and instead crafting an interaction that promises to leave the other person better for having met them.
Listen carefully to what others say. Seek common ground. Enjoy the interaction. Make it real. You’ll wind up behaving more thoughtfully and compassionately toward others and building rapport more quickly and effectively. That in turn will increase the odds you’ll achieve your ultimate goal. It can be hard to dispense with the “kill shot” mentality. If an interaction is going well, you’re feeling great, too. Oxytocin is coursing through your brain, and that might lead you to jump too far ahead in the conversation. In managing expectations, you also have to manage your own emotions. Remind yourself to breathe. Don’t rush. Make the experience of others your top priority. You won’t go wrong.
Pick one of the eight rapport-building techniques and practice it with a complete stranger. When you feel you’ve mastered it, go on to another, and another. When you’ve mastered many or all of these, practice combinations of these techniques at the same time.
I love disguises and costumes. They’re a professional social engineer’s best friend. When interacting with others in everyday life, you obviously won’t be pretending to be someone you’re not in the course of presenting a pretext and building rapport. Nevertheless, certain kinds of physical props can help, not least because they shape how you think about yourself. Dress and appearance are particularly important. In one classic study, researchers asked students to take a test while wearing a white coat they found hanging in the testing room. Researchers told one group of students that the coat was a painter’s coat and another group that it was a professor’s lab coat. Students who believed they were wearing a professor’s lab coat performed better on the test. Those who believed they were wearing a painter’s coat worked through the test more quickly and scored lower. As researchers found, students who felt they were wearing a painter’s coat lowered their own expectations for themselves. You know that old adage that you should “dress for the job you want, not the job you have”? There’s some truth in that!12
When I was trying to land a job as a chef at a fancy restaurant with no experience, my clothing choices figured prominently in my pretexting and rapport-building efforts. I didn’t go in there wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt, nor was I wearing a three-piece suit. I wore a button-down shirt and dress pants—formal enough, but not overly so. The outfit left me feeling confident enough, and it helped me during rapport building because it didn’t distract or arouse suspicion in my would-be boss. Running my own company, I’ve sat on the other side of the table and encountered a number of job applicants who didn’t dress appropriately. They couldn’t build rapport with me, because all I was thinking during our interaction was, “This person has no clue how to dress.”
It might sound obvious, but I’ll say it anyway since many people mess this up: think carefully about all aspects of your appearance. If you’re paying a sales call to someone, you probably won’t want to go in there with uncombed hair, excessive piercings, or food in your teeth. If you’re wealthy and trying to connect with someone who isn’t, maybe you shouldn’t wear all of your expensive diamonds or your $3,000 Louis Vuitton handbag. If you’re on a first date with someone, check whether you’re wearing too much cologne or perfume. In many situations when you’re trying to have a serious conversation with someone, avoid pesky distractions like your smartphone. In any situation, think about the other person and how you might use physical props to make them as comfortable as possible, so that you can leave them better off for having met you.
We can boil down the concept of rapport building to two words: be friendly. But don’t let the simplicity of that imperative fool you. There’s sophisticated science behind rapport, and some serious artfulness is required to master it. If you do master it, you’ll discover that the simplest things in life are sometimes the most powerful. Joe Navarro told me how he once used the principles of rapport building described here to convince a teenage boy on an Indian reservation to confess to a crime he had committed. The teenager had hit another person with his car, perhaps while driving under the influence. But he wouldn’t talk to any of Joe’s colleagues, despite repeated attempts on their part to engage him. Sensing that the teenager was overwhelmed, Joe took him for a little walk, away from the scene of the accident.
Joe took a deep, cleansing breath, and then another, and then another. Seeing him do this, the teenager took breaths of his own. And like that, in a matter of seconds, Joe had established rapport, creating a tribe of two stressed-out human beings trying to relax. “I really screwed up,” the boy said, without Joe even asking him to tell him anything. From there, the boy went on to reveal everything that had happened.
Rapport building is so powerful that even highly trained hackers aren’t impervious to it. At our big conference every year, my company hosts a blowout formal party with a very exclusive guest list, just our clients and a few close friends. Our fellow hackers know about the party, and every year some of them try to sneak in, just to say they did. Not long ago, a guy approached me at the conference and said, “Chris, we’ve never met, but I’m a big fan of your books and your podcast. Here, I have a gift for you, just to thank you for everything you do for our community.” He handed me a bottle of Glenfarclas 25, my favorite scotch.
I was blown away. Inspecting the bottle, I said, “How did you know this was my favorite?”
“Well, I heard you mention it on your podcast.” He told me which episode, and he was right—I had mentioned it.
I thanked him for the gift and then felt the impulse to do something nice for him. “Hey,” I said, handing him a special wristband, “we’re having a private party tonight, why don’t you come? You can use this to get in.”
“Wow, man,” he said, “this is so cool. Hey, I have some friends with me. Can I bring them?”
“Of course,” I exclaimed, happy to repay the gift. “How many do you need?”
“Five.”
Five extra invitations was a pretty big ask for someone who wasn’t a client or close friend, but this individual had just given me a gift that meant something to me, so it felt hard to say no. Without thinking much about it, I handed him five more wristbands. He thanked me profusely and went on his way. That night, he and his five friends partied it up on our dime. They had quite the story to tell their colleagues back at the office.
This guy was good. He hadn’t manipulated me into doing his bidding—not at all. He’d built rapport by accomplishing several tasks in just a few seconds. He’d affirmed that he and I were in the same tribe of security professionals. He’d validated me while implicitly suspending his own ego. And he’d bestowed a thoughtful gift that meant something to me. The oxytocin was surging through my brain like the mighty Mississippi, creating a situation in which I wanted to comply with his wishes. When I did so, he went on his way, leaving me better off for having met him.
This guy had hacked a seasoned hacker. All by mastering the art of friendliness. Practice rapport building diligently, and you might hack someone like me, too. Even if you don’t, you’ll get more of what you want and leave others in your life a whole lot happier. In a small but important way, you’ll have done something to build community and heal our fractured world.