CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I heard a story once about Bono and Sophia Loren,’ says Andy, hoisting his holdall off his back and slinging it down on the shiny terrazzo floor in front of him. ‘They’re on this flight together and it hits a storm. Loren’s shitting herself with all the bouncing around and then, to cap it all, the plane is struck by lightning. By this stage she’s going obviously mental . . . until Bono turns round to her and says: “Don’t worry – it’s just God taking your photograph.”
‘It completely transforms things and she actually starts to laugh.’
We’re at the airport queuing up to check in. Andy’s doing a book tour in Belfast and I’m tagging along for the ride.
A bloke in front of us is on his mobile phone. We’re not sure who he’s talking to but from the way things are going there’s an outside chance it could be his therapist. He’s sweating, white as a sheet, and muttering stuff about take-off and landing being the times when things are most likely to go pear-shaped. He’s not exactly enthused about the next couple of hours and has clearly done his research. So much so that he’s beginning to make me nervous.
‘Reminds me of a story I heard about Muhammad Ali,’ I say. ‘He’s on a flight and as they’re taxiing out on to the runway, the cabin steward suddenly notices that he hasn’t fastened his seatbelt. So she goes over to him and asks him to do it up.
‘“I’m Superman,” Ali says to her. “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.”
‘She doesn’t miss a beat. “Superman don’t need no aeroplane!” she says.’
Now wouldn’t it be great if persuasion always worked like that?
Immediately. Incisively. Instinctively.
But, of course, it doesn’t, does it? Instead, most of our attempts to get other people to do things are about as effective as an exfoliating shampoo. In everyday life, persuasion is often a matter of trial and error. Of due process and negotiation. We get it right as many times as we get it wrong.
But clearly there are times when influence works first time. And clearly there are people – psychological cat burglars who are able to trick, charm and schmooze their way at will past our brains’ defence and security systems – who are better at persuading than others:
•Who can convince the boss to give them the pay rise they asked for.
•Who can convince the traffic warden not to write out the ticket.
•Who can convince the Champ to buckle up.
Is such deadly, black-belt persuasion licensed only to a chosen few? Or are we all able to do it – once we’ve decoded and mastered the secrets?
As a social psychologist—
‘Geek!’ honks Andy, as the queue starts moving again and we scuff our bags along the floor with our feet.
– in a world of ever increasing complexity, in a world placing ever greater demands on our attention, this was a question that I badly wanted to answer – even if Andy had already got there before me.
‘Of course we can all do it,’ he laughs. ‘I’ll give you a few lessons if you want.’
Did you know, for instance, that the brains of modern-day Western city-dwellers like us take in as much information during the course of a twenty-four-hour period as the brains of those who lived in rural medieval Britain would’ve taken in . . . during the course of an entire lifetime?
If we want to stand out we need to make ourselves count!
So I’ll tell you what I did.
I started to collect stories exactly like the one about Ali and the cabin steward.
I started to put together an influence ‘curiosity shop’ – exhibits of persuasion at ten when usually it’s at three or four.
Then, when I’d collected about two hundred or so, I subjected them to something called ‘factor analysis’ – a statistical technique that allows psychologists like myself—
‘He means geeks,’ Andy remarks to the girl on the check-in desk.
– to extract the key ingredients of whatever it is that we’re looking at.
I wanted to sequence the genome of this militant strain of persuasion. Uncover its DNA. And tantalizingly my analysis revealed FIVE CORE COMPONENTS which, when combined in unison in the one persuasion message, don’t just knock on the door of success, but kick it in, recline on the sofa with a nice cold beer and flick on the flat-screen telly.
And which also, rather handily, form the acronym SPICE!
And SPICE stands for:
•Simplicity
•Perceived self-interest
•Incongruity
•Confidence
•Empathy
And on the way to Belfast we’re going to talk you through each of these components in turn and their critical importance in getting you what you want.
‘I bet you a tenner you can’t get us into Business!’ Andy whispers to our long-suffering check-in girl.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ I say. ‘He’s a psychopath. They’re top-level psychological code-breakers. They can hack into your brain’s emotion servers and before you know it you’ll be doing everything he tells you!’fn1
Andy looks at me, then back at the girl.
He winks at her.
‘Double bluff,’ he says.
‘I’ve got a joke for you,’ I say, as we shovel down handfuls of peanuts.
We’re sitting in Business – and Del Boy’s looking smug. I’ve known some fast talkers in my time but this guy takes the biscuit. I’m not saying he’s bent but he could sell shaving soap to the Taliban.
Probably has, knowing him.
A nurse is doing the rounds of an intensive care unit when she’s called over by a man in a respirator.
‘Nurse!’ whispers the man hoarsely. ‘Are my testicles black?’
‘The nurse starts to panic. She whips up the sheet, takes a quick look underneath, but thankfully everything’s fine.
‘No, sir,’ she says. ‘I’ve just taken a look and everything is perfectly OK. You’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about.’
It doesn’t do any good.
‘Nurse!’ whispers the man even more urgently. ‘Are my testicles black?’
Now the nurse really starts to panic.
‘Sir!’ she says, ‘I’ve just taken a look and everything is perfectly OK. You’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about. Now please – time costs lives in medicine! Just spit it out in simple language: what seems to be troubling you?’
With his right hand, the man grasps the nurse weakly by the arm, while with his left slowly removing his oxygen mask.
He draws her gently towards him.
‘Nurse!’ he whispers, with seemingly the last vestiges of strength left in his body:
‘ARE MY TEST RESULTS BACK?’
Our brains have a preference, a hardwired preference, for SIMPLICITY over complexity. And nowhere is this more true than in the chaotic, cacophonous cauldron that we call persuasion. But precisely how powerful a spell the magic of simplicity casts over the influence process isn’t always immediately apparent.
We glimpse its handiwork in all walks of life . . . from politics to poetry to oratory. When President Roosevelt wanted to persuade a traditionally isolationist America to bail Britain out during her darkest hours of the Second World War he precision-engineered the simplest of phrases to do it. He called his policy: Lend-Lease.
And he described it in the simplest of language:
Suppose my neighbour’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose . . . if he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire . . . I don’t want to say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbour, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it’ . . . I don’t want $15 – I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.
The rest is history.
When John Keats wrote the first verse of his famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he could’ve written something like this:
What is the matter, armed old-fashioned soldier,
Standing by yourself and doing nothing with a pallid expression?
The reed-like plants have decomposed by the lake
And there are not any birds singing.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he got out his sharpie and knocked out the following masterpiece:
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Beautiful, isn’t it? The right combination of words tapped skilfully into the brain cracks open a safe deep within its vaults of rich and ancient emotion. And isn’t it precisely because of its propensity to say more with less that great poetry enjoys such unrestricted access to our hearts?
When Winston Churchill delivered his immortal, ‘Hostilities will be engaged with our adversary on the coastal perimeter . . .’ address in the summer of 1940, he could’ve put it differently. Instead of going down in history as the author of one of the greatest speeches ever made, he might have considered something less wordy:
‘We shall fight them on the beaches . . .’
‘Haha, yeah right!’ Andy laughs. ‘Someone once told me a story about an advertising exec in New York. One morning he’s walking to work through Central Park when he sees a blind man begging. The man is holding up a sign that says: “I am blind.” But his bowl is empty. On his way back from work the ad man passes the blind man again and notices that his bowl is still empty. So he picks up the sign, gets out his pen, and makes a simple change:
‘He writes: “It is spring and I am blind.” A couple of hours later and the blind man is raking it in.’
Nice.
But the evidence for simplicity’s hold over us isn’t just anecdotal. There’s science in the mix as well.
Research on the psychological principle of COGNITIVE FLUENCY, for example – how easy or difficult an object, argument or concept is to think about – demonstrates time and again that the easier something is to understand the more profitable, the more pleasurable, the more persuasive – in general, the more positive – we seem to find it.
Which of the following two food additives, for instance, would you say sounds the more dangerous: Hnegripitrom or Magnalroxate?
Most people say Hnegripitrom.
How about this?
Which of the following two amusement park rides do you think is scarier: Chunta or Vaiveahtoishi?
Most people say Vaiveahtoishi.
But you know what? All four of these names are made up. The reason the majority of people go for Hnegripitrom and Vaiveahtoishi is purely on account of the fact that Magnalroxate and Chunta are easier to say, and therefore easier to think about, than Hnegripitrom and Vaiveahtoishi. And, in general, we tend to equate simplicity with safety.
The same principle works on the stock market.
One famous study conducted several years ago found that if you invest in companies with pronounceable ticker codes (like GOOG for Google), you stand to make 10 per cent more profit after just one day’s trading than if you invest in companies with unpronounceable codes (e.g. RDO).
Companies you can say, pay!
In a similar vein, another study listed the features of a product in either an easy-to-read or a difficult-to-read typeface. Guess what the researchers found? Easy-to-read typefaces pretty much doubled the number of people willing to purchase the product.
Little wonder, then, that every time you walk into an Apple store it’s like having your senses scrubbed clean with a gigantic cognitive wet-wipe!
In fact, if you chart the evolution of virtually any consumer technology you’ll find the same pattern. You start out needing an IQ the size of Donald Trump’s hair to use it and end up a tech-ho without necessarily even being able to spell IQ. And the irony is that our forensic pursuit of the minimalist ultramodern is portentously depicted in ancient neuronal cave art scored deep within the gorges of our brains.
Things that are easy to process give us a momentary pleasure fix.
When we look at objects that are easy to pick up, for example, we produce microscopic smiles invisible to the naked eye. These imperceptible changes in facial muscle tone can be measured by a technique called electromyographyfn2 – and are not present when we look at objects that are difficult to pick up.
The take-home message is clear.
When considered in the context of websites, phones, cars, arguments – or anything else for that matter – the power of simplicity is absolute.
As we learned from Epicurus in Chapter Three, we have an inbuilt preference for pleasure over pain. And for anything that enables us to indulge such a preference, our brains roll out a big red chemical carpet.
‘But you still haven’t explained why our brains prefer simplicity over complexity,’ Andy says, taking off his go-faster Timberlands and pressing the ‘recline’ button on his seat. ‘I mean, all this geek stuff is great and all that. But what’s it for? The gun goes bang. But why?’
He sinks beneath the horizon.
‘Yeah, OK,’ I say. ‘Fair point. But you know what? Our intensive-care nurse of earlier has already kind of answered that for us. Time doesn’t just save lives in medicine. It was also very much of the essence during the course of our evolutionary history.’
I scrabble around in the seat pocket next to me for some paper – the sick bag will do – and pull out a pen.
‘Don’t worry about that, mate,’ says Andy. ‘In Business someone comes and holds the thing for you. You just have to press the call button.’
‘Any more of your jokes and I just might,’ I say. ‘Now, come back here.’
I smooth the bag out and write down the following sum while the seat whirrs and Andy jerks back into view. Then I get the in-flight menu and cover it up.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘On the back of this bag I’ve written out a very simple sum. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to reveal each of the numbers one by one to you and your job is to add it up out loud as we work our way down. You got me?’
Andy looks doubtful.
‘It’d help if you put pound signs in front of them,’ he says. ‘But OK, let’s give it a go.’
‘Right,’ I say, and reveal the first number.
‘One thousand,’ says Andy.
‘You’re on a roll,’ I say, and reveal the second number.
‘One thousand and forty.’
‘Genius!’ I say, and move on to the third.
‘Two thousand and forty . . .’
A few seconds later, Andy comes up with the total:
FOUR THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED!
‘They wanted me on Countdown instead of Carol Vorderman,’ he crows. ‘But I turned ’em down. I fancied a bit more of a challenge.’
‘Some people reckon you are Carol Vorderman,’ I mutter.
‘What was that?’ he says.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I don’t believe this but you’ve actually got it right!’
Andy looks at me like one o’clock half struck.
‘What do you mean, I got it right? Of course I got it right. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Well,’ I say, sheepishly. ‘When 99.9 per cent of people get to the penultimate calculation – 4090 + 10 – their brains instantly reach for the nicest, roundest, cuddliest whole number that they can think of. And they come up with . . . 5,000. Even Cambridge maths professors get this wrong. But you . . .?’
‘Maybe they could do with a few more psychopaths in Cambridge?’ Andy laughs.
I’m not so sure. I shove the bag back into the seat pocket and grab a glass of champagne from the cabin steward who’s doing the rounds. I feel like I’ve earned it.
‘Anyway,’ I say, taking a sip, ‘that, to answer your question, is why our brains love simplicity. You see, whenever our prehistoric ancestors faced a difficult situation – let’s say a predator, for instance – it would’ve been those who came up with the correct solution to such a predicament, be it fight or flight, that would’ve been most likely to survive and to pass on their genes to future generations. But even more likely to survive and to pass on their genes to future generations would’ve been those who came up with the correct solution most quickly.
‘Imagine, for instance, if every time you were faced with a sabre-toothed tiger you had to weigh the situation up from scratch: black, orange, stripy, fangs, drooling . . . creeping towards me slowly—’
‘What do you mean, “every time”?’ Andy butts in. ‘There wouldn’t be an “every time”. There would just be the one, mate.’
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘Life happens way too fast for it to be any other way. So over the years, the millions of years of our evolutionary history, our brains have learned to take short cuts; to use mental rules of thumb to make decisions; to employ learned associations; to assimilate millions upon millions of bytes – talking of sabre-toothed tigers! – of previously stored information to generate response outcomes.
‘Remember what that QC told me that time? Information travels round the brain like electricity around a circuit. It takes the path of least resistance. And the simpler you can make your argument, the more simply you present your case, the faster and more powerfully that information flows.’
‘Which is odd, isn’t it?’ says Andy. ‘Because most people think that by dressing things up, by using long words and flowery language, they’re making themselves sound more intelligent. I mean, that’s what that business bullshit chart was all about, wasn’t it? But actually, from what you’re saying it’s the complete opposite. The more complicated you make your argument the more likely it is to run into a mental roadblock in people’s heads.
‘You know, it’s exactly what you’re taught in the Regiment to do if you’re caught and interrogated. Be the “grey man”. Be the simple victim of circumstance who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Make it as easy as possible for your captors to dismiss you as a worthless bag of shit. If you can be the grey man you don’t stick out in the crowd.
‘Even when planning operations we are always told, KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. I still use KISS in my writing and even in business. So when the shit hits the fan my brain can work out very clearly what I need to be doing because it isn’t filled up with irrelevant information.’
Of course, we’re not saying that by keeping things simple we should in any way be dumbing things down. In fact, we’re saying exactly the opposite. It’s often remarkably easy to complicate matters – and inestimably more difficult to simplify them.
As Samuel Johnson famously once quipped: ‘I don’t have time to write you a short letter so I’ve written you a long one.’
Instead, what we are saying is this. There lies great beauty in simplicity – and such essential, elemental elegance is a honey trap for the brain.
Mathematicians constantly strive to find the shortest possible formula to describe a complex phenomenon. It’s called, in their language, ‘algorithmic irreducibility’.
We should do the same when we’re setting out to try to persuade.
‘Is it me or is there a funny smell around here?’ I ask Andy, as one of the cabin crew drops by with some hot towels.
‘Just you, mate,’ he says, slipping his feet back into his Timberlands.
‘Hey look,’ says Andy, jabbing me in the ribs. ‘Here he is – the poster boy for your Bad Good guys!’
We’re somewhere in the air between Birmingham and Liverpool and Andy is clicking through the film collection on his Mac.
Sure enough, there on the screen in front of him is Gordon Gekko, hair slicked back, white-collared shirt, braces, cufflinks, the whole nine yards.
I lean over and take a closer look as Andy unplugs his earphones and turns up the volume.
Bang on cue he delivers the line: ‘It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses.’
Andy smiles, before clicking on to the next film. He’s got the attention span of a goldfish on crystal meth.
‘It was all about him, all right,’ he laughs. ‘He didn’t give a shit about anyone apart from himself. As long as the money came rolling in, that was all that mattered.’
He’s spot on, of course. For Gekko, it was all about Gekko. But actually, unlike assets in the world of high finance, naked self-interest is not, as the man himself might put it, a zero-sum commodity. Sure, some of us might have more of it than others. But all of us own shares in ourselves – and like any corporate trader we’re keen to see their market value rise.
I once heard a story about King Louis XI of France. Louis was a staunch believer in astrology and so wasn’t exactly surprised when a fortune-teller correctly predicted that a certain member of his court would die within a week.
Mindful, however, that such a powerful clairvoyant as this might pose a considerable threat to his authority, he decided to send for him – having secretly arranged that he subsequently plunge to his death from a high window ledge.
‘You claim to be able to interpret the heavens,’ Louis addressed him gravely, ‘and to know the fate of others. So tell me: what fate will befall YOU? And how long do you have to live?’
The astrologer thought carefully about this for a moment. Then he smiled.
‘I shall meet my end,’ he replied, ‘just three days before Your Majesty meets his.’
Now, folks, we wouldn’t dream of telling you to do anything underhand in this book.
I mean, would we?!
But what we will tell you is this.
If, when you are trying to persuade someone to do something, you can frame your message so that it appears to be in THEIR INTERESTS as opposed to your OWN, you are going to have a much better chance of getting whatever it is that you want than if it’s the other way round.
Someone once asked a very pertinent question: what’s the best way of riding a horse?
Answer: in the direction in which it is going!
Well, from leading reins to leading brains. THE BEST WAY OF CHANGING SOMEONE’S MIND IS TO GET THEM TO CHANGE IT FOR YOU!
‘When I was writing Flipnosis,’ I tell Andy, ‘I hung out with a couple of the world’s top con artists both here in the UK and across the pond in the US. And while I was with them I posed each of them a question: “What, in your opinion, is the single most important factor in getting someone to do something for you?”
‘And you know what? Both of them, pretty much verbatim, gave me the same answer. Ninety-nine per cent of people make the same simple mistake when it comes to persuasion. Ninety-nine per cent of people think that the fundamental secret of persuasion is exactly that: TO GET SOMEONE TO DO SOMETHING FOR YOU.’
‘I can believe it,’ says Andy, flicking on to Angry Birds. ‘But . . . it isn’t, is it? The fundamental secret of persuasion is to GET SOMEONE TO DO SOMETHING FOR THEMSELVES.’
He zaps off his Mac and shoves it back into the arm of his chair.
‘I’ll give you an example,’ he says.
My wife had a friend who was one of your lot. She worked in some university up north somewhere. Anyway, as well as being one of the geek brigade, she was also one of the green brigade, and started up a campaign to get people cycling to work or taking the bus instead of driving in. She put up posters, flyers, sent round emails – you name it, she did it.
Nothing happened. Didn’t make a blind bit of difference. The car park was as rammed as it had been before she started. One night she came round for dinner and started blabbing about it. The main problem seemed to be that her head shed, who was also some bigwig on the university board or something, wasn’t interested and hadn’t got behind it and backed her.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s a self-centred, slimy little man and there’s nothing in it for him. He’s got other fish to fry.’
‘What other fish?’ I asked.
‘Revenue generation,’ she said.
Apparently, the big bee in his bonnet – or rather the big bee in the bloke above him’s bonnet – was the fact that the university finances were going tits up and they needed to make some money. Fast!
Ahhh! I thought. So that’s the way in, is it? The bastard’s strapped for cash.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t you tell him you’ve come up with a cunning little plan to swell the coffers? He’ll nick it, pass it off as his own at the next committee meeting – because that’s what slimy little gits like him do – and if they like it and give it the thumbs up, he’ll be flavour of the month.’
She looks at me as if I’ve just handed her a turd!
‘Why the hell would I want to make him look good?’ she shouts. ‘I’ve just told you he didn’t support me. Why on earth should I help him?’
‘Because,’ I tell her, ‘if it all goes according to plan you’ll get exactly what you want. You see, your brilliant idea to raise money is to introduce a hefty increase in car parking charges. Local councils do it all the time – it’s the easy option.’
Anyway, to cut a long story short, six months or so later when we see her, she’s beaming from ear to ear.
‘How’s the campaign going?’ I ask.
‘Couldn’t be better,’ she says. ‘The senate approved a hundred per cent increase in the annual car parking tariff and since then everyone’s been cycling or busing it on to campus!’
‘Bet your boss looks a right dickhead!’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘he does!’
‘Funnily enough, it’s a trick I learned from my Northern Ireland days, Kev. If you want to get an informer to do something you find out what’s important up the chain of command and play on that. People always want to impress those above them – even when they’re fucking them over!
‘Basically, if you want to get your boss to do something, find out what’s important to THEIR boss and piggyback what YOU want on that.’
Andy’s right. The best way of riding a horse is, indeed, in the direction in which it is going.
But the trick, when it comes to persuasion, is just a little bit more subtle than that. The trick, when it comes to persuasion, is to give that horse the impression it’s not being ridden at all.
Andy and I are standing at the baggage carousel in Belfast airport. As usual, the thing has been chuntering away for God knows how long and there’s still no sign of our bags.
A bunch of lads are here on a stag-do. They’ve got personalized T-shirts, green curly wigs, a life-size cardboard cut-out of – presumably – the groom, and the obligatory blow-up doll.
Their bags come round immediately and they roar off laughing into the Belfast night.
Sod’s Law.
‘Here,’ says Andy, tapping me on the arm. ‘Listen to this. A young bloke is in the final stages of getting things ready for his upcoming wedding and everything is going fantastically smoothly apart from the slightly tricky issue of his fiancée’s extremely hot younger sister. One day, he finds himself alone in the house with her and she creeps up next to him on the settee and suggests they, you know, slip upstairs for a couple of hours before the big day rolls round.
‘Anyway, the young man starts to panic and, rushing through his options, storms out of the house into the front garden where, unbeknownst to him, a reception committee awaits consisting of his fiancée, his father-in-law to be, his mother-in-law to be, and all the extended family.
‘They all give him a huge round of applause, his fiancée plants a big kiss on his cheek, and his father-in-law to be declares, in public, that he’s delighted to give him his daughter’s hand in marriage as he’s finally proved himself a man of honour.
‘Moral of the story?’
‘Dunno,’ I say. ‘You never know what’s round the corner?’
‘Always leave your condoms in the car!’
The role of incongruity in the influence process is twofold.
On the one hand it forms the basis of pretty much everything we find funny. Our brains love to be wrong-footed, to have the rug of expectation whipped unceremoniously from beneath their feet. And when that happens, in the right context, we laugh!
But alongside humour incongruity also has another psychoactive property, namely that of distraction.
Unusual, surprise or unexpected events jolt our brains into a micro-hypnotic trance during which all our usual neural security systems are scrambled and all our cognitive surveillance equipment disabled. And it’s at times like that that we’re at our most suggestible.
Let’s deal with each of these two properties of incongruity in turn: humour and distraction.
OK, so it’s no use beating around the bush. There have literally been hundreds of books on persuasion written down the years (and I, of course, include my own one in that – ahem, £8.99 on Amazon!).
But the one big take-home message that we want you to remember above all others from this chapter is, as Andy puts it, this:
‘Persuasion ain’t rocket science!’
And here, again as Andy puts it, is the first lesson from the Good Psychopath school of the bleeding obvious:
‘If, when you are trying to persuade someone to do something, you can make them feel GOOD as opposed to feeling BAD, then you are going to have a damn sight better chance of getting what you want than if it’s the other way round.’
‘When I was writing Flipnosis,’ I tell Andy, ‘I interviewed a bunch of New York traffic cops and I asked them whether anyone had ever said anything particularly memorable down the years that had succeeded in getting them off a ticket. Anyway, one of the cops told me about a guy he’d pulled over for speeding.
‘Did you know you were doing eighty in a fifty-five zone?’ he asked him.
‘Sure,’ said the guy. ‘Yes, I did.’
The cop was dumbfounded.
‘Then why the hell didn’t you pull over as soon as you saw me?’ he asked.
Quick as a flash, the guy turns round and says:
‘Well, officer, three weeks ago my wife left me for one of you guys and when I saw your lights in my rear-view mirror I thought you were bringing her back!’
That guy got off a ticket that day! And the reason for that is pretty simple. He’d given the cop pretty much all he could give him under the circumstances. He gave him a feel-good factor. He put a smile on his face.
And the cop, through the law of reciprocity – a very powerful law of influence – had felt the need to do the same, had felt the need to reciprocate. And he’d given the motorist pretty much all he could give him under the circumstances.
He let him off a ticket.
But as we were saying, there’s more to incongruity than just humour – than just a feel-good factor. Incongruity also has another psychoactive property – namely that of distraction.
Unusual events or novel situations shunt our brains into an auto-suggestive state during which we’re able to take in information but aren’t necessarily able to consciously process it. And it’s at times like that that we’re most at the mercy of those who are trying to persuade us.
‘Several years ago,’ I tell Andy, as we stand watching a near-empty conveyor belt continue to take the piss, ‘a colleague of mine conducted a fun study on how incongruity, distraction and micro-hypnosis pan out in the influence process in what’s probably the most unforgiving persuasion known to man – and I say “man” with good reason – because the study he did was on chat-up lines.’
‘Oh yeah,’ says Andy, peering down the delivery ramp. ‘What, purely in the interests of scientific advancement, he wanted to know if chat-up lines actually work, did he?’
It’s hard to keep a straight face.
‘Well, yes,’ I smirk. ‘I mean, if they don’t why the hell do we bother with the bloody things, right?’
Andy moves away from the delivery ramp and over to one of the baggage reclaim monitors. He squints up at it suspiciously.
‘I’m beginning to wonder why we’re bothering with this bloody thing!’ he mutters, pacing up and down.
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘what he did was this. First, he sampled a load of chat-up lines at random from the web. Secondly, he grabbed a bunch of students. Thirdly, he divided the chat-up lines equally among those students. And lastly, he let the students loose in some bars and clubs with the explicit instruction to try each of their lines out five times and then to report back to him with the data.
‘What he wanted to find out, of course, was whether any of the lines were foolproof – whether any of them would work five out of five times.’
‘And did they?’ asks Andy, suddenly sparking up.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘six months or so later when the dust had settled and the students did report back to him with the data, it turned out that only one of those lines was foolproof, only one of them worked five out of five times.’
‘What was it?’ asks Andy.
‘I’m not telling you,’ I say.
He moves a bit closer.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘You’ve twisted my arm. What you do is, you go up to a girl in a bar and you say this:
‘My mates bet me twenty quid that I couldn’t start up a conversation with the best-looking girl in the bar. So how about I go and buy some drinks and we spend their money?’
Andy looks unconvinced. ‘You sure?’ he growls.
‘I agree, it doesn’t sound all that great in the cold light of day, does it? But actually, the plot thickens. The line only works if, immediately after it, you insert a compliment. It could be anything. It could be “I like your hair”, “I like your shoes”, “I like your dress” – anything, so long as it’s a compliment.’
‘Now, you’re really beginning to take the piss,’ says Andy. ‘Now, you’re going into Derren Brown territory.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘It sounds odd, doesn’t it? But actually, once you start to get your head around the pretty rudimentary psychology that’s at work here, everything, rather quickly, starts slotting into place. You see, what’s happening here is this.
‘What this left-field, labyrinthine approach strategy does is it throws completely offline the woman’s primary response to encountering a pick-up artist in a bar, namely, caution and circumspection. And so as she’s desperately trying to get her head around the terms and conditions of this crazy, complicated deal, in slips the compliment sub-radar, ducking unseen beneath the razor wire of her consciousness and immersing itself undetected in the emotional, reward centre of her brain.
‘The result? When she’s come round from her micro-hypnotic trance – a residual feeling of wellbeing. And she’s a bit more likely to take you up on your offer of a drink!’
There’s still no sign of our bags so I get out my laptop and give Andy a first-hand demonstration of what I’m talking about – the power of incongruity to throw a spanner in the works of our usually articulate thought processes.
‘Ah, no,’ he mutters. ‘You’re not going into white-coat mode, are you?’
‘Sssh!’ I hiss, holding my finger up to my lips. ‘This is a lab, mate. No talking!’
I locate the file I’m looking for and open it. The display opposite pops up on the screen in front of us.
‘In front of you is a series of squares,’ I intone. ‘In each of these squares you’ll notice a word appears in a different location. Going from top left to bottom right along each row, I want you to say out loud, as quickly as you can, which position each word appears in, OK? It’s either left, right, up, or down.’
Andy nods.
‘So, just to be clear, you don’t read the word, you just state its position. Got it?’
He nods again. ‘Yes, doctor.’
‘Right, let’s go . . .’
Andy rattles through the list.
Twelve seconds.
‘How was that?’ I ask.
‘Piece of piss,’ he says.
I take back the laptop, turn it towards me and hit the space bar. Another display flashes up on the screen.
‘OK,’ I say, handing it back to him. ‘Now you’ve got the hang of it I want you to do exactly the same thing again for this next lot of words, OK? Remember, don’t read them, just tell me where they appear in the boxes. With me?’
‘Sorted,’ says Andy.
And off he goes again.
Seventeen seconds later it’s a different story.
‘Fucking hell!’ he goes. ‘Feels like I’ve been on the piss for a couple of days! Weird! What’s going on there, then?’
I laugh.
‘Let me tell you something, mate,’ I say. ‘You’ve got no idea how well you just did on that test! Most people screw this second list up big time – it can take some of them over a minute longer. In fact, some of them can’t even finish it! A five-second difference is pretty much next to nothing. But exactly what I’d expect of someone like you.’
‘What do you mean: someone like me?’ asks Andy.
‘A psychopath,’ I say. ‘It’s all about focus. You see, the reason for the time lag – as you’re now only too well aware – is that on the second list the conscious instruction to state the position of the words crosses swords with the unconscious expectation of simply reading them: a battle made much worse because of the INCONGRUITY between the words and their positions. All of a sudden, what you are expecting and what you actually experience don’t match up – and your brain gets tied up in knots.
‘But this – what we call – interference effect between two competing urges, the natural instinct to say the words versus the instruction I gave you not to say them and to instead state their position, doesn’t just apply to reading. It happens pretty much everywhere. Whenever, for instance, we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings. Or, as with the chat-up line, are surprised by the unexpected.
‘For a split second or two, our brain switches off from the immediate situation – does a double-take – and concentrates instead on whether it’s got its facts right. Our brain, in other words, blinks.
‘Now, this change of gear may last only a matter of milliseconds but even such a brief departure as this from the issue in question makes a huge difference. First, it sparks what is known in the trade as a cognitive reframing of whatever is going on. It inserts a minuscule degree of separation between us and our immediate reaction – a psychological local anaesthetic, if you like – that invites us to reevaluate whatever it is that we’re looking at.
‘Secondly, it creates an infinitesimally short time window of cognitive confusion through which any incoming information – such as compliments, for example – can slip, unchecked and unopposed, into the deepest recesses of our brains.’
‘Bit like a psychological stun grenade then?’ says Andy.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Exactly.’
He nods. ‘So this interference effect you were talking about between expectation and reality,’ he says, ‘do you get it in airports?’
‘Happens everywhere, mate,’ I say.
‘Thought so,’ he sneers. ‘Because all the time we’ve been standing here waiting for our bags and jabbering on about bloody chat-up lines, they’ve been sitting over there by that pillar!’
‘Queen Street,’ says Andy in a broad Belfast accent.
We hand the taxi driver our luggage and he sticks it in the boot.
‘Been anywhere nice?’ he asks.
‘Kandahar,’ says Andy. ‘Makes a change to get away for a few days’ peace and quiet.’
We exchange glances.
‘How’s business?’
The role of confidence in the influence process is fairly self-evident from the eponymous label ‘confidence artist’. In fact, one of the con men I spent some time with and interviewed summed it up rather succinctly.
‘Whoever heard of a confidence man who wasn’t confident?’ he asked.
Which, when you think about it, is a pretty good question. But in everyday life, the part played by confidence in persuasion is a little more subtle, perhaps, than first it might appear.
Sure, on the one hand it’s important that you as a persuader make the recipients of your influence – the person or people you are trying to persuade – feel confident in YOU.
In other words, that you establish CREDIBILITY.fn3
But on the other hand it’s equally important that you as a persuader make the people you are persuading feel confident in THEMSELVES; feel confident that they are as much a part of the influence process as you are; feel confident that they are making up their minds of their own volition.
Because – as every parent knows! – the more a person feels pressurized or bullied or coerced into making up their mind, the more resistance that you as a persuader are going to have to overcome.
Let’s park the CONTROL aspect of confidence up to one side for a moment and deal with the CREDIBILITY side of things.
Now the story we’re going to tell next doesn’t exactly show our emotional intelligence skills in the best of lights. But it’s such a brilliant example of the transformative power of raw confidence that it’s very difficult to leave it out. (Though, we do have to admit, we did think about it!)
One sunny afternoon in the Cotswolds a couple of years ago, Andy and I and our immeasurably superior other halves decided to have a picnic in the countryside. After hiking across the fields for a couple of hours, we entered a belt of woodland in the middle of which was a beautifully manicured green. There was a pond in the middle of the green, and a bench. And sitting on the bench having their own little picnic were a nice young couple with a baby.
‘That looks a good spot,’ Andy pronounces cheerily. ‘And here, if we squeeze through this gap in the fence, we can cut straight through.’
All four of us clamber through the gap in the fence and lope on to the green. As we pass them, the couple on the bench look up at us and nod.
We nod back.
We shake out our blanket, open up our basket, and spend the next three-quarters of an hour munching cucumber sandwiches in the glorious Oxfordshire sunshine. We peer into the little ornamental stream that flows through the miniature rockery. We examine the flowers. And my wife, as an afterthought, even picks a few to take with her.
‘Fantastic!’ pronounces Andy, as he fires up the gas-powered BBQ. ‘I’m going to get some of that chicken.’
When, eventually, we decide to make a move, the couple on the bench call us over.
‘Excuse me,’ says the woman rather tentatively. ‘I don’t wish to be rude but, erm, would you mind telling me how you got in here?’
‘In here?’ says Andy. ‘In where?’
I take over.
‘Sure,’ I say, gesticulating airily towards the woods. ‘Same way you did, I guess. The gap in the fence?’
The man and the woman glance at each other nervously. Then the woman puts down her salad bowl and quietly scoops up the baby.
‘Er, no,’ says the man. ‘You see, actually, this is our garden.’
Very slowly, as if we’ve just walked in on an Al-Qaeda cell, Andy and I put down our picnic paraphernalia and turn around. Briefly, through some trees at the back, I suddenly get a glimpse of a house.
And a car.
And a washing-line full of clothes.
‘We didn’t want to say anything,’ the man continues, ‘because we thought you were the owners of the, er,’ he smiles and nods smugly behind him, ‘holiday cottage?’
‘I’ve seen it!’ says Andy.
‘We’ve just moved here,’ says the woman, ‘and in the bumpf that went with the house it said that the owners sometimes drop in to, you know, check the place over once in a while.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Well, nice to have met you. We’d, er, better be making a move.’
The four of us back away into the undergrowth, grinning idiotically. We wave when we get to the fence.
‘Nice spot for a picnic!’ Andy’s missus mutters under her breath as her T-shirt snags on a branch.
It’s a terrible thing to walk in absolute silence!
Now there’s no doubt whatsoever in mine and Andy’s minds that we, well . . . got the rub of the green that day! It was raw, misplaced confidence that earned us that picturesque picnic spot. But as we were saying, there’s more to confidence – even misplaced confidence – than just establishing credibility.
Sure, on the one hand it’s important that you as a persuader make the recipients of your influence – the person or people that you are trying to persuade – feel confident in YOU.
But on the other hand it’s equally, if not even more important that you as a persuader make the people you are persuading feel confident in THEMSELVES; that you push, as far as you possibly can, the illusion that they are as much a part of the influence process as you are; that they are making up their minds of their own free will.
Because, folks, as Andy rightly points out: ‘The best way of getting someone onside is to convince them, as soon as you possibly can, that there are no sides!’
‘There’s a great story about Winston Churchill which demonstrates exactly that,’ I tell him, as the taxi pulls up outside our hotel.
One evening, at the end of a lavish party for Commonwealth dignitaries in London, Churchill spots a fellow guest about to steal a priceless silver salt-cellar from the table.
Now, caught between the desire on the one hand to avoid an undignified contretemps and the equal and opposite desire on the other hand not to let the bounder get away with it, what is Churchill to do?
Well, what he does is this.
He picks up the matching silver pepper pot, puts it inside his own coat pocket, wanders over to his ‘partner in crime’, takes it out, sets it down on the table in front of them, and whispers conspiratorially in his ear:
‘I think they’ve seen us. We’d better put them back . . .’
‘Problem resolved simply, elegantly and without any further ado.’
‘Class!’ says Andy, appreciatively.
‘In fact, this is just one of the talents,’ I continue, ‘if you can really call it a talent, that the world’s top con artists have over the rest of us. They are brilliant exponents of the art of getting us to think that we’re making up our own minds when in reality they are there behind the scenes pulling the decision-making strings like genius psychological puppet masters.’
One of the con men I spent some time with and interviewed even had a term for it. He called it the ‘Hot-In-Here’ effect.
Think about it. There are two ways in which you can get someone to open a window. You can either ask them straight: ‘Would you mind opening the window?’ A direct request.
Or you can go the indirect route and say something like this: ‘Phew! Hot in here, isn’t it?’
Now, nine times out of ten in this latter scenario whoever it is will get up and open the window – BELIEVING IT TO BE THEIR OWN IDEA.
And that is where things start to get dangerous. Because the research shows that as soon as we do something once for someone VOLUNTARILY – and the key word here is VOLUNTARILY – we are way more likely to acquiesce to future requests. We slip secretly and unknowingly into their power.
‘Exactly the same principle of mind control works in magic,’ I tell Andy, ‘through the application of the technique I showed you with the coins that time: “forced choice”.
‘And it’s probably no coincidence that one of the con men I hung out with was, in a previous incarnation, a rather accomplished stage magician. Tell you what, after you’ve settled up with Jeeves here, I’ll show you!’
While Andy and the driver exchange tips about the quickest way of getting from the airport to Belfast city centre, I fire up the laptop again. When their heart-to-heart has concluded, I call them both over.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘Andy, the first thing I want you to do is to think of an odd number between one and ten. Don’t tell me what it is, just keep it in your head. OK?’
Andy nods.
‘And what I want you to think of,’ I say to the taxi driver, ‘is an even number between one and ten. You got it?’
He nods too.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘What’s going to happen now is this. On the computer screen in front of us here a list of words is going to appear one by one and your task is to remember the word or pair of words that goes with the number that you’ve got in your head. You with me?’
They both nod.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s start . . .’
I press the space bar and the following list appears item by item on the screen. It’s funny seeing the two of them there hunched over the computer on the bonnet of the cab. Usually I do this in a bright, warm lab in Oxford. Not a blustery hotel car park in the middle of Belfast.
1.Precious metal
2.Wool
3.Cutlery
4.Golden colour
5.Highly polished
6.Ball
7.Sharp
8.Cat’s toy
9.Kitchen utensil
10.Round
‘Good,’ I say, when the words finish flashing and the screen goes blank. ‘Both of you should now have a word or phrase in your head. Right?’
‘Yep,’ they both say.
‘Great,’ I say. ‘So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to throw another list of phrases at you one by one and this time your task is to remember the phrase that you think goes best with the one you’ve got in your head at the moment. Happy with that?’
They both mumble something and I press the space bar again.
More flickering and flashing:
Blue felt-tip pen
Penny postage stamp
Carving knife
Yellow ball of yarn
Original oil painting
Old felt hat
South Sea island
Western stage coach
Antique clock
China coffee cup
‘Right,’ I say, when the list phases out. ‘Have you both now got a phrase in your head?’
They look first at each other and then at me.
‘Yes,’ they nod.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘With the aid of my fiendish mindreading powers I am now going to demonstrate to you that, although you may believe yourselves to be in control of your own thought processes, they can at times be manipulated by superior psychological powers. In other words, on this occasion—’
‘Get on with it!’ raps Andy. ‘It’s starting to fucking rain!’
‘Er, sorry,’ I say. ‘OK, Andy – you’re now thinking of a CARVING KNIFE. And you –’ I turn to the taxi driver – ‘are thinking of a YELLOW BALL OF YARN.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ says Andy. ‘I’ve fucking had enough of this!’
He slings his bag over his shoulder and starts marching across the car park to the hotel. I close up the laptop, chuck it into mine, and follow him.
‘Next time go by Nutt’s Corner not the Antrim Road!’ he yells back at the taxi driver. ‘You might get a tip.’
We check in, freshen up, and twenty minutes later meet back downstairs in the bar.
‘You know,’ says Andy, ‘I didn’t mention it earlier for obvious reasons but over here in the old days confidence was very much the name of the game. When you’re working undercover you’ve got to have the confidence to convince people you are who you say you are and not who they think you might be. When I was in Derry during the Troubles my job was to gather information about terrorist Active Service Units or ASUs: their weapons, hides and known associates – that sort of thing – so we could pre-empt attacks, make arrests, and save lives.
‘It took about six months before I felt well and truly bedded in. Mind you, by that time I was a local. I didn’t have a shave until Friday night. I wore market jeans and cheap trainers. And I did simple, silly things like always crossing the road where a lollipop man or woman was standing.
‘I was after continuity – you know, a smile, a nod, sometimes a hello, it didn’t matter which. What I wanted was human contact, some normal and everyday happening that people would see. I needed to be moving about the city like a local and being the Grey Man I was telling you about earlier, someone who doesn’t warrant a second look.
‘I mean, the reason people like me were “asked” to join this undercover group in the first place was because we grew up in places like Peckham – and an inner city is an inner city wherever you are. We’d feel at home in that kind of environment. I’ll give you an example. The Bogside Estate in Derry was, and still is, a hard Republican area. So as an outsider, to even have the confidence to walk in to begin with, you have to fill your head with a reason to be there.
‘If you don’t feel it in your head, you don’t look as if you feel it physically. And that’s when the people around you start to sense that something is wrong.
‘It’s almost like method acting – so much so that, after a while, I genuinely started to believe the reasons I came up with myself. I used to pretend I was going to see a mate, or sometimes, for no particular reason, a brother-in-law. The real world didn’t have a clue who I was. And that’s what you’ve got to hang on to. They wouldn’t be thinking: “Ah, look – there goes a Special Forces undercover operator.”
‘They’d just be thinking: “Who the fock’s he? Has he come down from the Shantello or Creggan? Or has he come over from one of the Protestant estates the other side of the river and is going to try to kill someone?”
‘If you feel confident it takes just seconds to bluff it and make them feel comfortable that you’re one of them. A quick What the fuck are you looking at? would usually do the trick. Sometimes you didn’t even have to open your mouth – a look was enough.
‘That was the general attitude I liked to embody. One of the tribe. That way – as they used to say back home in Peckham – “Everyone’s a winner!” They felt safe and I could then get on with whatever it was I was doing.’
We finish our drinks and head into the restaurant for a bite to eat.
‘By the way,’ Andy says as we sit down. ‘That mindreading stunt you pulled earlier. How did you do it?’
‘Haha! I knew you couldn’t resist it. It’s actually quite simple.
‘The odd numbers on the first list – not that you would’ve noticed – were all on a shiny pointy theme: precious metal, cutlery, highly polished, sharp, kitchen utensil. So you picked one of them. But the even numbers followed another theme, a knitted cuddly one: wool, golden colour, ball, cat’s toy, round. And the taxi driver picked one of them.
‘Now, when we get to the second list – the one from which I asked you to select the phrase that best matched the first one you chose – well, there were only two that were really in with a shout: carving knife for you and yellow ball of yarn for him.
‘None of the others – South Sea island, Western stage coach, antique clock – had any connection with either sharp and pointy or knitted and cuddly. So without realizing it both of you were forced into the choices you made – hence, as I said, the name of the technique: “forced choice”.
‘You might’ve been under the impression that you were making up your own mind. But, brilliant mentalist that I am, I was one step ahead of you all the time.’
Andy shakes his head.
‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Admit it! Pretty cool, isn’t it?’
He scratches his neck.
‘It’s not bad,’ he says. ‘For a geek.’
It shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that empathy makes up the final ingredient of SPICE.
The previous four ingredients – simplicity, perceived self-interest, incongruity and confidence – all roll a psychological red carpet out for the brain, make us feel good in some way. And empathy arguably does that more than all of the other four put together.
Empathy may be characterized from a variety of different perspectives. But here, we’re going to carve the definition up three ways.
Empathy is the ability to:
•READ another person.
•BOND with another person.
•SPEAK another person’s language.
Or, to use a communications analogy, empathy is the ability to tune into another person’s emotional wavelength and to broadcast your message on that frequency as opposed to within a more general psychological bandwidth.
In a study conducted in a telephone call centre, for instance, sellers were given a choice of wearing left-ear or right-ear headsets. Results showed that sellers who chose left-ear headsets made more sales than those who chose right-ear headsets – possibly because they took a naturally more ‘intuitive/emotional’ approach to customers as opposed to a ‘logical/intellectual’ one.fn4
The more skilled you are at psychological comms the more successful you’ll be at persuading people to do things.
‘One of the lads in the Regiment had a bit of a problem with his temper,’ Andy tells me, as we scoff down spaghetti bolognese. The kitchen has shut but luckily the chef managed to find some in a pot somewhere.
‘It had gradually got worse, starting with smashing things up and fighting on nights out to kicking off at home – you know, slapping his wife about and that. It got to the point where he was on his final warning and something needed to be done. He’d seen some people, been to an anger-management class in town, and they’d suggested meditation. That didn’t go down too well. I think he demolished the place when he heard that. Meditation was something that sandal-wearing lentil-eaters did. Not a rufty tufty SAS trooper.
‘Then one day one of the other lads who was big into karate was talking to him in the pub and slipped into the conversation that at the higher levels of the martial arts it all becomes less physical; the emphasis is more on getting your body and mind in tune than it is on the technical side. He mentioned meditation.
‘And that was it. All of a sudden meditation was something that fitted with who he was. It was on his wavelength. He started a course and got really into it. He never looked back after that.’
That lad in the pub was a clever guy. Who knows whether he knew what he was doing? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But what he managed to pull off in that conversation was a brilliant rebranding job on the whole meditation ‘thing’.
By repackaging – or, to use the technical term, REFRAMING – it, he dragged meditation out of what we call his mate’s LATITUDE OF REJECTION (the decision-making zone ruled by ‘No!’) and into his LATITUDE OF ACCEPTANCE (the decision-making zone ruled by ‘Yes!’).
And the light went from red to green.
LATITUDES OF REJECTION AND ACCEPTANCE
The art of branding, or framing, is a dark art indeed!
It’s incredible how much more you can achieve with just a simple turn of phrase; how powerful your message can become by tuning your influence dials in to PERSONAL as opposed to GENERAL frequencies.
The American florist Max Schling once ran a brilliant ad in the New York Times. The copy, composed entirely in shorthand, was ripped out by thousands of curious businessmen who inevitably went to their secretaries for a translation.
The ad (unbeknownst to the businessmen, of course) turned out to be addressed . . . yes, you’ve guessed it . . . to the secretaries themselves – asking them to put a bit of business Schling’s way next time the boss wanted flowers for his wife!
And we’ve all got languages that we understand better than others. Where Schling used shorthand, other skilled persuaders use metaphor. Imagine I was your boss and I wanted you to put in a couple of hours extra after work on an urgent presentation. Imagine that I also knew (good bosses always do their homework!) that you were training for the London Marathon.
If I transmitted my request on a GENERAL INFLUENCE FREQUENCY it might sound something like this:
I was wondering whether you could stay behind after work tonight for a couple of hours to help finish the presentation.
And my chances might be fifty-fifty.
However, if I transmitted my request on a PERSONAL INFLUENCE FREQUENCY it would come out a little different:
I know it’s a tough part of the course right now but I was wondering whether you had the stamina to push through the wall and go the extra mile tonight to help finish the presentation.
And my chances would increase significantly.
The power of metaphor, as we saw in the previous chapter, isn’t just confined to the act of persuading ourselves. It can also be harnessed to influence other people.
‘You know, when you work undercover you use a lot of these kinds of skills,’ says Andy, shovelling in the last of his spaghetti.
I look up from my own bowl and it’s not a pretty sight. There’s so much sauce on his face it looks like a very bad fake tan.
‘I’ll give you an example,’ he says:
The Bogside I was telling you about earlier is a maze of two- and three-storey tenements interconnected by dark alleyways. Some alleys lead to other alleys. Some just come to a dead end. The architect, if there was one, must have been high on LSD and playing with Jenga blocks when he drew that place out.
But you know what? Some things never change. Just like where I grew up in London, it had a Spar shop, kids running about with mothers shouting for them to get the fuck inside as it was tea time, and groups of blokes hanging about drinking, smoking and generally making too much noise.
The only real difference between a Derry estate and one in London was that in Derry these men were at war. There was no gangster-style, pretend-shooting hand gestures from these lads. They had explosives, machine guns and grenade launchers and could kill you for fucking real.
Anyway, one evening I found myself in the Bogside looking for some players who had just brought a couple of assault rifles on to the estate. The plan was for their snipers to take out a Brit army patrol later that night. Kids shouted and screamed as they chased a football through the puddles. Scabby dogs skulked in the doorways. The few street lights that still worked started to flicker on.
As I passed the Spar shop – an old freight container with a heavily padlocked door – the kids stopped playing football and stared. That wasn’t unusual. Children as young as five or six got paid as dickers – to give an early warning signal of any potential problem that might be coming the estate’s way.
It didn’t bother me. Why should it? After all, I was going to see a mate, wasn’t I? That’s why I was there. I did my normal routine and stared them out.
Who the fuck are you looking at?
I had no idea what time it was. You don’t wear a watch in case someone comes up and asks you. With an empty wrist, you can just shrug them off and keep moving.
Adults were looking at me now as well. They all knew the weapons were being moved into position, and in one or two kitchens faces were pressed up against the glass, trying to see through the condensation.
I looked right back and stared them out.
Who are you looking at? Get back to boiling your cabbage!
Anyway, by this stage a couple of male voices had piped up behind me. But I wasn’t turning back to look. Why should I? I just kept walking. If they challenged me, I’d front it out. My accent was just about passable in short bursts. But why should they challenge me? My mate lived on this estate and I’d been here many times before. So they could just fuck off.
There was no hesitation in my stride. I made sure of that. Like I said, I had every right to be there. I knew where I was going. I turned left down the next alley to see if they carried on following.
Shit, dead end!
There was no way I could now just turn back around and come out again. How natural would that look? I mean, if you knew where you were going you knew where you were going. You wouldn’t just suddenly get it wrong.
The mumbling voices stopped at the mouth of the alley. Not surprisingly, the fuckers were checking me out. Everything in this part of the world that was unknown and moved was deemed a threat. The wall at the end of the passage was approaching fast and when I reached it I stopped. Surprise surprise, the ground was littered with dog shit, old Coke cans and a burnt mattress.
I could hear the voices still murmuring to each other behind me and it was easy enough to guess the conversation. ‘What the fuck’s he doing down there?’ Then I could hear windows being opened for others to join in the chorus.
I unzipped my jeans and went to take a piss. But it wasn’t happening. I started counting. How long does a piss take? It was all going on behind me but I couldn’t exactly turn round to have a look, could I? If I did that, it really would kick off.
One thing was for certain. They weren’t about to come down the dead end after me. Way too risky. If they did that they’d have no idea what would happen. But that didn’t help me get over the anger I was feeling with myself. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been there, Kev. But it’s all to do with fucking up and not having control.
Anyway, thirty seconds passed. I jumped up and down on the balls of my feet to get rid of any imaginary dribbles, zipped up and turned round. The guys had gone. It was weird. I walked to the end of the alley and it was like nothing had ever happened. The only people in sight were children on rusty old bikes.
I turned left to carry on with the job as kids threw cans at dogs and the cabbage cookers checked me out.
But now wasn’t the time to fuck them off. Now was the time to smile at them, to be embarrassed for pissing under their kitchen windows. I mean it wasn’t exactly nice, was it?
So that’s what I did. I shrugged, gave them a sheepish grin, and went on my way.
And fuck me, wasn’t one of the faces looking down at me the old lollipop guy from the Strabane road that I always gave a nod to when walking past!
So you know what, mate? You’re right. At the end of the day, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or how much homework you do, you’ve got to have the ability to get on with people. To build up a bit of rapport. To fit in.
I mean, if you can’t do that no one’s going to tell you anything!
And you’ve also got to be able to read people; to gauge how they might be feeling, guess what they might be thinking.
The right word – or the right piss! – at the right time can potentially save hundreds of lives while the wrong word at the wrong time can potentially cost you your own.
At the end of the chapter Andy and I have put together some handy hints to help you build rapport in all aspects of your life – not just if you happen to be wandering around undercover somewhere on some inner-city housing estate.
But I’m intrigued by what he says about reading people – and before we crash out I fire up the laptop one last time and give him a little test.
It’s the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test’ developed by the Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron Cohen to assess how good we are at judging other people’s mental states from limited information. The idea is to choose which emotion you think a person is expressing simply from looking at the eye region of their face.
If he’s any good he’ll get at least three out of five, I think, as I show him the pictures below:
He gets all five. (See here to check.)
‘I’m impressed!’ I say. ‘Want to do another five?’
He saunters off down the corridor to his room.
‘I’d take a lesson out of Ali’s book if I were you, mate,’ he calls back over his shoulder. ‘Quit while you’re behind!’
Smiling is infectious. Researchers in Sweden presented volunteers with subliminal pictures of smiley and angry faces and monitored activity in their own facial muscles. Even though volunteers had no idea what they were looking at, the smiley faces stimulated the zygomatic major muscle (involved in smiling), and the angry faces the corrugator supercilii (which moves the eyebrows when frowning.)
Every motorist knows they are more likely to be let into traffic if they make eye contact with an approaching driver than if they don’t. Research shows that eye contact can account for as much as 55 per cent of information transmission in a given conversation – the rest being apportioned between ‘nonverbal auditory’ (e.g. intonation) at 38 per cent, and ‘formal’ verbal content at just 7 per cent.
Compliments are like Viagra for the brain. Positive validation not only makes us feel good, it can also serve as a natural conversation starter. But make sure the compliment is genuine. Insincere flattery is as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool – and just as easy to spot.
Top salespeople and politicians have a genius for ‘instant intimacy’. But asking a stranger’s name, and then using it, can give any of us a head start. First names personalize an encounter, and make those we speak to feel valued. In fact, studies have shown that if you ask a person a favour they are more likely to oblige if you begin by using their name.
‘I made myself homeless to sell this!’ a Big Issue seller once told me. I bought a copy on the spot. Humour instantly disarms – which is why ‘GSOH’ appears in over 80 per cent of personal ads. You don’t need to go into stand-up mode, but don’t stand on formality either. A great way of building rapport is to loosen up.
Ever wondered why estate agents can’t wait to put the kettle on? Thanks to a team of psychologists we now know the answer. Researchers in the US tricked volunteers into holding either a hot or a cold drink before rating how ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ a stranger was. Guess what? Those who held the hot drink rated the person as more caring and generous than those who held the cold drink.
Researchers in the Netherlands asked students to give their opinions about a bunch of advertisements. Unbeknownst to the students, a member of the research team mimicked half of them while they spoke, roughly mirroring the posture and the position of their arms and legs, and taking care not to be too obvious. Minutes later the experimenter dropped six pens on the floor, making it look like an accident. Guess which students were three times more likely to help pick up the pens – you got it, the ones who’d been mimicked!
Studies have shown that waitresses who touch diners on the arm a couple of times during their meal earn considerably more tips than those who don’t. Touch stimulates the production of the ‘love’ hormone oxytocin – important not just in forging romantic relationships but also friendship bonds. But don’t overdo it. Too much touching is just plain creepy!
In the early 1970s, a group of researchers in the US approached students on a university campus and asked them for a dime to make a phone call. Some of the researchers looked like the students – they were dressed in hippy clothing and had long hair – while others dressed ‘straight’. It turned out that the ‘hippy’ researchers had a 2 out of 3 strike rate whereas the ‘straight’ ones got lucky less than 50 per cent of the time. Appearances count. And the ones that count most are the ones most similar to our own. Why else do you think that guy who sold you the car the other week took such an interest in where you were from? Coincidence that his friend also happens to live there? And what about the guy in the electrical store who sold you that tumble-dryer? The one who got you talking about the football and who also supports West Ham . . .?
How did you get on? Correct: playful, fantasizing, regretful, defiant, insistent
0–11 You couldn’t sell fire to a caveman! But now you know the secret it’s time to start practising.
12–17 You’d probably manage fire but would struggle with the warranty. Definite room for improvement.
18–22 You win some, you lose some. For every time you get it right, you get it wrong. You need to raise your game to join the pro ranks!
23–28 You definitely know your way around other people’s brains. You have a pretty good hit rate for getting what you want – and it’s more judgement than luck.
29–33 You say, ‘Jump!’ Others ask, ‘How high?’
fn1 To find out how persuasive you are, why not take our test at the end of the chapter?
fn2 Electromyography is a technique for evaluating and measuring the electrical activity of nerves and muscles.
fn3 This, incidentally, is why medical experts wear white coats when being interviewed on telly and why business analysts appear against a backdrop of share indices and computer monitors.
fn4 In the same way that our eyes are connected to opposite hemispheres of the brain (right eye – left hemisphere / left eye – right hemisphere), hemispheric lateralization also occurs for auditory stimuli too. Traditional conceptions of hemispheric specialization suggest that the left hemisphere is logical, analytical and rational while the right hemisphere is intuitive, emotional and holistic.