Get what you want by subtly nudging people to agree with you and to act.
“If you would persuade,” Benjamin Franklin said, “you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”1 Influence is the process of making it easy for someone to behave or think in desirable ways. Master the seven principles in this chapter and you’ll soon find yourself winning arguments, making new friends, and convincing others to comply with your wishes.
I was standing in the parking lot of a corporate headquarters. My goal: get inside and access the executive offices. As I approached the front entrance, a guy in a shiny new BMW Z3 sports car zipped past me and into an executive parking spot. He was talking into his Bluetooth headset, and from the frown on his face and his flailing arms, it appeared that he was having a spat with someone and was quite upset. “Hmm,” I thought, “I’ve got to walk slowly past this car to try to hear what he’s saying.” I knew I couldn’t walk too slowly—that would seem creepy. But I was carrying some papers (part of my pretext) and pretended to read them so that I could quite reasonably shuffle slowly past. As I passed the car, I couldn’t make out what he was saying, except for one thing: “I really don’t want to do this today. It’s going to hurt a lot of people.” What was happening? Was he going to fire someone? Would there be layoffs? Would he announce some other bad news?
I continued walking to the front door, went inside, and approached the receptionist’s desk. The monitor before her was tilted at an angle so that I could just barely make out what she was gazing at. And guess what? She was playing a video game. For an instant, I ceased being a hacker of humans, and just behaved like an ordinary, concerned person. If that angry, agitated executive walked in and caught her playing a video game, who knew what would happen. So, I said to her, “Hey, before I tell you why I’m here, I just want you to know: I think I saw your boss outside in the parking lot, and he’s in a really bad mood. If he sees that on the screen, he’s going to freak.”
She shut down her game, turned politely to me, and said, “How can I help you?” Just then, the angry executive walked in. He passed by the desk in a huff and said, “Beth, in my office.”
She got up to go, and as she was turning around, she mouthed “thank you!” to me. At that point, my “hacking humans” hat popped back on my head—I knew this would end well.
I sat down to wait for her to come back. Six or seven minutes later, she reappeared, a bit flustered, and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe you waited.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “I figured you’d be able to help me. So, I just thought I’d wait.”
“Where were we?” she asked, sitting down.
“Oh,” I said, “you were about to buzz me in because I’m late for my meeting in HR.”
She shot me a look—no, it was a slow, full-on stare—that said, I know that isn’t true.
I glanced down at my watch and sighed. “Yeah, I’m really late.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. She hit her buzzer and let me in.
As a result of this one little encounter, my colleagues and I were able to hack this entire company. We gained access to everything—all of their data and documents.
The approach I used here wasn’t rapport building—I didn’t have time for that, nor was I able to convey a clearly defined pretext. I jumped straight to another set of tools that professional hackers of humans also keep in their toolboxes: principles of influence. Pretexting and rapport building can suffice to induce others to behave as we’d like, but more often they function as a prelude to deliberate efforts to influence. If you’re trying to get your siblings to contribute money to pay for your aging mother’s care, or your employees to put out extra effort so your team can succeed with a big project, you’ll communicate your request in specific and strategic ways once you’ve already initiated a conversation so your siblings or employees will be more likely to say yes. Professional hackers don’t leave these efforts to chance or “gut feel.” They deploy proven techniques rooted in the science of human psychology, techniques so powerful they almost seem like mind control. In fact, hackers can often dispense with pretexting and rapport if they need to and just use influence to get what they want, as I did here.
The specific technique I used with this assistant is called reciprocation. It’s similar to the “give to get” rapport-building technique described in the last chapter, with an important difference. “Give to get” is generic: you don’t know much about the other person so you give them something small that everyone likes in hopes they’ll do something good for you as well. Your goal is simply to get them to like you so that at some future moment you can then nudge them in a specific direction. With reciprocation, that moment of influence has arrived, and your altruism is now keenly targeted to elicit a specific act of goodwill that seems both commensurate and natural to the other person. You know something about your person of interest and what they regard as valuable. You intentionally prepare the way for your imminent request by giving them this valuable gift so that they’ll feel indebted enough to say yes to you.
In this particular hack, I had a goal in mind: I wanted the receptionist to let me into the building. Guessing that the executive I’d seen in the parking lot was her boss, I gave her something I knew she’d find valuable: a chance to avoid a potentially nasty encounter. Although it might seem hard to believe, I gave that gift selflessly, without my end goal in mind. I was just acting on impulse to help her. But it instantly dawned on me that I had stumbled upon the perfect gift to give her so that my impending request would seem both commensurate and natural for her to fulfill. I could now ask for what I wanted and receive a favorable response. I had unwittingly triggered the reciprocation dynamic.
You, too, can use reciprocation and other principles of influence to win people over and prompt them to act on your behalf. You’re probably using some of these principles in your daily life right now without realizing it. Imagine what would happen if you honed these skills and deployed them deliberately. Imagine, too, how great it would be to recognize when others are trying to influence you—you could break free of their spell and make informed decisions that are in your own best interest.
With one exception, the principles of influence I use and teach aren’t original to me but rather come from Robert Cialdini’s classic book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.2 Before encountering this book, I had intuitively practiced these principles, but had been only dimly aware of what I was doing. Cialdini crystallized these principles for me and introduced me to the underlying science, and for that I feel greatly in his debt. To become a master hacker of humans, read Cialdini as well as the other authors listed at the end of this book. In the meantime, begin building your skills and seeing results by integrating the following seven key influence principles into your daily interactions.
Rounding out what I’ve said on this, let me emphasize the importance of breaking out of your own bubble and paying close attention to your person of interest. The Golden Rule presented in the Bible has us treat others as we would want to be treated. In applying reciprocation, you’ll want to practice what businessman and author Dave Kerpen calls the “Platinum Rule”: treating others in line with their wishes.3 Since you’re trying to arouse feelings of indebtedness in others, what matters is their subjective frame, not yours. Think of a gift they would find sufficiently valuable to inspire their gratitude or feelings of obligation to you.
Remember, gifts you bestow don’t have to be expensive or fancy. Sometimes handcrafted objects or thoughtful gestures are the most valuable to people. And both gifts and requests can be quite subtle. Posing a question, for instance, creates an “obligation” to answer. Divulging a piece of information might create a sense of obligation to return the favor. Laughing at someone’s joke might create an obligation for them to laugh at your joke. And holding the door open for someone might leave them feeling obliged to do something equally chivalrous for you.
In the above example, the “gift” I gave the receptionist turned out to be perfect for her, to an extent I couldn’t have imagined. A few weeks after the incident, when I debriefed her and others in the organization about our break-in, I asked her why she let me in. “Because,” she said, “I got yelled at three times already for playing computer games at the front desk because it’s such a boring job. You saved me from getting yelled at again, and I was especially grateful because my boss was in a bad mood. When I came back and you said I was already in the process of letting you in, I knew that wasn’t true, but you had just saved me from being humiliated. And I thought, ‘Well, this nice guy can’t be a bad person.’ So, I decided to let you in.” I had lucked into a gift that cost me little (just a few minutes of my time) but was so valuable in her mind that she breached important security protocol. Even though she knew something wasn’t quite right it felt natural for her to agree, and she might have even felt obliged on some level to do so.
If you plan to make a request of someone, think in advance about that person’s needs or desires and any gifts that might arouse feelings of indebtedness or obligation commensurate with your request. If you aren’t sure what your person of interest values, observe them carefully, listening for “pain points” they might express—problems that you might help address with a modest outlay of time, effort, or money. Don’t make your gifts larger than the level of rapport that exists, as that will backfire. Reciprocation is potentially an open-ended process in the context of everyday relationships. Gifts you give might allow you to extract positive responses to your requests, paving the way for you to give other, more valuable gifts and make bigger requests going forward. In effect, the act of mutual gift giving allows you to build progressively greater levels of rapport. You’ve left other people better off for having met you and thus created a positive impression in their minds. Since people like you more, you can increase the value of what you bestow and request.
If my neighbors watch over our house when we’re on vacation and I reciprocate by doing the same for them, we’ve created a certain level of goodwill and trust between us, making it possible for either of us to do the other an even bigger favor—say, spending several hours to help the other figure out why their Internet isn’t working—and ask a similar favor in return. As time passes and our relationship develops, we might find ourselves taking in valuable packages for one another or eventually watching one another’s pets for the weekend. If either of us had asked the other to care for our dog Ralphie when we’d first met, it would have come across as strange and excessive. We’d have engendered distrust, rendering future cooperation less likely. But the same is true if one of us had bestowed a huge gift in anticipation of making a request. The other party might have found it strange and suspected that it came with some pretty big strings attached.
Any of the influence principles discussed here can create positive feelings in others’ minds, raising baseline levels of rapport and enabling even greater influence. Rapport and influence are thus mutually reinforcing. The more rapport you build, the more influence you can potentially wield, and vice versa.
Years ago, after my family adopted our dog Logan from the Humane Society, we received a call soliciting a donation. “How is Logan,” the woman on the phone asked. “Is he still healthy?” When I responded that he was and thanked her for checking in, she informed me that they were raising money for their annual charity drive to benefit animals under their care. “Most of your neighbors have been donating two hundred dollars today.”
“Wow,” I said, “two hundred is a lot of money.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” the woman said. “I know times are hard right now so maybe a donation of fifty dollars would help. Could you manage that?”
“I don’t know, maybe I could do forty. Would that be okay?”
“Perfect,” she said. “Would you like to donate that now by credit card or by check?”
If the woman had called and not set that initial amount of $200, I probably wouldn’t have donated $40. I would have reasoned that I was already doing my part by taking care of a dog. Or maybe I would have given a token amount, like $10. By starting at a high number and then conceding to something smaller, she made me feel like I was “getting something” from her and doing the deal on my terms. I felt more comfortable conceding to her and contributing the $40.
As the near ubiquity of the Golden Rule suggests, we humans like the idea of treating others as we’ve been treated (whether we actually do it all the time is another question).4 This idea goes well beyond the reciprocal gift-giving described above. If someone concedes something to us, we’ll be more likely to concede something to them. Further, as research in social psychology has also demonstrated, we are more likely to agree to requests if we’ve first agreed to a smaller, but related request—what is known as the “foot-in-the-door” technique.5 A potentially useful pathway to compliance is thus to first use concession to get your person of interest to agree to a relatively small request and then progressively increase the scope of your requests as you build mutual trust and rapport. Now that I’d agreed to donate $40 to the Humane Society, I was more likely to comply with a follow-up request for a $60 or $75 donation, had that been their ultimate goal.
Another trick is to concede something that seems valuable to your person of interest, but that isn’t valuable to you. The Humane Society might have decided that their target donation was $25 per person. Starting at $200 and conceding $160 of that was an effective approach. Before you deploy this technique, make a list of possible concessions you might make and compare them with the concessions you’re seeking to ensure the balance is in your favor.
If you’re not using concession in your parenting, you’re missing out. When my son Colin was eight, he went through a phase of asserting his independence by refusing to eat breakfast. He just wouldn’t do it, no matter how much I begged, cajoled, or threatened. He even began waking up later and getting ready for school just before the bus arrived so that he didn’t have time to eat breakfast. One morning, I had an idea. I woke him and said, “Hey, you have a choice this morning. Do you want eggs, cereal, or oatmeal?”
He thought about it for a moment and said, “I’ll take oatmeal.” And like that, I’d won. I’d appeared to concede something by relinquishing control and offering him a choice, thereby giving him a chance to express his independence. In return, he conceded something to me: he would eat oatmeal for breakfast. All I really cared about was that he ate something—it didn’t matter what it was. I’d done to him what the Humane Society had done to me. I’d given him a choice knowing that whatever he chose, I’d win. In both cases, the person deploying concession got their person of interest to willingly agree to what they wanted, leaving them better off.
According to social psychologist Timothy C. Brock, commodity theory holds that “any commodity will be valued to the extent that it is unavailable.”6 In other words, scarce goods are valuable goods. Hackers of humans mobilize this simple principle, designed to explain the psychology underlying consumer behavior, to move targets to a desired outcome. You can, too. Are you trying to sell a product? Announce that it will be around for a limited time only. Want to get someone to confide in you? Tell them you don’t feel comfortable talking to anyone else about this issue—only them. I use scarcity all the time when setting up meetings with potential clients. Instead of telling them that my calendar is wide open and they can pick any day and time they want for our appointment, I’ll give them just a couple of relatively short windows over a week-long period from which they can select. Doing so makes it appear that I’m extremely busy, and that my time (and by extension, that of my entire team) is valuable. The prospective client now wants the meeting even more. I haven’t lied to my prospect—I am very busy. I’ve just chosen to offer limited flexibility in scheduling to highlight that reality.
We humans love to experience consistency in our daily reality, associating it with stability, wisdom, and confidence. As research has found, behavioral consistency helps build cognitive trust (not to be confused with emotional trust).7 In a business context, members of the consulting firm McKinsey have spoken of “the three Cs of customer satisfaction: Consistency, consistency, consistency.”8 If you have kids, you know this principle doesn’t just apply to customer care. You walk into a room to find a prized glass vase lying shattered on the ground. Your son or daughter stands nearby. When you ask if they broke the vase, they say, “Nope, not me.” If you observe that a ball of theirs is a couple of feet away on the floor, and that this ball wasn’t there just ten minutes earlier, and that you heard them throwing something around the house, they still deny breaking the vase. “I just came into the room and it was broken,” they say. Kids do this kind of thing all the time—lying to the point of ridiculousness, just to remain consistent with their original story.
You can easily mobilize our drive for consistency in your daily life. Reinforce people’s inner urge to remain consistent, for example, by rewarding behavior of theirs that you like. Although I had notched a victory when my son Colin conceded to eating oatmeal for breakfast, my success was fleeting. I would have to induce him to continue eating it day after day. I did that by rewarding his behavior so as to reinforce his internal consistency drive. I made no secret that I was happy with him, and I offered to make him oatmeal any way he wanted, even adding maple syrup for sweetness. Today, Colin detests oatmeal, and that’s because he wound up eating it every day for an entire year as a kid, thanks to my hacking skills and his internal drive for consistency. (Think it’s easy to have a hacker as a parent? Ask Colin—it isn’t!)
Companies play on the consistency principle all the time, most notably in their loyalty programs. Starbucks knows its customers naturally maintain morning coffee “habits.” They reinforce those habits by giving you points every time you buy a drink and more points if you develop other habits they like, such as adding a breakfast sandwich to your order. You can develop rewards systems of your own to help people in your life behave consistently in ways you like. Want your children to stretch their artistic muscles? Praise the pictures they paint and post them on the wall. Before you know it, you’ll have more paintings than you know what to do with. If you want your spouse to communicate with you more, don’t just demand that behavior. When your spouse begins to tell you about their day, actively listen and ask follow-up questions, “rewarding” them with your interest. When they’re done, proffer a second reward in the form of a hug. These two actions will help them create a consistent pattern.
You can also use consistency in the course of conversations to nudge people in desired directions. You stand a better chance of getting someone to agree to a request if you first pose easier questions and get them to say “yes” to those. They’ll be more inclined to say yes to what you really want simply because they’ll want to appear consistent to themselves and to others in the answers they give. Also, when someone has agreed to your wishes, try getting them to articulate that to you explicitly. “So to confirm,” you might say to an employee, “tell me again what goals we decided on, and when you’re going to complete those projects.” If your employee commits voluntarily to taking an action, and verbalizes this commitment to you, they’ll be more inclined to follow up and not backtrack thanks to the psychological desire to remain consistent.
People tend to regard an action or idea as “good” or acceptable if they believe others do, too. In research experiments, scholars have demonstrated the power of social proof for a range of actions, including doing good deeds, littering, and “even in deciding whether and how to commit suicide.”9 Hackers of humans use peer pressure to influence their “targets.” And they also try to appear similar to their targets so that targets feel more comfortable doing their bidding. In their mind, they’re helping an insider, not a stranger.
Students of mine used such techniques to obtain personal information from strangers in a Las Vegas mall. One student in a team of four sat down in the food court with an iPad in hand, posing as a successful developer of Apple Store apps. He purported to have a new game that had not yet been released (prior to arriving at the mall, he had quickly downloaded an app that allowed you to develop simple games for kids). He was in the mall, he said, asking people if they wanted to demo the app and provide feedback. To demo the app, people would need to leave their full name, place of residence, and date of birth. If this student had simply pitched passersby to demo the app, he would likely have only attracted a few takers. Instead, he had the three other students on his team stand in line pretending to be strangers who were waiting to try out the app. That alone piqued bystanders’ curiosity, but then these three pretended to play the game and loudly exclaimed how “awesome” it was. When asked, the three happily provided their personal information to the supposed app developer. Seeing them do this, others in the food court began lining up and willingly handing over their personal information. Since others had done it, it seemed “safe.” It was a brilliant display of the social proof principle.
Used properly, social proof can create situations in which even reluctant, cynical people concede to your requests. On one occasion, while I was trying to enter a secure building, the guard on duty handed me a clipboard to sign. Scanning the board, I noted that one of the people who had signed in earlier that morning was a man named Paul Smith. Pretending to realize that I lacked the proper identification, I handed back the clipboard, apologized profusely, and promised the attentive security guard on duty that I would return later that day with the proper ID. On my way out, I casually asked his name. I never did return with the proper ID. Instead, I returned the next day and approached a different guard. “Hey,” I said, “my name is Paul Smith. I was here yesterday, and Jim checked me in. I filled out all the paperwork, and he let me in.” The security guard let me in without checking my ID. For him, the social proof that I had mustered by mentioning his colleague’s name was enough.
Most of us are socialized to respect authority figures. In a classic study reported by the psychologist Stanley Milgram and conducted at Yale University, research subjects were asked to administer electric shocks to another person under the pretext of helping experts better understand how punishment affects our ability to learn. Prodded by the researcher, subjects meted out electric shocks of varying strength as “punishment,” with the shocks ostensibly growing more severe as the experiment proceeded. Milgram wanted to see how far people would go in administering pain to another person when prompted by an authority figure. Out of forty subjects, most—twenty-six—continued administering shocks until the very end of the experiment, with the voltage well above a level marked “Danger: Severe Shock.” As Milgram remarked, the experiment showed “the sheer strength of obedient tendencies.” “Subjects have learned from childhood,” he continued “that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will. Yet, 26 subjects abandon this tenet in following the instructions of an authority who has no special powers to enforce his commands.”10
Scammers use the authority principle all the time to bilk people, posing as police officers, IRS agents—you name it. Between January and May 2019, the Federal Trade Commission logged almost 65,000 reports of scammers pretending to be from the Social Security Administration, and almost 20,000 reports of scammers claiming to work for the Department of Health and Human Services.11 Scary, isn’t it? You certainly don’t want to use the authority principle to cheat people in your everyday life, but you can use it in subtler ways to become more persuasive. When trying to convince a boss to hire you, you might influence them by deepening your voice slightly or using more sophisticated vocabulary appropriate to the job, since both might suggest authoritative knowledge. When trying to resolve an issue with customer service personnel, mentioning your long-standing patronage of the company and evoking your familiarity with its products might lead them to take your complaint more seriously, since you’ll have established your “authority” as a valued customer.
Remember those students of mine who induced people in the Las Vegas mall to disclose their personal information? During the next class I taught, I challenged my new set of students to outdo these exploits. They sure did, this time mobilizing the authority principle. A team of students went to a bar and approached the lead singer of a band that was performing that night. One of the students told the singer that they were students working on a study and needed to get as many people as possible to fill out a survey. Most of the questions on this survey were bogus, but the last few asked for the same information as the other students sought: name, place of residence, date of birth. The lead singer agreed to help. Later that evening during the band’s performance, one of the students jumped onstage with the singer’s permission, grabbed the microphone, and said, “Joe, the lead singer, just helped me with a study for my graduate school project, and he’s asking everyone here to help me.” The lead singer chimed in, “Yeah, help this guy out!” Within a few moments, dozens of people at the bar were lined up to fill out the survey, just because the lead singer—an authority figure in this context—asked them to.
If people like people who are similar to them (the tribalism described in the last chapter), they really like people who like them.12 If you like someone, evoking genuine concern, care, and affinity commensurate to the level of rapport that exists between you, they will in turn like you—and go to great lengths to make you happy. Of course, liking your person of interest by itself isn’t enough to guarantee that they will like you back. If you show them how much you like them by paying them compliments, asking how they are, telling them how much you like them, and so on, yet you reek of body odor, are shabbily dressed in a context where you’re supposed to be dapper, or hunch yourself over into an off-putting, defensive posture, your person of interest still isn’t going to like you. Your body language and dress actively turned them off. So, in addition to liking someone, you have to use these elements to create a “blank canvas,” if you will, that doesn’t impede that person from liking you back and responding positively to your requests.
Even if you smell great, dress appropriately, avoid forbidding body language, and take other measures to make yourself likable, your person of interest still might not reciprocate your expressions of affinity. In one epic fail that occurred while I was trying to break into a building, I approached the receptionist and complimented her on one of the many framed photographs displayed on her desk. One featured her two teenage daughters in their bikinis during a beach vacation. “Wow,” I said, “that’s a great picture of your daughters.” I had meant this as an innocent compliment to convey my affinity for her. She responded with a hostile glare, pegging me as a creepy stranger who had eyes for her scantily clad daughters. I didn’t even try to request entry. Instead, I left and had someone else on my team try instead. To this day, the encounter represents one of my most cringe-worthy moments as a professional hacker.
You might studiously avoid any miscues and find that your person of interest still doesn’t like you back. Don’t worry, it might have more to do with them than you. My wife has an acquaintance who was in a horribly abusive relationship with a guy. He apparently looked quite similar to me—same height, same build, same color hair. My wife’s acquaintance had been so traumatized by this man that she began to visibly shake whenever I walked within a few feet of her. I could have smiled all I wanted, tilted my head back in a way that suggested openness, smelled great, showered her with compliments, even told her outright that I liked her, and it would have made no difference—she wouldn’t have liked me back. If you’ve tried everything and still can’t get someone to like you, it might well be out of your control. Rather than continuing to frustrate yourself, you will be best off avoiding this person and seeking what you want or need from someone else.
Now that you’re familiar with the key influence principles, let’s work with them. Try the following exercise:
Pick someone important in your life, such as your spouse, child, or friend. Your job is to convince them to try to eat something that they think they would never want to eat, using one or more of the principles of influence. This food item can’t be too gross or bad for them—you need to leave them better off for having met you. But the food has to be strange enough to be somewhat of a challenge. What will you do to incite your person of interest’s culinary boldness?
While writing this book, I used this exercise to get a friend of mine—I’ll call him Joe—to try a Japanese food that clearly grossed him out: raw uni, the gonads of sea urchins. We were grabbing dinner at a sushi restaurant, and in the space of ten minutes as we were sitting down, ordering, and waiting for our food I blasted him with multiple influence techniques, just for fun. Having known one another for a while, we had already built a certain amount of rapport, which I enhanced slightly as we entered the restaurant by talking up how great it was, knowing that Joe likes a good meal.
From there, I left the impression that I had expert knowledge of sushi and of this restaurant in particular (authority principle), throwing around sushi terms, describing in detail why this restaurant had the freshest possible sushi, and chatting with the waitresses as a regular would (they also clearly recognized me, which further established my authority). For good measure, I also tossed in some social proof, telling Joe about several people he knew who had previously eaten uni at this restaurant and loved it. Joe tentatively agreed to try the dish, so we included it in our order. I was halfway there.
When the food came out, it was every bit as fresh as I promised, which further buttressed my credibility (consistency principle). Since I had induced Joe to promise to try uni, his innate tendency toward consistency also impelled him to want to deliver on that promise. Fellow diners of Japanese descent, I alerted him, were also enjoying uni (social proof) and so should Joe, given the high esteem in which I held him for being an adventurous eater (liking). Staring long and hard at his uni, Joe finally put it in his mouth, chewed slowly, and swallowed. He didn’t like it very much. He told me he would never order it again. Still, he felt better off for having tried something new. He could at least brag to his friends and family that he had tried sea urchin gonads.
Try this exercise with a few people, testing out the seven influence principles. Use only one if you like during an encounter or mix and match them. Experiment. Have fun. Make note of what doesn’t work. From there, look for other opportunities in your daily life where you might profitably exercise influence. If you have conversations coming up where you’ll have to make a request of someone, plan these out in advance. Start with your pretext and from there list influence tactics that might match. If your pretext involves presenting yourself as the “newbie work colleague,” you probably won’t want to use the authority principle. If your pretext involves playing the role of the “stern boss,” avoid the liking principle. Also pay attention to your own emotions. If you’re feeling nervous about the encounter, you might want to avoid using the authority principle, as you might lack persuasiveness. If you’re feeling sad or depressed, it might feel harder to deploy the liking principle—you might not feel affinity for much of anything.
Once you’ve narrowed down your list of possible influence principles to deploy, don’t cling to it unduly. As you start to execute tactics in the moment, abandon or modify them as necessary on the fly. Whatever you do, don’t overdo these tactics. Otherwise, your person of interest will start to become aware of them and their critical faculties will kick in—they’ll become suspicious and might even come to dislike you. Take the liking principle too far, and you risk coming off as obsequious. Take authority too far, and you’ll seem arrogant and smug. Take reciprocity too far, and you’ll seem inappropriate. In each of these cases, your person of interest will feel much less inclined to help you and might even move to end the conversation.
In the course of these encounters, you might find you don’t need to mobilize influence principles as you’d planned, since your rapport building (which you’ve also been practicing all along) proved sufficient. In that case, stop! Cease and desist. If you don’t, it could prove fatal, as it once was for me and my colleague Ryan. We were breaking into a building posing as, you guessed it, pest control guys. It was eleven thirty at night, and the site was empty. As we were making our way around the building, we got lucky: a lone member of the staff was leaving the building and heading to the nearby parking lot. Before the door could close behind her, I stuck my foot in to catch it. The woman hadn’t seen us as she’d exited, but she’d heard me. She turned around, startled, and asked who we were. Pointing to our outfits, I said, “Pest control, ma’am. We’re inspecting for spiders and scorpions. Just a quick inspection, and then we’ll be spraying tonight while nobody is around.”
“Oh, okay,” she said, and continued on her way. That was it—I had won. In just a few seconds, I had built rapport. She clearly believed me and was leaving the premises. I should have shut up and continued on my way. Instead, I kept yapping. “Yeah,” I said as she was walking away, “this time of year, spiders are really bad. We decided to come late at night because it can be scary when you spray. They come out and die slow.” Ryan glared at me as if to say, Dude, what are you doing? Without thinking much about it, I was trying to mobilize the consistency principle, showing this woman that our actions were consistent with the pretext we had established of being pest control guys. Despite Ryan’s glare, I couldn’t stop myself—I blathered on in this vein, talking about spiders and the chemicals we were using, digging an even deeper hole for myself. The woman turned back to face us. “You know what,” she said, “I don’t know if I feel comfortable with you here.”
“No, no,” I said, “we’ll be in and out. Don’t worry, you can go on your way.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t feel comfortable. I need you to leave before I call the police.” She backed away and walked quickly to her car. We had been so close—I had my foot in the door. And yet, now we had to leave, all because I had tried to deploy an influence principle when it wasn’t necessary. Once you’ve already got your person of interest helping you, let them do it and leave it at that! When it comes to hacking humans, less is usually more.
Each day for the next week, pick a different influence principle, and challenge yourself to use it during minor interactions you have. Take a moment at the start of each day to brainstorm multiple ways you might deploy it as a tactic. If you’re trying to use the authority principle, make a list of how you might project a modest amount of authority in different social contexts—by picking a piece of clothing that you think exudes authority, dropping bits of expert knowledge, and so on. If you’re trying to use the liking principle, maybe you’ll challenge yourself to approach a colleague at work with whom you frequently clash and use compliments and other means to learn more about them. The possibilities are endless!
As you gain more experience with these influence principles and apply them alongside the other strategies in this book, you’ll be astonished how easy it is to get people to do your bidding or to think as you do—not because they have to, but because they want to. Influence is your ticket to getting free stuff, getting hired, getting your colleagues to support your decisions, enticing your kids to eat their breakfast, and so much more. In fact, as you become more adept at influence, the risk is that you’ll become overly confident in your new super power, assuming it can get you anything you want. In that case, you’re in for a rude awakening. Judicious deployment of these principles never guarantees success. Truly masterful hackers of humans hope for the best but know their super powers have limits. Some people are so psychologically adept and alert to the workings of influence that they just can’t be swayed, no matter what you do. There aren’t many of these people, but they’re out there.
I once met the ultimate security guard in the course of our hacking work. As part of this assignment, we had to compromise three separate buildings on a corporate campus, this time posing as repairmen from the Big Blue Repair Company who had come to fix something in several of the company’s server rooms. We nailed the first two buildings no problem, bypassing security even though we were not on their list of authorized visitors. At the third building, we encountered a young guard who from his stiff demeanor, crew cut, and athletic build seemed to be ex-military. “You’re not on the list,” he said when I told him my name.
“That’s odd,” I said, “because we were just in some of your other buildings, and the security there let us in no problem.”
He shook his head. “I’m not security for those two buildings. I’m security for this one. Sorry, but you need to be on the list.”
Fishing for information, I asked, “Who was it, John, who was supposed to put us on the list?”
“No,” he said, “Fred Smith, the director of IT.”
“Yeah, I could swear our office said he did. Let me call and find out what happened.”
We left the guard with a fake business card and went out to our car to do some quick online research on this Fred Smith guy. We found out who he was and obtained his contact information. Spoofing his phone number, I called the security desk where I’d just been denied. “Hi, this is Fred Smith,” I said to the young security guard. “Did you just turn away two repair people? Well, they were supposed to come up here on fifteen to do some repairs. So, I’m going to call their office and have them come back. Please add their names to the list.”
“Sure thing,” the guard said.
Bingo, I thought, problem solved. We were in.
About forty minutes later, I strolled back over to the security desk. “Hey,” I said, “I got a call from my office saying we’re back on the list. I guess we can go in now, right?”
“Uh-uh,” the security guard said, frowning. “Before you do, let me ask you a question. I took your business card and looked up your company name. I can’t find the Big Blue Repair Company in this state anywhere. Where are you from?”
“Oh,” I said, “that’s because we’re new to the area. We just moved in here.”
“That’s odd,” he said, “your card said you were family owned for twenty years.”
I was flustered now and stuttered a bit. “Well, we are, but in a different state.”
“What state? I’d like to look you up. Just because you’re on the list doesn’t mean I’m letting you through.”
We never did compromise this last building. This guy was too good, resisting any influence tactic we threw at him. We’d tried authority by impersonating the IT director. We used the consistency principle, in that my business card and outfit perfectly matched my pretext. We used social proof, informing the security guard that we had been in the other two buildings and his colleagues there had let us in. None of that worked—the security guard’s invisible “force field” was too strong. He was a born gatekeeper, which was why we later advised his company to put him in charge of training all of their security guards.
If guards everywhere were as good as this guy, and if employees of companies everywhere were as alert to the influence tricks criminals might try, my team and I would be out on the street looking for work. Sadly for organizations but fortunately for us, most people have personal force fields that are far weaker than this guard’s. They’re vulnerable to the influence principles, far more so than they realize. That spells opportunity for those of us who understand these principles and know how to mobilize them. Practice influence tactics to get what you want and win others over to your cause. As you improve, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve left people better off for having met you, even as you get more of what you want. Further, you’ll spot influence tactics instantly in the interactions you have with others. The more conscious of them you are, the less you’ll be swayed, and the more control you’ll have over your decisions. Do you really want to donate money when you’re solicited? Do you really want to let a stranger into your home? Do you really want to bring on someone to your team who makes a seemingly strong pitch? Maybe, but maybe not.
On some occasions, you might find yourself giving out information you don’t need to give. The people who solicited the information might be hackers, and some of that information might be quite sensitive. Chances are, these strangers deployed some specific influence techniques that short-circuited your inhibitions and got you talking. By mastering these techniques yourself, you can use them not to hurt people, but to develop more intimacy in your relationships and to help keep your loved ones safe, healthy, and thriving. How might you get your doctor to tell you what your diagnosis really means? How might you induce your boss to tell you what she really thinks of your performance? Turn the page and find out.