CHAPTER 7

Mechanics of Bonding and Fracturing

WHEREAS THE TECHNIQUES of bonding center on finding commonality, the mechanics of bonding are ways to create and spotlight that commonality. You might think that because the techniques of fracturing center on pinpointing differences, the mechanics do that as well. True statement, except that the mechanics to bond or fracture fall into the same categories. The outcome you get is a matter of how you use these ways of relating to people. Think of each one as a magnet: depending on where you point the magnet, it will either attract or repel.

The categories are:

• Illustration
• Isolation
• Association

Before we explore those, take a look at some exercises with the 3-D bell, and then plunge into a skill set of paring options that you will use with illustration, isolation, and association.

Making the 3-D Bell Work for You

For any person, a model displaying her characteristics in a 3-D format will show that commonalities exist between her and others in a group. Susan may be a mother of three; Jack is a father of three. Both work at your company. Both have bachelor's degrees. The human brain is designed to find patterns, and it finds them well. We bond with those who have similar skill sets, tastes, beliefs, and experiences. But we are woefully inadequate at finding the real differences because we habitually project what things mean onto others. Jack is a bit more adventurous than most of the other bank employees and plays paintball on weekends with a bunch of college kids. They often stop at a local bar for a beer after games. Jack talks candidly about his college days with his young friends; he has more interests in common with these kids than his coworkers. Everything goes well and predictably for Susan, Jack, and their bank colleagues until one day someone discovers from his paintball-playing son that Jack was once arrested for possession of marijuana. The resulting chaos creates camps that break out along familiar lines: traditionalists, earthy people, justifieds. This example merely highlights the fact that, if you ask enough questions of those around you and then share the answers, you will be surprised at how different most people are from what is superficially evident.

Although the overall shape of the bell is the same—at least in some places—there are anomalies. The more superlative someone is in one area, the more likely he is lacking in another. People who may appear to be lackluster because they don't stand out in any specific place may be solidly differentiated in so many places. These balanced personalities may be overlooked in a starstruck group.

By visualizing the full bell, you know what the person's drives are, and can use the tools to your best advantage, whether negatively or positively. You can take the fact that Jack was arrested for marijuana possession at face value and contribute to his disintegrating reputation at work, or by knowing more about him, point out that his volunteer work at the high school gets kids into constructive outdoor activities. Or in a reverse situation, you can take the fact your neighbor speaks seven languages as cause for deference, or make it known that the reason he has been fired from jobs on most continents is that his Chinese is really bar slang. The holistic bell helps you to understand where to apply levers to fracture the man from the group, or bond him and add value to him as a member of the group.

Paring Options

Do not treat paring options like a party game. This is the darkest section of this book, and at the very heart of why interrogation is so demanding on practitioners as well as prisoners. The only positive related to it is outcome; the skill itself remains negative.

Think of this harshest form of manipulation as a way to force someone to choose between two options: bad—what you want him to do that is tied closely to his needs; and worse—what he wants to do. The latter is worse because you have structured it so that choosing it will move him down the hierarchy of needs. This is why we maintain that, by its nature, paring options is a dark art. It is also the single most powerful skill a person can learn in influencing human behavior. Do not use this casually. Misapplied, the outcomes can be disastrous for you and your target.

In the October 2018 US Supreme Court confirmation hearings related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Senator Cory Booker opened his questioning of Kavanaugh with a confrontational statement: “Judge Kavanaugh, you drank on weekdays in high school, not just weekends.” The assertion, delivered with the certainty of someone who was reading one of the Ten Commandments, was the first to hit Kavanaugh behind the knees in a relentless effort to bring him down. When Kavanaugh turned to what appeared to be a copy of his high school calendar and tried to evade the question, Booker returned with: “You drank on weekdays—yes or no, sir?” The senator then extracted a reluctant version of “Yes.”

The coup de grâce, however, was Booker's deft use of paring options. The premise of paring options is forcing a person to choose answer A or answer B—there is no C. They have to do one of the following:

• Choose the answer they want but be at odds with themselves.

or

• Choose to be themselves and be at odds with the situation.

The example from the Booker-Kavanaugh exchange concerns Booker's question about whether or not Kavanaugh ever drank enough in high school to black out.

1. Choosing to say no puts him at odds with himself if he is an honest man and ever did black out. Blacking out is not a crime; it's the possible aftermath of drinking heavily, which Kavanaugh admitted he did. He claimed that he had a “sensitive stomach” and that excessive drinking caused him to vomit on occasion; someone without a “sensitive stomach” could likely have enough alcohol in his system to both vomit and black out.

• This option sets up the opportunity for perjury.

2. Choosing to say yes puts him at odds with the situation, which demands that he maintain the rock-solid assertion of innocence regarding the sexual assault of fifteen-year-old Christine Blasey. Even if he blacked out just once, at a completely different party with a completely different group of people, admitting that he did black out undermines everything he said about not committing the sexual crime.

• This option promotes the assumption of guilty as accused.

This is a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's commonly referred to as a catch-22, the title of the Joseph Heller novel in which the character Yossarian feigns madness to avoid combat, but his drive to avoid it is perceived as proof of his sanity. In other words, there is no way out of the trap.

Matrix of Fulfillment (How to Satisfy Maslow)

Maslow's hierarchy starts with basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and sleep, with the animal needs on a very broad tier. The visual representation of it as the base of a pyramid makes sense because it is the foundation of all the other tiers of needs. The items you need to meet these basic animal needs are relatively easy to find, but when you cannot find them, you cannot move to the next tier. In a congested, famine-stricken area, one finds it hard to maintain his esteem while fighting for an apple. As you move up the pyramid, it gets harder and harder to ascend to the next tier, as opportunities to find a new group diminish, or it takes significant effort to gain or regain self-esteem.

Though the opportunities become rarer as you move up the pyramid, the number of actions that could fulfill each of these needs actually broadens. When you are thirsty, hungry, or need shelter or sleep, the options are narrow. When you are at the point of self-actualization, however, the options are endless. All the money in the world will not keep you from dying of thirst while stranded on a raft in the ocean, but maybe you can be self-actualized through having the world's most extensive collection of shoehorns used by Elvis.

If you overlaid a diagram of the hierarchy of fulfillment over the pyramid of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the result would look like this:

As the diagram indicates, the possibilities for fulfillment of the higher needs get broader and broader, so only the physiological ones are tightly constricted. We walk through life inherently aware that, aside from those animal needs, anything is possible (or so our self-help gurus would have us believe). But there is yet another critical factor: situation.

Situation

You come home and your spouse asks you what you would like to eat. You say you would like lemongrass chicken. Unfortunately, you live in a small town in Kansas where there is no lemongrass at the supermarket and no Thai restaurant within eighty-five miles. In this case, you failed to understand the situation and assess what the possibilities are, so the situation pares the options.

Would you ever drink water with rat feces in it? Of course not. How about cow feces? At this point, you think we lost our train of thought even asking that question. But what if your only source of water was either a well suffering from a rat infestation or a muddy pond where cows hung out? That is precisely the choice that Maryann faced in her first Eco-Challenge, a race encompassing more than 376 miles of spectacular Utah wilderness, much of which also happened to be very, very dry. Racers who made it as far as the well and the pond—many did not—all faced the same options: 1) use some fabric as a filter as you pour the contaminated water into a bottle and add iodine; or 2) go into a state of dehydration and get kicked out of the race. About 100 people chose to drink the water. Maryann would normally not have considered that an option, but the situation forced the issue. In this case, she was still functioning at a high enough level for the dynamics of both triangles to meet. She opted to forgo esteem and drink dung water rather than walk away from the race and further shatter her esteem.

In a very real-life situation, in which there were no camera crews or other people around, the majority of people would opt for the same decision, not for esteem reasons, but for the most basic reason of thirst.

This diagram shows the real imperative—the real choice of options in the diagram below. No matter what the magical mystery self-help books say, for real human beings, the true options are limited. The shaded diamond delineates the area of actual options and it reflects these premises:

1. Few people have the ability to move their reality to the point that their self-actualization tier (the peak of Maslow's pyramid) can touch all of the possible options. Why? Your operating system and the output of what's running on it (experiences) limit your capability to maneuver through the tiers, so as you move up the tiers, the options become slimmer. The resulting possible options are based on situation and prior decisions.

2. The broadest range of possibilities for most of us exists in the tier of belonging and love. Does that really surprise you when you think about how many people never truly get to the point of real self-esteem?

How you perceive yourself in terms of possibilities also narrows your options. Look at your own core personality and the 3-D bell that represents your strengths and weaknesses, your ordinariness, and your differentiation. There are only so many things that will allow you to get to the point of self-actualization. The universe of possibilities is large, but not for an individual with a limited number of talents and interests, which is really any of us.

On a theoretical level, there are infinite ways for humans to become self-actualized, but on a practical level, they narrow. If we carried no baggage from the past, any given thing could satisfy that need; but every decision limits the next, and before you know it, the options are narrow. Once you acknowledge this, you negate the presumption that people have unlimited ways to feel truly satisfied. As you go toward the base of Maslow's hierarchy, there are fewer ways to satisfy the needs on each level. As you keep dropping down, the more primate the need, the fewer the natural options. So the broadest range of options lies in the place where the monkey and the man meet: belonging and esteem.

Your knowledge of this reality combined with your situational awareness and analysis of an individual enable you to get people to do things they cannot imagine. That level of control starts with putting yourself in the right circumstance. Regardless of what it takes to satisfy someone's needs, if you have control of the circumstances, you can manage a person's perception of the possibilities.

The Landrum Factor

In codifying the process of paring options, we chose to name the system after Don Landrum, the most efficient practitioner of paring options Greg ever met. Don was a Vietnam-era special forces soldier, a Green Beret who was one of the founding members of the SERE school.

Greg worked with Don when Greg was in his twenties, so he had a number of years to practice and integrate the operational principles he saw Don use. In a nutshell, his art was the ability to make people see life as mundane and limited, even when it's not.

The diagram illustrates that at the heart of the possibilities to fulfill your needs and inside the narrowed options based on situation is a very narrow band of real—not imagined—possibilities. This band of possibilities is much narrower than the original for one simple reason: self-image.

Through manipulation, skilled interrogators can easily convince sources that, in areas where they think they are typical, they fall woefully short of the mark. And in areas of pride, they are just typical. You can manage this in three ways:

• Isolation
• Illustration
• Association

Isolation

You do not have to lock your target in a cage. Merely separating the person from the support group that props up his self-image will accomplish isolation. For example, you accompany the local office Goliath—she has the highest equipment sales in the county—to a national sales conference. Although others may know her name, it is by no means a household word. If she starts to raise her head in a way that undermines your agenda, you can quickly strike her down because her power base and self-image insulators are not around her in this setting. A natural way to do it might be to spotlight how small the county is.

You can also make isolation a contrived and premeditated exercise. You might choose to set up a meeting at her favorite restaurant. At the last minute, change the restaurant to one where everyone knows your name just to set her off balance and undercut her self-image. The most powerful effect is to remove any source of self-image reinforcement.

Isolation is a powerful tactic, and when it occurs inadvertently, it can even be an insidious killer. It has the power to evoke a sense of personal extinction.

Inside each one of us lies hidden needs and desires. Let's call them the “hidden Maslow.” Self-image is tied to your hidden Maslow. Because these needs and desires may be cocooned inside a person, others may have no clue as to what they might be and inadvertently isolate her, causing deep psychic gashes.

Carol had a reputation for throwing extravagant parties, and they were always in honor of someone else. Birthdays, engagement parties, anniversary dinners—she had done so many of them over the years that people came to expect them and count on her generosity. Throughout her career, she had risen to the top of her profession, so she had the money to do over-the-top events; she made more than her ex-husband ever had. Her daughters expected fancy weddings and got them.

Her persistent need was to see other people express joy, but tied to it was seeing that joy associated with her. As the years went on, her spoiled daughters gave her affection, but never seemed to connect Carol's generosity with love. Her friends did, but she began to doubt their affection. Had she done enough? Did they love her for who she was? These questions plagued her and surfaced in the last letter she ever wrote.

Carol checked into a comfortable hotel one Friday evening in 2013. It was not a fancy place; it was a low-rise building just off the highway. She drove there and took a small bag up the cement stairs to her room at the end of the building.

Carol covered the mattress with plastic. She penned a letter of apology to the maid and left her a $500 tip. Her final letter and will remained in the suitcase. Reclining on the bed, she shot herself in the mouth.

Her action was a dramatic, and dignified, way of conveying a critical message about isolation, although it's safe to say that's not what she intended. When those around do not support your efforts to fulfill your hidden Maslow—even though they had no idea what you deeply needed and wanted—the pain can be too intense for some people to endure.

Carol's story involves a sharply defined moment, but how many of us experience isolation and try to address it by accelerating death in socially acceptable ways, such as binging on alcohol? When it comes to the experience of isolation, self-awareness is more important than awareness of the things that fuel or starve other people's self-image.

In Carol's case—as in so many suicides—while her hierarchy need for fulfillment appeared to be satisfied externally, it was not internally. She did not taste the satisfaction she craved.

Illustration

Through illustration, you ask him enough questions to dispel the notion that he has control of the topic at hand and unlimited options in a given situation. Once a person starts to see where his shortcomings are, it limits options he perceives as available. When you use illustration, your questioning and listening skills can pinpoint things he does not want to come out and feelings of inadequacy related to meeting core requirements of the group. Once identified, you prey on them by questioning with intent.

Don Landrum cited the old adage: “An idiot can ask enough questions to make a wise man look the fool.” He would ask where you are from and ask questions about your hometown until he knew something about your town you didn't, or just know something you couldn't answer.

Each of us absorbs and processes information a little differently. A great questioner like Don Landrum can ask who, what, when, where, why, and huh? questions so well that you can find yourself backed into a wall, unable to answer questions about your own family.

Association

The art of associating plays on the idea that each choice eliminates another. By showing association with one group, you eliminate the ability to bond with another. The result is that you narrow a person's options even further than the situation dictated.

Another insidious form of association relies on your use of the 3-D bell on the alpha of that group. You determine where he is inadequate and highlight it. Because that alpha enjoys supertypical status in your target's world, how great can the group be? The person's association with the group led by this tainted alpha suddenly plays as a negative.

When paring someone's options, you send the message that he can either follow a path to fulfillment that you've laid out, or do what he wants with unknown consequences. You narrow the choices so that the only way he can belong or continue to differentiate is to do what you want, to take the path you chose for him. That path has appeal because you connect it with the promise of meeting whatever his pressing need is in the hierarchy.

In the interrogation world, this is simple. The two parties are enemies, and the one is dependent on the other. (The interrogator is often heavy-handed due to time constraints; he has the luxury of control, whereas you have the luxury of time.) Based on the chain of events that led to the situation, the prisoner's options are very limited. The interrogator may take the road of trickery by asking the prisoner to give him something of dubious value and then making the prisoner feel as though he gave up a great deal of information. The interrogator then uses this as a lever to say to the prisoner, “I'm going tell the entire prison population that you just helped the enemy unless . . .” The message is clear: the interrogator will differentiate this prisoner from the rest of his group in a negative fashion to make him an outcast.

Fearing the loss of camaraderie, the prisoner asks the interrogator not to disclose the information. Always willing to “help,” the interrogator tells the prisoner he would have no need to divulge anything to the others if the prisoner would just help him complete the details. The prisoner is faced with a dilemma: give up more details and save face with fellow prisoners or remain principled and not say anything else. Choosing sacred principles means he not only will lose his reputation for talking in the first place but, more importantly, he will also lose the belonging of his fellow countrymen. The allure of violating just one more time to save that bond wins out.

Take it to even greater extremes. A person who walked into a situation feeling self-assured but has his ego battered, his comrades isolated from him, and his physical well-being threatened has sunk all the way down to the bottom—the level of physiological needs. The interrogator has pared his options to the point at which he will do what's asked of him for a cookie. Remember, the cookie isn't the prize; the cookie is insidiously tied to the psyche.

In the History Channel's We Can Make You Talk, Greg and his colleagues faced volunteers with various backgrounds, but all came in with a confidence that they would do well in the two-day simulation. One young man in particular hung his superior attitude on his academic credentials; he came into this role-playing exercise asserting that he would show these cretins from the US Army that he could put them to shame.

He was a twenty-eight-year-old, self-actualized college professor who found out his title and degrees meant nothing in that environment. All his snooty demeanor did was kick us into high gear with psychological techniques designed to break him. Those credentials were and are impressive, but we would never reinforce his self-image by saying that, and neither would his fellow prisoners, who had their own self-image to worry about. He was isolated from admirers.

This guy walked into the simulation seeing himself as differentiated—intelligent, well educated, and well bred—but we pared him back to the point where all he had left was enough dignity to belong, and we let him know that if he did one more thing that went against us, we would remove that dignity, and he would be left grasping for belonging.

When Greg and his fellow interrogators interviewed him, they took every opportunity to point out to this tall, skinny guy that he was not physically gifted. That is an easy starting point with someone who is young. The rigors of movement and the physical nature of the reality TV abduction took their toll on all the participants. There were women in the group who held up much better than the professor—a point not wasted on the interrogators. They pointed out to the professor that a young woman sitting near him had fared much better than he had physically, and that they thought he couldn't even stand up to a woman. His reaction was sad, comical, and predicable: “I have a brilliant mind.” That became his tag for the rest of the exercise. When they dragged him from room to room blindfolded and insulted his manliness, they always used his nickname: Brilliant Mind.

Greg and his cohorts interrupted his charisma cycle as soon as they responded to his introduction. His credentials carried no meaning in the real world—a fact they quickly demonstrated by illustration and isolation. Once they had him to the point of rolling over, he became their point of association for the others: Is this the best of your breed? Was he brilliant? Absolutely. In the way a computer programmer is brilliant in the jungles of Borneo. Pure knowledge, no application.

They took a quick look at his 3-D bell and found the areas in which he felt inadequate. Then they overlaid these onto his strengths. Each time they identified a strength, they mocked it, wearing him down to the point where he questioned whether that strength was real. What they used against him were human interpersonal skills that preyed on his own feelings and fears of inadequacy.

In undermining his confidence, they also demonstrated to him that he wasn't what he thought he was. As his confidence eroded, he even questioned whether or not he belonged in his peer group. Brilliant Mind gave himself an F and sunk lower in Maslow's hierarchy.

Ultimately, they sent in a threat—a big, fierce-looking interrogator he perceived as stupid and dangerous. The professor responded by offering to trade information for insulation—and a cookie.

Paring Options: How You Do It

The SERE school and interrogation simulations for television capture extreme circumstances, in which a subject may well plunge all the way down to the bottom level of the hierarchy. If anything like that happens in your workplace, then you probably have a job in a maximum-security penitentiary.

Your first step is to plot the bell curve for the person you want to influence. Is this person a self-actualized, super-typical person such as the young college professor in the simulation we described, or is he struggling to meet needs lower in the hierarchy?

You take someone from a self-actualized place by doing exactly what the interrogators did with the college professor: You don't acknowledge that his differentiator demonstrates any value. Instead of Oprah Winfrey the media mogul, you talk to Oprah the poor child from Mississippi. You make the person feel as though she has to show you she's more. You manage the person's state.

Clingers—those who are uncertain of their place in a group—are fair game and open to attack because they are barely hanging on to their status within the group. Maryann knows a woman with an accent that can best be described as idiosyncratic European; she has never even been outside of the United States, nor does she have a family that speaks oddly. Her accent is a source of fascination for some of her colleagues who find it amusing that this pretty, smart woman has come up with a twisted tongue that's all her own. Most people in the group feel more marginal about it, however, and when one of the relatively unpopular (translate: subtypical) people in the group called her on it, it was like he had taken his boot to her head and kicked her down the social ladder. All eyes were on her.

In a moment, among the people who were present, her eccentricity overtook her amusing cuteness. The coworker bounced her down to his subtypical level. By attacking her position in the group, and forcing her to make sudden moves to normalize in order to keep her place in the social structure, he effectively did two things: He took away her differentiator and forced her to fear for her sense of belonging. That split second of personal doubt is the upper hand in interpersonal relations. In this situation, he had little to lose, and she little to gain.

Most of this book relies on skills that you can use to raise or lower someone in Maslow's hierarchy. The best solution is one that causes a person to rise because you will be viewed as charismatic and good. If you use this skill set associated with paring options, your aim is moving people down the hierarchy. Few people—at least not the ones with any self-respect—will respond to you kindly. Consider your own reputation and your need to belong. This is not child's play.

Take Him Down

It's much easier to pare options as you move people down the levels of the hierarchy rather than up. The only options they have left are the ones that will serve the needs of the level they are on. If they don't do what you want them to do, they limit options for growth, or worse yet, you push them farther down and their options become even narrower.

By relying on the 3-D model of your target to visualize the whole person relative to his world, you will see where his areas of pride are. Understand these areas of pride may have nothing to do with belonging to the group against which you are trying to manipulate him. Even if you are levering him against the people at work, and his greatest strength is not at work, you may not see the correlation, but the correlation is there as a lever.

Here's how it works: He will be very proud of his grandest accomplishment, so you can use this pride and the tools of illustration to differentiate him in a way that separates him from the norm for the group. By separate, we do not mean make him feel superior or gain friends—just the opposite. You want to spotlight his special talent in a way that makes it seem elitist or wacky: “How'd that dingy race to Tangiers Island go last month, Earl?” To which he replies that it was a yacht race, and he can't help but come across as snooty.

Self-image drives all of this, so what seems perfectly normal to him for the outside group where he's insulated may seem bizarre when you start to illustrate exactly what it means. For example, Greg participates in a sport that involves people wearing armor and beating the heck out of each other with sticks. Working in the business world with golfers as he does, it takes a certain personality type to be able to withstand scrutiny of the hobby. Well insulated in the world where the sport is normal, what he does raises no eyebrows. Standing in a group of people who have no idea what the details are, and repeatedly ask questions about the intricacies of the hobby, could knock a person who lacks confidence off center. The easiest way to know you have an “in” to influence someone like this is when you find a person who is highly differentiated outside the group with which you are dealing, but few in that group know about that differentiation.

Once you start to separate your target from the group, the next step is to offer him an out that ties him back to the group and is bonded to your success. You might call for a consensus on a decision that had been going against you, and with his vote, you win. Or it may mean that he takes on some extra work to make your life easier.

The pattern is this:

• Fracture him from the group with knowledge you have gained in modeling.
• Illustrate the point, or just openly divulge it.
• Once the fracture is evident, give him a clear option to do something that you want, which will allow him to rebound, avert further loss of face, or allow him to continue down the path of his choosing and lose even more ground with the group.

This is one of the most powerful forms of a threat-and-rescue technique. When you are done, the target will never forget it, although he may not understand how you accomplished what you did.

Paring options is a style of getting what you want that leaves a mark. With time and mastery, you can get to the point of subtlety, but in the beginning, most people have a tendency to be harsh with this skill set. The person who has been manipulated this way will likely not forget it. Just like any other choice you make, this one will change the options you have later. Interrogators may never see the person again. They can afford to be casual with the relationship. Daily life doesn't make it that easy to get away.

We give you knowledge of this core art of interrogation because there are some people who invite this treatment with their own “art.” When you see someone who prides himself on being a manipulator, and who tries his tricks on you, retaliate with this. Most likely, the person will slink off. You may never have to deal with the issue again.

As we discuss in the following chapters, there are other, much subtler and kinder ways to get cooperation.