CHAPTER 5

Human Modeling

YOU ARE ABOUT to study animals in their natural habitats. Think of yourself as a keen observer similar to primatologist Jane Goodall, only with the ability to speak chimp.

The process of human modeling that you learn in this chapter will help you understand both strangers and people close to you in a way that gives you the information you need to influence their behavior. It will help you create a holistic view of the person that highlights needs and motivations.

We cannot emphasize enough how important this modeling ability is. By pinpointing a person's key points and seeing whether they are strengths or weaknesses, ordinary or extraordinary abilities, you get a clear picture of the person you are going to manipulate. Bypassing this step means you might get lucky and hit his hot buttons or find something relevant while you are in the process of trying to manipulate him, but your outcome will be unpredictable. You're just shooting in the dark. Every interrogation starts with as much knowledge of the individual prisoner as possible, which includes information gleaned from those who captured him and those who feed him and manage his daily life. We then go into the interrogation and ask questions to add more detail to the picture of who he is. This picture presents the peaks and hollows in his personality, so we know what he has in common with us, and what his advantages and fears are. Without this knowledge, our efforts to manage his sense of belonging or need to differentiate could have disastrous results. Greg has been away from the military for many years and has been working within global corporations. The similarities to the military are powerful. People attend meetings every day and discuss everything under the sun without a single thought for the person they are talking to. They drive agendas without thought for the human glue that makes business work. Greg spends much of his time teaching, coaching, and mentoring people to pay attention to others in the shared time and space of a meeting. He drives the use of the same tools used in the world of military interrogation to deliver better meeting results and stronger teams. The reason this works is simple: by understanding what people are and are not saying, you can better target what makes them tick. Once you have that information you can build stronger bonds—or you can weaken them. Sound familiar?

The tools in this chapter are designed to give you another sense of sight into a human being—an understanding of the person as he sees himself, as well as how others see him. It is a worthy investment. Only if you are capable of reading someone's mind can you forego this step.

You will use the tools you just learned in Chapter 4 to learn information relevant to drawing a detailed map of the person you have targeted. If you're good with the tools, then you will have a pencil sharp enough to draw the details. These tools also come into play once again as you interact with the person to get her to do what you want.

Your first step in sketching the map is to admit that you do not know everything there is to know about your target. It doesn't matter if the person is your mother, a colleague you've worked with for fifteen years, or your best friend. There are facts you do not have about the person that may be extremely important in influencing her behavior.

The Personal Operating System

According to Wikipedia, an operating system manages resources and provides “common services for computer programs.” Imagine that a person's thinking and behavior is driven by an operating system. That operating system is running on hardware defined by genes. Only certain programs will run, and some will run differently than they do on someone else's hardware or operating system.

To examine this operating system, you would need an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) system. The fMRI would show you activity that corresponds to portions of the brain a person uses when she engages in a certain kind of thought. Because you cannot see this, you have nothing to go on but the intangible indicators. How is that different from a Mac or PC? Like the difference between Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, there are identifiable differences in the way people operate, regardless of the biological similarities. The way the person interfaces with the world, and specifically other people is, in that way, analogous to the way an operating system functions in a computer. This operating system dictates priorities, information handling style, and reaction to new input.

When we discuss human beings, how information is processed is beyond our scope. By the time that book is written, the material will be dated anyway because fMRIs are changing our understanding of humans on a daily basis. So we want to concentrate on how a person reacts to things in the outside world. The easiest way to discuss this may be in terms of overarching behavior patterns. Let's agree to call these personality types for purposes of our discussion here.

Personality Types

Similar to any believable book about people, this one does not give you a comprehensive list of descriptions of human beings. You need to look at your individual target, who just may inspire a whole new category. People are amalgamations of genes (hardware), experiences (programming), situations (input), and hormones (power surges). Not one of these can be overlooked when understanding a person. Take this rudimentary system we've laid out here as a set of suggestions, and baseline your target to figure out exactly what he is.

These personality types are like operating systems only in that they have bearing on the person's perception of input, priorities of processing, and how information is handled.

Interrogators always begin an encounter by establishing control and rapport. Success in doing so quickly is contingent on the interrogator's ability to codify the source's “operating system.” The ability to do this is based on mechanisms built into the military scheme: the presence of guards, cameras, and microphones to ensure there are no private moments in the compound. Your need for information about your target are no different, even though your techniques for getting it are. You need a grasp of your target's attributes, habits, and state of mind. You need a sense of the continuum of all things that never change for him, as well as the elements that shift around on an ongoing basis.

Each person has an overarching personality type that remains consistent for long periods of time, if not throughout his mature life. What we're giving you is just a sampling of contrasting types. You should use this as a springboard to creating your own lists, which will likely reflect your own culture, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. For now, start by understanding each of these personality types and how they contribute to your efforts in modeling a human being. When we deal with the application of skills in later chapters, we return to these types so you see how to tailor your strategies and tactics to get what you want. That will provide the examples and structure you need to customize your efforts to influence someone who falls in a category not covered here.

These pairings can be visualized on radial diagrams. As you go to the extreme in one, you approach the other, just as you've probably observed in political systems. The most important reason to understand this is so you can get the insights related to self-image that you need to manage and predict outcomes. If your actions challenge your target's self-image, your ability to move him the way you want depends on knowing whether you'll meet with avoidance, rejection, acceptance, or a total system crash.

Pretentious Versus Earthy

Pretentious people are shaped by their insecurities. They look for a model of life that is acceptable, if not superlative. The pretentious will try very hard to impress those whose opinions matter. In terms of the most pretentious types, everyone's opinions matter. If you have seen an episode of the long-running sitcom Frasier (portrayed by the actor Kelsey Grammer), you picked up on the comic premise that Frasier's postures about art, cuisine, wine, furniture, and music all come from his desperate hope that his tastes really are more refined that anyone else's. And his brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), has no hesitation about either reinforcing Frasier's judgment when it alleviates his own insecurities, or attacking it if taking Frasier down a notch will make him feel better.

Truly earthy people are content to be who and what they are, whether that means they have gray hair and wrinkles or dated furniture. Earthy people feel comfortable with their own rhythm in life. Others may not agree with them, but the earthy type remains indifferent.

On a radial diagram, the earthy type can go so far that the gray hair, thrift store clothing, and tie-dyed couch covers are defining and displayed for their own sake. When this happens, the laid-back elements become inviolable parts of life, and the image of earthiness becomes another kind of pretense. In many cases, fashion trends, and even lifestyle trends, grow up around what starts out as earthy, but it is quickly co-opted by the mainstream, pretentious crowd. A few years ago, there was a dramatic rise in the cost of outdoor clothing because a few trendsetters adopted the gear of the earthy—the stuff you get at gun shops and army—navy surplus stores—and made upscale, sport-specific clothes desirable for people who never came near those activities. The so-called green fashions on the catwalks, epitomized by Stella McCartney's designs, are another example.

On the opposite extreme, the pretentious can go so overboard with differentiating that their behavior becomes bizarre, pushing so far to the edge that they are removed from society. Their eccentricity moves them past the point of pretentious as they become unconcerned with the opinions of those who “do not matter,” so they, in effect, become earthy and quirky in their indifference to mainstream opinions.

The reason the extremes matter is this: If you plan to get a pretentious person to do something, you need to understand how that person perceives himself in the bigger picture. Does your opinion matter to him? How does he perceive himself in terms of the others in the group you are interacting with? Is he so pretentious that he believes only the opinions of those “in the know”—with whom he has only voyeuristic contact—matter? You need to understand how he processes input and prioritizes information to understand how to best interact with him.

Similarly, if the earthy person is so indifferent to what people think, how do you appeal to her? Can you talk down to her (because she just doesn't get it) and expect anything to change? You need to act on the understanding of how rooted and fully integrated this personality type is to ascertain whether the person is moving toward esteem or trying to belong. This will influence your decisions about how you help her to differentiate or belong. For instance, the pretentious may be moving around the bend and getting so close to earthy that a few simple disclosures would make her appear eccentric. Knowing that, you can ask questions and make comments to move her there with ease, or at least to show her you're capable of doing that, and then rescue her in exchange for a favor.

Conforming Versus Anti-Establishment

People who conform find comfort in being part of something. They try to fit squarely within the group. They may express opinions, but the range will be dictated by what falls within a normal range for the group. The idea is similar to national party politics: you can have radically different opinions, so long as the rest of the party embraces them. These people follow the rules because rules matter; they keep the world in order. The resulting insulation is centering.

For them, a tremendous sense of security emanates from feeling that they are a part of something through this behavior, and they bolster that feeling and refine their self-image by avoiding any deviation from it. Follow this to its logical conclusion: The conformist gets so close to a specific issue that he loses sight of the overall picture and begins to differentiate to the point of divergence. At that point, he becomes anti-establishment. Some gun-rights activists fit this type. While the right to bear arms is sacred to any soldier, it can become so entrenched in some people's psyches that they become the harshest of anti-establishment types.

Anti-establishment people eschew the rules, think structure is for those with no imagination, or believe that there is a better way than what has come to be. They believe that, if the right person made the rules, the rules would be better, so in effect, they are simply advocating another set of rules. What if they had their way and suddenly the rules were different—exactly as they wanted them? When anti-establishment types get so caught up in the rules that they start mass movements, they cross the line. They move to become the establishment. When they are in charge, they become more conservative and conformist in an attempt to hold on to their sacred idea.

When an idealist is the enforcer, he simply cannot imagine that his idea is wrong; the problem must be in those who are enforcing it. Look at the great reform movements of the 20th century for governmental models of idealist turned conformist. In most cases, the definition that comes from being anti-establishment is a dramatic attempt to seize power and establish a new order for its own sake. These people make great followers for the insidious, aboveboard leader.

In practical application, you need to understand whether your target conforms for her own sake or strikes back when she had no voice in the decision. This understanding gives you the opportunity to manage her drives. If she is a conformist and you want her to do something, the easiest way is to create a coalition and move her along with the room. Coalition building is much easier than direct conflict. By altering the group norm, you will easily move along a conformist. After all, she either moves or becomes an anti-establishment type. When differentiating, her drives will be to become a more solid participant in the group; when she is sufficiently differentiated as to no longer belong, she will need a new place to “belong.” Belonging is powerful.

If he is an anti-establishment type, let him in on “the vision” and how you plan to do things. If you can make him a true believer, he can become a soldier in the cause. Simply understanding the psyche of the anti-establishment type allows you to target him as well. Most anti-establishment types believe there is a better way. Once those people truly become invested in the outcome of the group and stand to lose, they rarely continue to stir the pot. To paraphrase the social author Eric Hoffer, people with Happy Meals and cable TV do not revolt. Causing the anti-establishment guy to belong squarely in the group and allowing him to “change things from the inside,” you co-opt his passion and create a soldier for the establishment. You simply have to remember to tend his fire, or he will stagnate and become an opponent.

Know-It-All Versus Guru-Seeker

The know-it-all takes bits of information, whether relevant or not, and applies them to the situation. In many cases, he does this by relying on the fact that he has been “more right” than others in the past (like our five feet three friend, who was taller in the past). Despite the fact that he may actually know more about some things than others, his need is to know more about all things than all others. Not surprisingly, the know-it-all gets wound up when he meets someone who may actually know more than he does. Whether it is because he went to a better school (or simply lived near Princeton or Harvard), has more experience, or just “knows the business” better than you do, you encounter this type commonly in the workaday world. He is an archetype; he is Cliff the mailman on Cheers. This type's sense of belonging and esteem comes from the deference he receives from others for being a font of information. That shapes his very identity. In some cases, he doesn't suffer from intellectual narcissism, rather he is insecure and well aware that he is full of crap, but hopes secretly that others do not notice. By using the tools described in Chapter 4, you can probe to determine which state is true for him and plan accordingly to move him farther up or down the hierarchy.

The guru-seeker wants enlightenment from an approved source to claim the validation as his own. No amount of knowledge, performance-based achievement, or success will give this person the same amount of joy and validation that quoting the Maharaja will. He needs to know that what he is saying comes from an enlightened one. The danger for this type is that gurus can come from all walks of life and the trustworthiness of his guru is dependent upon his selection criteria. The guru may just be a know-it-all who has been elevated by deference of others and, by using the snowball effect, has leveraged himself to guru status. On the other extreme, if the guru-seeker fulfills his needs and gets continuous validation from the Wise Ones he approaches, he can get to the point at which he looks down on others who have not shared the presence of the guru.

A practical example of this is an acquaintance of Maryann's who worked for the group that promoted Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller's work in sustainable and renewable technologies. Fuller, best known for his design of the geodesic dome, had died by the time this person got involved in the work, so he never even met his guru. Nevertheless, the gospel according to Bucky ruled his life and nearly everything that came out of his mouth. A common response to people who criticized him was, “Bucky was a genius. You wouldn't understand.”

When a guru-seeker gets to this point, he begins to understand the world according to his guru better than anyone else. In effect, he becomes a sort of demi-guru, as he feels justified to enlighten lesser beings. In effect, he can serve as the guru's gatekeeper to ensure that, although the path is wide, the gate is so narrow that few can pass through it.

If you tell someone with cockeyed confidence in his facts that he got something wrong one of three things will happen. First, he gets defensive and dances around the mistake, very likely trying to maneuver you into thinking that you misunderstood. Second, he crashes through the floor of the Maslow level he's on—maybe reputation—and now seeks nothing more than belonging. Third, he becomes aggressive and attacks you, but probably not on the same point you challenged. You tell him what he said about elephants is wrong and explain why, and he lashes out by saying that you dropped out of high school. That's exactly what this Bucky-adoring acquaintance does; as a result, he has to move quickly from one circle of “lesser beings” to another.

Understanding where each of these fits in the hierarchy will help you determine a best course of action. Based on several factors, her personality will dictate whether that information is valuable and actionable. These factors include: authority of the source, deference (in both directions) with the source, and style of delivery. It is often easier to get concession from a know-it-all when she is allowed to incorporate the new knowledge into her lexicon, so asking leading questions and letting her divulge the importance of what you know fits her style of understanding without resistance.

With the guru-seeker, establishing yourself as the one to which she should be deferred, or quoting Nostradamus-like prophecies, will get you further than blurting out facts. Think about evangelists who don't offer a single fact or personal insight but win people over by quoting the Scriptures. By establishing that your knowledge is simply borrowed from a sage, you get more approval than trying to say you are the guru. Guru-seekers only follow those with a following—until they understand that they can be nothing more than a messenger.

Traditional Versus Trendy

In the extreme, both traditional and trendy are first cousins to pretentious. This has more to do with how people are grounded than what their tastes are. Do they need the approval of past heroes to validate their choices, or is the opinion of supertypical humans alive today good enough to override the judgment of generations? Some people can get caught up in trends and still label themselves traditional. Social pressure is powerful.

Sherry touted the everlasting supremacy of classical music. Because it had survived for hundreds of years over its contemporaries, she said it was clearly worth more than modern music. The counter to this is that anything on Spotify can theoretically survive as long.

Traditionalists trust the known and believe that things have evolved the way they have for a reason. Whether they realize it or not, they espouse a belief that the accidents of history involving groupthink are more profound than the groupthink of today. The outward appearance of the group is to lean on traditional means of dress and trappings of authority, to lean toward old ways of doing business, etiquette, and eating. When others adopt corporate casual, they stick to the high end, wearing starched shirts and slacks instead of khakis and golf shirts.

The extreme end of the trendy spectrum sees the current opinion as weightier than grandma's. The argument from members of this group is that this generation knows more than all past generations—perhaps because of our accumulated knowledge—and is, therefore, in a better place to make decisions. Superficially, their focus seems to stay on what's hot right now and adopting the latest trends. In the extreme, they think about the long-term outcome of what they are doing today, because everyone else is doing the same thing. A trendy activist might (ironically) protest tearing down a historic building because every other trendy person has it as a priority activity. Behavior such as this provokes the traditionalist to ask, “If everyone else jumped from a bridge, would you?”

Traditional and trendy, then, are more than statements about fashion sense or preferences. Trappings such as clothes and decorations illustrate how someone sees her role in a particular environment. The traditional person openly declares that the past has value, and part of how she demonstrates her own value is by carrying on tradition. She is a guardian of history, a promoter of classic looks, sounds, and smells. A hardline traditionalist may not be able to get past differentiators such as tattoos and tongue studs to connect with a person.

When taken to the extreme, one begins to look like the other. Taking tradition to the extreme can become a trend and negate the original purpose of the movement. Few people understand where traditions come from and how convoluted they have become. Taking a tradition and following it ad nauseum can result in trendy behavior because the supposed tradition is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at creating a trend. Look to pundits on the far left and right politically to see the practical results of this confusion: they both pull out the sacred traditions of democracy as sound patterns for action while they laud “change” as the only answer to our problems.

Trends can also become so ubiquitous that they become the tradition; and generations later, no one is the wiser. Tattooing as an indicator of individuality has long since passed the breaking point with tradition, and now could be seen as a badge of belonging instead of a badge of differentiation with society. So we have to ask: in two generations, will tattoos on the small of the back be seen as standard for old, staid women?

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Purdue pulled a traditional phrase out of his Southern lexicon during the 2018 elections when, in stumping for the Republican candidate, he told the people of Florida that their gubernatorial race was “cotton-pickin' important.” This phrase calls to mind a tradition of discrimination against and mockery of African Americans, and the Democratic candidate running for office was black—not a tradition that anyone should thrust into the spotlight.

In dealing with either type, keep in mind how each perceives her relationship to the organization as she is persecuted as avant guard or respected because she is old school, or vice versa. Either extreme affords you a unique opportunity to manipulate feelings of belonging and differentiation, but you must first understand how the barely belonging eighteen-year-old employee fits before attempting to differentiate, or else you will isolate her.

Justified Versus Open-Ended

Justified thinkers and open-ended thinkers are related to traditionalists and trendies, and you can probably see how many of these other sample categories show similar relationships.

Justifieds populate the extreme wings of churches and political parties, but they show up in companies and insist on something like Lean Six Sigma as the answer to all corporate woes. They are people who live in a politically liberal enclave who say, “Just because you're a Republican, you don't understand this,” or people of a given religion who feel so much pity for an atheist that they hound him with Bible verses. The justifieds feel as though they have every reason and every right to preach their version of correctness—and they often make logic-driven people a little nuts, and very angry. You might be thinking of all those justifieds you know and feeling superior about your balanced points of view. But think about something that escalates your passion every time you think about it, something that you believe contributes enormously to the quality of your life. Maybe it's books. Would you act like a justified if the publishing industry suddenly decided that all books should be in digital format only?

Extremely open-ended thinkers have the “anything goes” mentality—no fundamental rules to life. Everyone should be allowed to do what they want within the bounds of . . . nothing. This group fits the Ayn Rand objectivism model. These people believe that the Christian Fundamentalist movement, which has well-defined views on homosexuality and children out of wedlock, is skewed and wrong.

They also point to the intolerance of the whole system, and that things must change and people must be allowed to live as they wish. In healthy doses, this means liberty with no intervention by religion or government. Unfortunately, the extreme expects the government to create a church-limiting process, thereby interfering with the beliefs of the religious extreme. When this happens, the government tells religions what their dogmatic constraints are. The result of moving so far to the open-ended is that the open-ended thinker becomes a justified in the way he does business.

Of all the groups we've covered, these two are the most closely related. At their center is the basic belief in the freedom to believe whatever they want to believe. Ironically, it takes very few steps to go from open-ended to justified and back again. Approaching either of these types unprepared is risky. Use questions to explore how the person sees himself. Steer clear of areas in which the person has hot spots, except to demonstrate he is irrational and fracture him from the group.

Your ability to peg the operating system gives you the first key piece of information you need to get a specific type of person to do what you want.

If you're familiar with other systems for describing personalities, you may tend to question how these categories—and they are samples, rather than a comprehensive list—relate to the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator or the Enneagram system. These two standards are both valuable ways of gaining insights into human personality by applying certain evaluation criteria. They will tell you something about how you relate to the world, as well as to certain situations.

Our purpose in coming up with this “system” of contrasting types with commonsense labels is twofold: 1) to point out how extremes of all kinds eventually come together and, therefore, can be very similarly influenced; and 2) to focus the discussion on self-image, and the factors that molded it and sustain it.

In his book The Power of Risk, Jim McCormick found evidence from surveys that supports this notion of extremes meeting at a point, but he puts it in the context of strengths and weaknesses. His strength/weakness paradox states: “Our greatest strengths and weaknesses are one in the same. All of your strengths have the potential to become weaknesses.”¹³ In short, any positive trait, if applied in the extreme, can become negative. Take any of the previous categories that you immediately perceive as positive and follow it to the extreme, and you will get the negative. The persistent search for a guru turns a curious person into a know-it-all. The zealotry of an earth mother will turn her into someone extremely pretentious.

Clearly seeing each of these for what it is allows you to predict how the person will collect, process, and prioritize information. While most people live closer to the center of the continuum, those who are close to the edge give you an opportunity to nudge them in the direction of someone to which they see themselves diametrically opposed—and that push followed by a retrieval may be just what you need to get what you want.

What Makes Johnny Run?

What did this person decide to load onto his “system”? Once the programs are loaded, where does this person excel? What does he do in a middling way, or where does he fall below the norm? Which of these things causes him pride, and which causes shame?

Understanding all the aspects of the character and all the factors that affect self-image can tell you why the person behaves the way he does, and where he has areas of strength and weakness. Once you plot the information about each trait on your mental bell curve, you put them together to compose a 3-D image of where this person is average or typical, where he falls below the norm, and where he stands out above the crowd. This visual representation allows you to define the whole person relative to others in the population with which he identifies.

Let's look at a well-known celebrity from a distance and talk about what we can see without getting close to him. What do you know about Ryan Reynolds?

You may consider yourself a big fan of his films Dead-pool, Green Lantern, and The Proposal, and even know a few non-movie tidbits, such as his ownership of Aviation Gin, but can you draw a complete picture of him? Here are some facts you may not know that put flesh on the skeletal view you have of Ryan:

• Country of birth: Canada
• Family religion: Catholic
• Education: dropped out of a polytechnic university
• Early career: starred in a teen soap opera
• First wife: Scarlett Johansson
• Daughters' names: James and Inez
• Money struggles: worked the night shift at a supermarket to make ends meet after doing TV
• Causes: environment and cancer cure

When you look at the whole picture—and there is a lot more to know about Ryan Reynolds—you see that he is typical in several ways (married and divorced, two kids, spent some time in college). As an award-winning comedic and dramatic actor, he might be called supertypical. Struggling to make ends meet, however, would make him subtypical in the minds of many people. Men who already had some career success aren't supposed to take a night job in a grocery store to make ends meet.

In short, how you classify Ryan Reynolds in terms of his relationship to other age forty-ish Western males depends a great deal on which part of the picture you are shining the spotlight.

Taking just two characteristics, here is where Ryan Reynolds would sit on bell curves:

The Old Bell Curve: How Typical Are You?

The bell curve can represent a range of values so others see how their experiences and characteristics can be visually represented as typical or atypical.

If you ask a small group:

“How many of you have cut your finger with a knife at least once?” Everyone raises their hands.

“Twice?” Most keep a hand up.

“Five times?” A few hands remain.

In this model, anyone with a finger sliced less than twice is subtypical; two to five times is the norm; and more than five times is supertypical.

Although it's a distorted view, it captures one fact about this group, made up of these particular people. People who cut themselves more or less than the norm, for example, might see this as a springboard for conversation at the break. Why? People seize on commonalities and differences to create taboos and create bonding.

Any of us can be typical, subtypical, or supertypical depending on the environment and circumstances. Steve Jobs was supertypical in the greater understanding of American culture. An able-bodied thirty-year-old man who lives with and is supported by his parents is subtypical. A forty-five-year-old woman who processes loans at a bank is typical. Are there aspects of American culture in which Steve Jobs was subtypical or a geek? Sure. This helps us understand why demographics and statistics can be used to make any point we want to make.

In this model, the supertypical reign. The typical, wanting to be more like the ruling class than those “below” them, allow the supertypical to influence their behavior, tastes, and other aspects of their lives. The typical admire and even emulate the supertypical in the hope of gaining their approval. Meanwhile, the subtypical look up, hoping to become typical. If you want a clear example of this, just look at the way kids group themselves in high school.

Our primate cousins in the ape dominion behave this way. The supertypical comprise the ruling class with the alpha male by establishing a pecking order in which he is king. The others jockey for position. The pack includes the supertypical alpha male and alpha female, the masses, and the subtypical, but the last group is barely part of the pack. Human beings replicate this model on different scales.

As a rule, humans emulate the supertypical of their group. Look around at the people in your workplace. If your boss—the person able to promote you, endorse your plans of action, and authorize a Christmas bonus—wears a suit to the office every day, you will probably emulate that style in the hope of boosting her approval of you. Does the latest trend started by supertypical Celebrity X spark spin-offs in the population, regardless of whether it's a fashion trend or one related to behavior or speech? You may think you are immune, but try to hide from certain ubiquitous facts about celebrities that creep into the most serious conversations, such as: Tom Cruise is an active member of the Scientology community; Britney Spears was taken to a psychiatric facility; Heath Ledger died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight. Celebrity watching thrives with a billion-dollar industry serving the intellectual curiosity of pop culture geniuses.

The New Bell Curve: How Unique Are You?

Through the ages, experts have developed all kinds of tests to give humans concise ways of describing each other. The Myers–Briggs and Big Five systems offer ways to characterize personality; emotional intelligence (EQ) tests give you a sense of how well you perceive and handle emotions in relation to the rest of the population; and intelligence quotient (IQ) tests supposedly tell you how smart you are. All these tests have serious limitations, though. For example, intelligence tests evaluate a very narrow band of ability, which is why they are almost useless in evaluating someone's real intelligence. This is like evaluating someone on the basis of a series of flat bell curves to determine what's normal. The evaluation has no relationship to what's normal, only to what the norm is for a particular group.

A person can reach high levels of esteem and a fantastic reputation at work. Another person can reach the same levels of esteem during activities that have nothing to do with work. The first is the person who has a career, or at least a job, that energizes her. She cannot wait to demonstrate day after day how competent she is because she loves the work. She may go home to a TV and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every night, or she may go home to a vibrant, loving family. The second is the person who makes a living doing job A today and job B tomorrow, and then spends evenings and weekends focused on a completely different activity. This is the actor working as a waiter, or the competitive skydiver working as a barista. How would you know what the other half of the person's life is like unless you know her in both settings?

If you looked at either of these people in a single dimension, you might see a person who is not fulfilled. And you could be very wrong.

With every person you want to influence, you want more than the information from the flat bell curve. You want to ask the questions that reveal depth so that all sides of the bell take shape. Your job is to find where they are supertypical and stroke their ego. If you are using a negative approach, it is your job to find their weak spots and offer to help them up from subtypical. Knowing their unique combination of character traits and abilities is the information you need to get them to do what you want.

This is what interrogators do: work people in places where they feel strong, as well as in places where they feel weak.

Libby is a perennially underemployed actor. Acting is her passion and her “night job”; she generally takes admin jobs with few intellectual demands and very set hours. If you were Libby's boss and wanted her to complete a task at the office, you would get nowhere if you focused on her role in that work environment. She wouldn't lift a finger. Instead, she would quit and move on to the next admin job, and you would never get what you wanted. In tying incentives or pep talks to her day job, your best strategy would be to discover her priority: being on stage. After finding out her passion, you could talk to her in a way that she would tune in to you. You could articulate the reasons why homing in on certain parts of her day job could help her be a better actor; then you've caught her attention and got some leverage with her.

At its core, this approach is about respect for the whole person, and the image of the bell serves as a visual reminder for that.

Most people are balanced. If they are strong in some areas, then they are weak in others because human beings have only so much bandwidth. The key is to find out which things cause them pain, and which add value to their lives. To play the role of Elizabeth I, whom most of us remember for her grand successes, Cate Blanchett tried to capture the holes in the queen's persona. She explained her process in an interview on www.50connect.co.uk: “What I have tried to do in this film is to create a sense of a hollow woman—without a companion, a husband, a child—searching for what replaces that void.”

For most people, their 3-D bell would not be a pretty one. They would have parts that bulge to show their prowess, and parts that sink to illustrate their incompetence. There would be dings all over the bell. The tools we're giving you here allow you to easily see those dents and bulges. That's the knowledge you need to manipulate someone's behavior. On rare occasions, you will see the more solid bell of someone whose capabilities are not great, and neither are his shortcomings. He is truly balanced. This “ordinary man” will be your toughest case.

Why the 3-D Bell?

Bell curves provide an excellent visual representation of relationships between bits of data. This means a single snapshot of how Johnny relates to Becky in terms of numbers of fingers and toes, siblings, and so on. If all we look at is the number of children in the family and income level, we get one picture of a person. If we look at the arrest record, we get another. Just like the brief analysis of Ryan Reynolds illustrates, a complete picture of a person integrates lots of different traits into the image.

The bell curve model we're introducing attempts to take the same approach. For example, look at the results you get by representing a person as subtypical, typical, or supertypical in a dozen different areas. Overlay the curves on one another in a 3-D way so that you can theoretically walk around it and look at all the sides. This is the kind of model you need to create for your target. When you do this, it is like creating a topographical map of who the person is. The visual allows you to understand where he feels pride, strength, weakness, or shame, and where he feels normal or average. More importantly, it allows you to know about the areas where you can make him feel these emotions.

You will not be able to determine when a person has reached the pinnacle of his environment or when he needs to be lured beyond his environment—both of which are fundamental to getting what you want—unless you have a more robust model to assess someone. You must see the person holistically so that you can know reliably where he is strong, weak, and average. In short, how balanced is he?

By coordinating multiple flat graphs into one 3-D representation, you get an image that looks like the Liberty Bell. You might even imagine cracks in the bell where your ostensibly superhuman target shows subpar performance in certain areas.

Interrogators stroke a person's ego in spots where he is strong, and push to the point of pain in spots where he is weak. You will do essentially the same thing, but start by visualizing it in a way that has more relevance in business settings and other aspects of daily life; that is why the 3-D bell is useful.

• Step 1: You need to look at the myriad lines that make up your subject's bell and see where he sits.
• Step 2: You will use the tools described in Chapter 2 to move him along that line—to a more supertypical position, to a more subtypical posture (if you choose a negative approach), or to a different bell curve entirely. The latter is a result you want to produce when the person has reached the absolute pinnacle of the bell curve.
• Step 3: You now have him in a position to “close the deal,” a process that we describe in the next section.

To show you how Steps 1 and 2 could work, let's go back to the profile of Ryan Reynolds. First, here is how selected traits look on bell curves that could be overlaid into a 3-D image:

If you wanted to gain leverage with this award-winning performer and highly accomplished businessman—nearly at the pinnacle of the movie actor and businessman categories—you might look to his causes. What could you do to raise his profile as an environmentalist or a champion for the eradication of cancer? If you use the positive approach to getting someone to do what you want, your action to move him into the realm of “supertypical” among celebrities within those causes may give you some unique influence with him. We say may because we use this solely as an example of how this process works, not how it would work specifically with Ryan Reynolds.

You could do this in an office setting with the CEO by targeting her causes, and then presenting her with an opportunity to give the keynote at a fund-raising event for that charity. Maryann's friend took another approach: She focused on her boss's love of physical fitness and invited him to be her guest at a health club with top trainers. She got a lot of lunch invitations from him after that, as well as a Christmas bonus. That's the positive side of differentiating. The negative side would be to outrun him and outlift him at the gym.

The exercise of profiling a person with the level of scrutiny required to create a 3-D bell curve may have some surprising results for you, too. You may realize or discover something about a person that gives you a different perspective about working with him. You may decide that a respectful approach aimed at bonding feels more natural than pushing him away, or vice versa.

The reason why someone may look well balanced in the 3-D bell is that they compensate for ranking super-typical in some areas by being subtypical in others. The Ryan Reynolds examples hinted at that. Look at that mix of achievement and underachievement in other people you know well, either by reputation or personally. Thomas Jefferson, for example, not only served as the third president of the United States, but he also distinguished himself in fields such as horticulture, architecture, archaeology, paleontology, literature, and education. He was far less supertypical in his personal life: After ten years of marriage, his wife died, and he never remarried; of his six children with her, four either died at birth or when they were babies. In short, he could devote most of his prime years to everything but home and family. If you work in a large office, you have probably come across at least one person who works overtime voluntarily and excels in production, but has no one to go home to (or doesn't care to go home to whoever is there).

You know more about the areas in which someone like that is supertypical because people typically lead with the edge they want people to see. So when you see someone who projects an almost superhuman amount of achievement, look for areas in which he is an underachiever. Many times, the most balanced people will not be overachievers in any particular area because they go through life doing little bits of lots of things.

As you mentally plot a person's 3-D bell and the span in supertypical areas seems enormous, you need to keep probing to complete the picture. They will likely be just as broad in subtypical areas. They excel in other things and pay for it somewhere else.

Creating the Bell

We told you that interrogators collect information with guards, cameras, and microphones, but because you don't have them, you'll need magic. That magic is the adept use of the tools covered in Chapter 4. In this section, you will exercise them in building rapport, baselining, and gathering information so you can create that 3-D bell of your target.

Apply these techniques inconspicuously. You will get resistance ranging from a skeptical look to harsh expletives if you pry and push for information. That means you should start your conversation broadly and allow your source to direct which questions you ask. Don't gut your plan at the outset by asking your boss, “So, what makes you tick?” or “What really embarrasses you, sir?”

Your target's response will be driven by his operating system. If you ask a pretentious type what he is most proud of, you can guarantee he will offer an answer—a complete one. He might also take the opportunity to answer the same question by giving you an anecdote about swimming with crocodiles and losing his keys in the Congo. On the other end of the spectrum, you might find a well-adjusted earthy type giving you a sarcastic answer and asking you why you care.

Keep your collection effort to typical conversation with two differences. You have a mission, and you are the one driving the conversation. These are the steps you will follow:

1. Establish rapport.
2. Establish baseline.
3. Understand the threshold.
4. Gather information.
5. Reinforce rapport.

Establish Rapport

This bridge called rapport can only join people who have something in common. That could be something as simple as age or shared misery with the workplace. Or it could be something unique, such as a love of Italian sports cars. All the subject will do is serve your desire to start a conversation without it feeling contrived.

Establish Baseline

Listen for his stress-free style of word choice, cadence, pitch, and tone. Look at his body language and eye movement patterns in casual conversation. Note anything that you might consider a glitch that's normal for him. It could be something subtle, such as a certain way of using pauses, or it could be something you find decidedly odd, such as focusing to the side of you instead of making eye contact.

When you know what is normal, you can see abnormal. As you start the conversation, you detect cues in body language and hear clues in his stress of certain words about what is important. Using active listening skills founded on his baseline, you can know what is a source lead; you follow it and make the conversation flow naturally. If you fail to use source leads, your style of follow-up will seem wooden. He may suspect that you're probing, which will trigger an instinct to resist.

Understand the Threshold

When you work in the bodyguard business, you are taught to use a technique called threshold braking. This involves riding your brakes to the point that your car is slowing, but there is no perceptible dip to the nose of the car. You learn this because it allows you to steer as you brake, which is vital to maintain control of the vehicle at all times.

As you ask questions and follow his leads, think of the threshold-braking metaphor. You pay attention to signs that he feels you are probing. You do not want to push to the point where you see a reaction. The only way you will be able to spot and adjust to mood changes is to ride the brakes with no perception that you are braking. If there is an indicator that he is sensing you are doing more than chatting, you have to transition immediately to a less-threatening topic. Loop back to something innocuous that he mentioned previously.

Gather Information

As you follow the conversational leads, appeal to his pride. Flatter him when you've clearly entered an area of pride. You will see similar indications in a male or female—chin up, erect posture, possible shoulders broadening, and clear enunciation with a bit more volume and excitement in the voice. To get him to give you more detail, pinpoint the accomplishment and stroke his ego. Buried in that detail will be other links that allow you to follow up using good questions. You will be able to find out things, such as why he is so proud of this particular accomplishment. Maybe he beat the odds. Maybe he turned around one of his biggest-ever failures.

As you gather information, pull out all kinds of tools from your toolbox. These will get you some quick results:

• Repeat words. Repeat words about which you want him to give you more information. Humans naturally drop words we want to talk about and are more than willing to educate those who do not understand the things we are passionate about. Prey on this natural tendency. Follow his conversation style and talk about what he wants to talk about, but anchor places to which you want to return by repeating that word along the way in conversation and keying his mind to return to it. If you use the word out of context, he will need to fix that for you.
• Rely on the useful sisters: flattery and criticism. By using these levers, called pride-and-ego up/down in interrogator terms, you can lever behaviors as part of the conversation. Asking “What were you thinking when you did that?” is a mild form of criticism that will likely elicit more details than he normally would divulge. The same is true of flattery. People feel the need to be understood and will clarify when you show them you don't understand. When you are seen as a kindred spirit, they will give you more of a good thing.

As your 3-D model of the person takes shape, you grow to understand both the individual and how that person fits into the various groups to which he belongs. He may be ordinary at work, but a hero and leader among the Shriners. Focus on the former, and you could miss his real grounding, just like most of the people who work with Maryann's actor friend who is perennially underemployed in her day jobs. By knowing to whom you are talking, you can motivate your target on a level that matters deeply. You won't just pay lip service to his needs and desires if you get this holistic picture based on the information you gather, both overtly by asking questions and covertly though observation.

Reinforce Rapport

There should be no pressure in these exchanges—only information collection. These steps are about understanding your target, not manipulating him. As you progress through the conversation and ease of it, remember the role of emotion in reinforcing rapport. Regardless of how excellently someone plays golf or sings, the objective opinion of that skill isn't nearly as important as the emotion the golfer or singer attaches to it. We have all seen celebrities crumble in the public arena because they felt their performance fell short, whether that was in a sport, a movie, or a concert.

You can plot someone on a bell curve, therefore, and not get a true picture of how that subtypical, typical, or super-typical status in a performance area affects her self-esteem or shapes her aspirations for self-actualization. This is the subjective information—the color and texture of the image—that enables you to reinforce the rapport you have built.

Enter the Prototypical

As you read about all these types of people, whether related to status in a group or extremes of behavior, it may have occurred to you that something is missing. These are people like John F. Kennedy and Princess Diana on a grand scale, and someone for whom you had huge admiration in your community or even your family, but thought they were out of reach.

You might think that you do not know anyone personally who fits this description, but that's probably not true. Did you know anyone in high school who you felt was destined for greatness? Someone whose success did not bother you? In other words, that person was not your rival, but somewhere above being your rival? You may have no idea where that person is today, but your positive memory of her is sacrosanct. All of us have known people like that at different phases of our lives, and in different positions. It's almost as though they are a different breed of human.

These are the prototypicals. Once a person becomes prototypical, she is not part of the culture anymore. You would never put her in your class. She is like a new class of being: human, but not human in the way the rest of us are.

The Greek gods are classic representations of the prototypical. They are people, just a different class of people. According to mythology, they manifested pettiness, anger, irrational behavior, romantic love, and lust just like humans, yet they had superhuman powers that made them worthy of an empire's adoration. What's the difference between them and Princess Diana? Not much.

We have a constant need to look for figures who are better than us, but a persistent need for those people to be one of us. We look for ways to bond to them. The more prototypical they are, the less we rejoice in their destruction. And yet, as we've observed with many heroes of recent times, it is possible to have such a fall from grace that the prototypical status can never be regained.

One example of that is O. J. Simpson—from football star and movie star to the possible owner of a bloody glove—although Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Bill Cosby are also good examples. Elizabeth Taylor was Hollywood royalty until she married Senator John Warner. Attending political fundraisers instead of the Academy Awards knocked her down a few notches in the eyes of some Americans. Michael Jackson never stopped being a musical genius, but when allegations flourished that his genius was accompanied by perversion, his stature also plummeted. Bill Cosby, TV's archetypal family man who made Coogi sweaters cool, is now living in infamy as a sexual predator.

When prototypicals such as this fall, those who viewed them as an almost godlike figure are likely to go through stages of grief. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described this in her book On Death and Dying. Why do people care about the fate of someone like O. J. Simpson—as though it is a form of death? We do not want them to fall because, if they do, what can happen to us? When someone like O. J. Simpson goes through a series of legal traumas and shameful behavior, we feel “wrong” because we have been worshipping the wrong “god.”

The social dynamic that involves a prototypical person differs from that of “normal” people. For example, the fearless leader of your company who commands respect by walking into the room may have a lousy golf game. The fact that he shoots three times his age does not bother him in the least, though.

He has nothing to prove, and he will continue to command respect—even on the golf course—just because his persona is that of a prototypical person.

You are probably thinking, “Life must be sweet if you're prototypical.” Not nearly. You still have the basic human need for peers, only you find yourself surrounded by people who see you as peerless. That can be an incredibly vulnerable position, as many prototypical people who forged questionable relationships have demonstrated with disastrous, exploitive marriages and business partnerships.

No matter where the person is on the bell curve, if you use a negative approach to get what you want, the key question is: How do I make that person feel as though he is losing his grasp on belonging? The belonging could be his company, club, circle of friends, or even family. It's not even belonging in an absolute sense. It's belonging in the sense of what he perceives his role to be in that group.

The Who and How of Your Target

Is the person you targeted to influence capable of giving you what you want? If not, what is that person capable of in your grand scheme? Help or detriment?

Once you determine that an individual is capable of fulfilling your desires, you can lay out a plan to accomplish your objective. That plan begins with the exercises in human modeling to get an understanding of the individual's core personality type, as well as his status in his group. As you progress, you might suddenly find he is not the right person to give you what you want, but rather someone who is instrumental in getting the right person to do what you want. The modeling exercise gives you the information to progress forward in a new direction.

As you model people, do not wear your dark glasses, or rose-colored glasses, or whatever kind of screen that customarily distorts your vision. Projection of intent, motivation, and human qualities that are born by need will destroy your ability to understand someone. You will be a victim of your own prejudice, stress, and emotional baggage if you let these factors filter your perceptions of the person you targeted.

You need to do the same thing in his group. You may have a tendency to inflate the value of his group—something such as Mensa, for example—or to ridicule it, depending on your point of view. Put that aside, because your assessment of the group's value is not the critical factor: You need to know where your target fits in the hierarchy of his group. Someone who reigns as supertypical in an unusual environment has achieved success and gives him security: he has met the need for belonging, advanced to having a sense of reputation and status, and may even have achieved self-actualization. It is those bare-bones factors that give you the information you need to manipulate him.

This phenomenon applies in any context. Whatever it is, the group provides a chance for a person to belong, but it also offers opportunities to excel. Your ability to model someone depends on looking at her in the context of the group and leaving behind your assessment of whether not the group is worth belonging to.

Once you have collected salient details of your target's personality and place it within the hierarchy, be cautious. Handle that knowledge carefully, or you will damage the person's psyche. To get what you want, you may need to show your target that it can happen, but it is rarely beneficial to do so.