CHAPTER 1

Shared Needs: Belonging and Differentiating

TAKE A MINUTE and ponder what elements of your life you cannot live without. Look at the things that make your life valuable—not your latest gadget or miracle cosmetic, but the essentials that would leave a marked void if they disappeared. Some go without saying, such as your most basic human needs: food, clothing, and shelter. In terms of human drives, what is your most basic need—the intangible equivalent of food, clothing, and shelter?

Regardless of whether your personality bends toward introverted or extroverted, regardless of whether your feelings about people make you a misanthrope or philanthropist, human companionship is a primary driver of human behavior. Companionship can be different things to different people, but the premise remains consistent for all but the most deviant minds: people need people.

Maryann and her coauthor Trevor Crow (Mullineaux) began their book Forging Health Connections with this fact: “We are built for relationships. The need for connection with others permeates the human body.”² The rest of the book was devoted to scientific documentation of and guidance on ways people can heal and extend their lives through connection to other people. It is true, whether from the perspective of Maslow's hierarchy of needs or that of a medical doctor: people need people.

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced his theory on the hierarchy of needs in a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” The premise is that, unless the lower human needs related to survival and security are met, then an individual will not be psychologically equipped to pursue so-called growth needs. The ground floor of the pyramid is composed of the biological components we all know: food, sleep, and other elements essential to life. One floor up, you find all the things that provide safety. Arguably each of these first two levels can be met without the need for other people, but the ability to go it alone ends there. On the third level, you have the spectrum of intangibles that relate to belonging and love: affection, relationships, and camaraderie. Moving up to the fourth level, you find esteem needs, such as achievement and reputation; and at the top, self-actualization.

Maslow's theory was that human beings cannot progress to the next tier of the hierarchy until the needs below it are met. Twenty-first-century behavioral science has criticized Maslow, assigning greater weight than before to the need for human connection as a “basic” need. But ask yourself: if you were starving to death—not just hungry, but starving to death—would you want a hug or a cookie?

What we consider achievement and reputation can come only when someone feels as though he belongs—that he genuinely connects to other human beings. The personal growth and fulfillment associated with self-actualization can only come after satisfying the need for achievement and reputation.

Let's pause for a minute here, because grasping the hierarchy of human needs is the core of the how-to information in this book. The motivation behind a person's choices takes shape according to what lower needs have been met and what higher needs remain unfulfilled. Among the most interesting attributes of human behavior is that these needs are often more visible from the outside than the inside. Others can clearly see things about you that you cannot, but there are exceptions.

Look at the top tier of self-actualization. How can you see, understand, or manipulate another person's sense of self-actualization? After years of dealing with peoples' behavior, we still don't know how anyone can start to understand what self-actualization means for another, especially when so few can define it for themselves. We will explore this conundrum later in the book when we look at internal and external motivators in self-actualization—essentially, the power of a person's core principles and values versus the power of things like money and power.

Greg's background as a battlefield interrogator and instructor in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) school taught him that interrogators are rarely able to base an interaction on grasping a source's criteria for self-actualization. Interrogators are on a schedule. The science of interrogation is about asking questions and getting as much information in as little time as possible. The process involves using shortcuts to get down to business. To begin, take the interrogator's approach to confronting a person's progress on the route to self-actualization:

1. Assume the person is not self-actualized. Most people are not.
2. Even if she is, shifting her to one of the lower tiers in the hierarchy will change that quickly. When an interrogator mounts a successful attack on someone's reputation, the ensuing campaign to restore that reputation drops the victim to the level below actualization. If you want an everyday example, tune in to the smear campaigns of a presidential election. Watch the effect of defending a reputation that took decades to build. Do you see a different aspect of the otherwise poised candidate?
3. If you want to move him even lower on the pyramid, attack his sense of belonging. His response as he tries to hold on to this most basic, intangible human need is to drop a step down on the hierarchy. If he is masterful, or well insulated, his regrounding can be quick, but it allows the manipulator an instant to get the upper hand.

The Drivers: Belonging and Differentiating

The concept of belonging is simple. Everyone needs to feel as though he or she has a place in a group, and this does not mean something superficial like a plot of land in the suburbs with two kids and an SUV. Fundamentally, it means you experience some kind of bond with others. This can range from an impromptu group formed to solve a problem to complex fraternal organizations and societies.

As you read this, you may be thinking, “I have bonds, but I'm certainly not the same as my friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and family members. I'm different. Everyone knows that. A lot of them even look up to me for it.”

You got to that point by belonging. If you were not accepted first, you would be a stranger whose differences would have no meaning and carry no interest for the group. You would not be a subject of discussion in the same way a member of the group would be. Those differences—the identifying traits that you value—are called “differentiating factors,” and they are at the heart of both self-esteem and esteem from others. It is about accomplishments, reputation, status, and responsibility. Regardless of the group, and regardless of what creates the identity of the group, belonging followed by differentiating drives the sense of esteem a person gets. The kind of differentiating can be as individual as a fingerprint, and it is heavily dependent on the person's self-image, which is highly subjective and volatile.

Self-Image

Frame of reference determines our outlook on the world. The more facts we know and the more expansive our experiences, the broader our frame of reference and the more completely we see the picture. That frame of reference puts you in the picture somewhere, too.

What do you look like in that picture? You may not have considered how your self-image is tied to others. What other people tell you about you affects how you see yourself in the frame. In some cases, they expressed an opinion openly, but in other cases they merely implied it—or you thought they did. (Your psyche will sometimes manufacture other people's judgments or opinions of you.)

Start with the physical. Are you taller or shorter than average? For what population? We know a woman who is five feet three and tells of a time when she was tall. The story is funny because as a child, she was always tall for her age. Later in life, when she told friends she was glad she had been gifted with height, people burst her bubble. She carried the delusion of being tall well into adulthood. How does such a skewed perspective develop? Her self-image developed as she looked at the tops of her childhood friends' heads, and then it hardened because those friends never challenged her as they grew and she did not. Her height was never a subject of discussion. This same kind of deference occurs on a regular basis when someone differentiates himself in a confined environment and creates a superlative image in a limited population. You see this phenomenon all the time in small-town high schools, where the most gifted football player is small in stature but runs fast. As soon as he gets to a college populated by bigger players who outsprint him, his self-image takes a beating.

Maybe you are more attractive or athletic than others in your group. Ask yourself what the standard is for your group, and what would happen if your tribe suddenly changed? What if you changed jobs and ended up in the Yucatan Peninsula with Mayan descendants who top out at about five feet tall? Or if you took your slightly plump, tanned body—considered beautiful where you live now—for an extended stay in Norway? These examples are a bit extreme, but they highlight that your sense of belonging to a group and being distinguished within that group is a relative judgment.

It applies in terms of achievement, too. Many people become big fish in little ponds and become convinced that they are capable of so much more. They move on to a larger pond only to find that their deferential group has been left behind. Suddenly they are no longer better or normal, much less superlative. This new set of expectations, whether vocational or social, changes the ground rules.

Self-Image and Interrogation—the Extremes

The science of interrogation is about asking questions and getting as much information in as little time as possible (assuming the person cooperates). The art of interrogation happens when you apply a set of extreme interpersonal skills so subtly that the unskilled observer rarely knows what is going on. Both the interrogator and the source are keenly aware of the interchange; it is more stressful for both than either will likely encounter in any other situation. This art of interrogation relies heavily on managing the person's self-image.

In the interrogation business, the euphemism for a cooperative source is a broken source. This implies that the interrogation broke her will to resist and she will cooperate. A source who “broke on direct” means she answered the questions she was asked. No fanfare or manipulation. The mechanics of what makes a person divulge sensitive information to her enemy in that manner cannot be overlooked. Consider this classic scenario of a captured soldier sent to a compound to face an interrogation.

When the soldier enters military service, he is indoctrinated and pumped full of duty, honor, country, and camaraderie. This system of teamwork, mission, and higher purpose insulates him from the thought of what the enemy must be like. It is simple: the guy on the other side is the enemy; he is to be destroyed, and an interrogator has the power to do it. The soldier's self-image is manufactured and injected into him; regardless of where he fits in the group, he is a soldier. He belongs, so now all he needs to do is differentiate. The younger a soldier, the easier it is to have him absorb this self-image. Camaraderie, cohesive training, good leadership, and proper discipline insulate him and prevent him from needing self-examination. He does not need to evaluate whether he is a fool or a wise man. It doesn't matter whether or not he understands his government's policy and it fits his ideology, or that he is serving more than one master. The profile is built and reinforced by what it takes to stay alive, stay mission focused, and to look out for his team.

The rituals of his military life play a central role in his decisions and responses. Humans are very complex creatures with many “subroutines” running in the background. One sure way to short-circuit this is through rituals, rites of passage, and complex imagery. It plays out in social clubs and formal organizations like the Masons and American Legion, as well as in formal training like the military.

On a more insidious scale it plays out during informal political rallies like the red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) teams in the United States as they prepare for ritual “war” with the other party. Watch the news feeds: US political rallies often have the imagery of war. The rituals of the party bond people to others with whom they have little else in common other than a candidate or a single issue, such as immigration.

You can even see how the pageantry- and image-filled ritual of the Third Reich was so fully overwhelming in galvanizing a people who felt oppressed by an “unfair” treaty.

When a soldier is captured, everything turns upside down. He no longer has the input to maintain the image of warrior, professional, and noble servant to his country. As he sees the enemy for the first time in human terms, he is barraged on every front with reality-altering images. The self-image inputs that created his role of soldier recede into oblivion. No longer a combatant, he now depends on the captor for everything from food and shelter to communication with family. The other soldiers from his world are now just as dependent, and the uniforms that held so much power before are gone, or worse, they are simply a mocking reminder of the earlier self-image. His only contact with someone who speaks his language is the interrogator, so prisoners often react to questions to sustain conversation and regain some form of stability. A good interrogator starts the conversation in such a way that the first question lets him know whether the system has done the hard work of “breaking” the prisoner. In wars prior to the 21st century, most people—as high as 90 percent—had broken on direct, or simply answered the interrogators questions without manipulation.

People curious about the leverage that interrogators possess discover that they are anxiety brokers relying on the fear of the unknown and managing that fear to get a desired result. The one unknown that people fear the most is personal extinction—and that does not refer to physical death. The personal extinction to which we refer is psychological, an aspect of identity similar to self-actualization because it is so personal and only the individual knows what defines it. An interrogator's magic is to find the combination of words that engender that fear, and then relieve the fear just as efficiently.

According to the research done by Maryann and her coauthor Trevor Mullineaux, “a battlefield interrogator who wanted to build rapport with a prisoner, for example, may have begun the process by making sure he had something to eat and a sense that he would not be physically abused.”³

The food Maryann and Trevor mention isn't food to eliminate dire hunger; the POW isn't looking for food as much as he is looking for certainty. This certainty comes in the form of a morsel or handout.

Contrast the scenario of the traditional soldier as a prisoner of war with a more recent situation involving terrorists. The new enemies of the United States and most of the Western world do not seem to break as readily as the soldier in the traditional mold. Although the enemy has changed, the tools to break him have not. The currently “approved techniques” were derived from a brilliant noncoercive interrogator from Nazi Germany named Hanns Scharff. His techniques (which we discuss later) are brilliant, but they do not seem to have the desired effect on nontraditional combatants. The unsatisfying results are predictable.

The terrorist has no image built on a group of comrades. Often, he acts independently and insulates himself. His self-esteem comes from the fact that he operates clandestinely, and his self-image is deeply rooted in the justification for his actions. When captured, he faces the enemy as a warrior in the cause of a greater power. He sees, often for the first time in his life, the infidel and the experience of capture. That assault on his psyche reinforces the self-image honed by his beliefs, as well as the image of the Western heathen. The true believer gets further justification; he communicates with his centering authority—or in Western terms, he meditates—and the jihadist has his self-image bolstered. There is a cliché that says armies fight their last war continuously. By holding a group of people who face interrogation with these same tools indefinitely and allowing them to recenter, Western powers created the unimaginable: the ascetic jihadist. We are not discounting the need for distancing terrorists from their targets; rather, the Western world needs a different approach for a new enemy. The effect of the current system is to strengthen the self-image of the jihadists and take away any chance the interrogator has to broker anxiety by demonstrating his understanding of the terrorists' feelings of personal extinction.

ISIS fighters might be viewed as somewhere between terrorists operating in cells and independently and the cohesive units of soldiers. In the case of ISIS prisoners, noncoercive techniques apparently worked in some cases. According to Seth J. Frantzman, executive director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis, interrogators have sometimes been surprised at how forthcoming their prisoners are. Frantzman, who has been covering ISIS—often as an embedded journalist—since 2015, notes simply: “Many of the ISIS fighters and member didn't appear to think they had committed crimes by supporting ISIS.”⁴ They assigned legitimacy to their battlefield activities the same way a US soldier might. One key factor: In Frantzman's experience, they felt especially safe with interrogators associated with the Kurdistan Regional Government. Their use of noncoercive techniques was in sharp contrast to the style of the Iraqis, whose Shi'ite militias were known to torture prisoners and make them disappear. They simply didn't fear execution at the hands of the KRG.

You will likely never deal with either of these extremes, but consider what commonalities exist between the interrogator's circumstance and yours. When someone opposes you and is bolstered by forces, inside or out, you have little chance to get her to do what you want. But when that person feels threatened—whether the threat occurs because she feels like an outsider, like a nobody in the group, or in danger of being supplanted as the alpha—you have a lever. How you apply this lever is the art because you will creatively rely on both positive and negative levers, depending on the situation and the individual.

We want to emphasize that it is extremely dangerous to inject poison into someone's self-image. You can push a person to retaliate violently by doing that. If you manipulate someone to the point where she feels she has lost her sense of self—that is, the point of personal extinction—and you do not know how to manage the situation, you can seriously harm her psyche. When interrogators do this, they either pull the person out of it and restore her sense of self, or walk away, not caring what kind of damage they just inflicted. But daily life is not an interrogation, and the outcome is not a life-or-death situation. Used for the right purpose and in proper measure, you can get people to do things you want; used incorrectly, these tools can result in things you really do not want.

A parent might choose the “incorrect” way to punish a misbehaving child by taking away the one thing in his life that means the most to him—his puppy. In trying to manipulate the child to behave, the parent has unwittingly scarred his psyche.

Brandy Vela's 2016 suicide spotlights a worst-case situation resulting from toying with someone's self-image. As an overweight, eighteen-year-old girl she endured body-shaming from people at her school as well as people using fake Facebook accounts to send bullying messages. Brandy changed her phone number and even reported the intense bullying to police, who couldn't trace the messages and were forced to wait until a physical confrontation occurred. When the harassment continued, she snapped. In front of her parents, Brandy shot herself—the literal expression that she had experienced personal extinction.

When we wrote the original version of this book, suicide was the third leading cause of death for people ages fifteen to twenty-four according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of this writing, it has risen to the second leading cause of death for this age group. Young psyches are not necessarily resilient enough to deal with the end of a love affair or an embarrassing situation. Do you think embarrassment isn't a strong enough reason to take your own life? After a DUI or minor scrape with the law (a violation that would not ruin a person's life), some people choose suicide instead of the embarrassment of jail. If their pride in being respectable, dignified individuals was fundamental to their personal identities, the possibility of jail time drove them to personal extinction. Their definitions of respectable and dignified did not allow a check mark in the box for incarceration. A quick Google search yields dozens of examples, and many people were well into adulthood when they did it.

Self-Image and Cloistered Groups

Every group develops a norm, or concept of typical, for its group. This norm can be mainstream for the overall culture, or so narrowly focused and bizarre that only initiates recognize it. The more open the group to outsiders, the more mainstream the group will remain. As a group becomes more cloistered, individuals within it gain more power and influence. Cult leaders illustrate this dramatically: Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, Charles Manson of the Manson Family, Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate, and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. Often these “big fish” individuals will distort and convolute the group's norm so much that by the end—which in these cases, was the end of life—none of the others could recognize how it happened. The people who fell under their spell described them as charismatic, or even divine. One quick look by the rest of us who did not belong to that tribe ask one question: What the hell were they thinking? Oddly enough, they were responding in the same way Maslow predicted: first by belonging, and then by differentiating.

They belonged because each of them took part in a group. Whether it offered refuge from parents who opposed the hippie way of life, a world that did not understand racial harmony, or simply feeling as though they had no peers in the real world, each person found a group with ideas and beliefs he or she shared—a place that offered comfort.

They differentiated by following a leader who steadily increased his sway over his “family” and skewed the way the group's norms took shape. By attempting to fit in, each person moved further and further from the norms of the society as he or she became similar to the others, and even sought to become a favorite child to this parental figure. It's unlikely that any of these people signed up to commit mass suicide or multiple homicides, but many of them found themselves doing exactly that. One could argue that, by ending their lives and others' lives so dramatically, they were all mentally ill, but other events—some controlled experiments and others rooted in common practices—indicate otherwise.

In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo invited a population of healthy, middle-class male college students to participate in a two-week study of the effects of prison life on the psyche. Arbitrarily, he divided the group of eighteen in half: nine guards and nine prisoners. Zimbardo's team transformed the basement of a building on the Stanford University campus into a prison environment, with the added touch of planting video and audio recording devices so they could monitor what happened. Upon capture the “prisoners” were treated as real prisoners, from hearing their Miranda rights to delousing. The “guards” received no special training, but they knew their job was to enforce order in the prison and do what they thought was necessary to gain the respect of the inmates. While prisoners wore baggy outfits that looked like dresses, the guards wore khaki uniforms and sunglasses, and they were armed with whistles and billy clubs. Guards worked in three-hour shifts, but the prisoners played their parts around the clock.

Day one passed without incident. On day two, a rebellion broke out. All nine guards came on duty and decided to quell the rebellion with force, which began by spraying the prisoners with a fire extinguisher to subdue them. The prisoners suffered ice burn, which caused pain and chapping, and it was enough to give the guards the upper hand. They stripped the prisoners, removed their beds, and threw the ringleaders into solitary confinement.

Day three brought some new tactics by the guards. They split the prisoners emotionally and psychologically by singling out three for good behavior and giving them privileges—such as food and beds—while denying others any comforts. To prove how much control they really had, they switched the good and bad prisoners. The prisoners became confused and thought some of them had “turned.” Distrust grew among them. While the prisoners became more fractured as a group, the guards bonded. One prisoner cracked so badly that he was released from the experiment. Three days later, after prisoners were forced to clean toilets with their bare hands, the experiment ended. Thinking that no one monitored the video after regular hours, night shift guards concocted such degrading and pornographic punishments that the researchers knew normalcy no longer mitigated their behavior.

On his website devoted to the prison experiment Zimbardo asks: “How could intelligent, mentally healthy, ‘ordinary’ men become perpetrators of evil so quickly?”⁵

He concluded the following about the fundamental issues of bonding and fracturing:

By the end of the study, the prisoners were disintegrated, both as a group and as individuals. There was no longer any group unity; instead, it was just a bunch of isolated individuals hanging on, much like prisoners of war or individuals hospitalized for mental illness. The guards had won total control of the prison, and they commanded the blind obedience of each prisoner.

In psychological terms, the guards' behavior can be explained with the concept of deindividuation: a state when a person becomes so submerged in the norms of a group that he loses his senses of identity and personal accountability.

During hazing rituals, fraternities produce an analogous result by leveraging students' desire to belong, reinforcing the demands of leaders through peer pressure, and shrouding the real nature of the hazing to come with secrecy. Many of the hazing abuse cases that have ended tragically involved pledges being forced to out-drink one another. Most of the time, that involves alcohol. However, at Chico State in 2005, hazing involved making pledges drink so much water that one of them, Matthew Carrington, died from water intoxication. You might think, “Why didn't they just say, ‘Enough's enough?’” The responsible fraternity brothers did something insidious, most likely without even realizing how effective it would be. They physically isolated two of the pledges and broke them down mentally by stressing them out physically.

What caused each of these “experiments” to go haywire? And what does this have to do with getting people to do what you want? First let's look at the cause of the failure.

Defining a Group—on the Outside Looking In

The bell curve gives us a simple model for analyzing a group. Within any group you can chose to represent people on a bell curve.

The narrative description goes something like this:

1. Some are barely members of the group, more tolerated than belonging. They exist on the fringes of the group. Let's call these subtypical. Although others may tolerate them, they are not emulated, and most others think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” They may be discussed, however, because even though they are ugly babies, they are “our ugly babies.”
2. Other members represent what is normal, or typical, for the group. They do not have extraordinary abilities and are not particularly charismatic. They are middle of the road, or in our bell-curve image, middle of the line.
3. On the side opposite the ugly babies are people who are supertypical within the group. They are the “beautiful people,” admired and emulated, and even obeyed in some cases. Depending on the size of the group, this might be one person or many people. These are the leaders, whether that's a formal or informal designation.

Cloistering to Limit Inputs to Self-Image

Think about this bell-curve model as it applies to your life, on a small scale that describes your family all the way up to a full-blown cultural model. We emulate the people on the right. The mainstream model in the American culture results in celebrity endorsement of products. But why does this work?

Humans are primates. That does not necessarily mean you came from monkeys, just that you are a different kind of monkey. It makes no difference where you stand in the evolution discussion; the fact that humans are primates is not open for debate. Regardless of your ethnicity, primary language, or culture, you share about 95 percent of your DNA with chimps.

You also share a few other attributes. Whether we like it or not, many of our most basic drives mirror those of our hairy cousins. Chimps are social creatures living in small colonies with a distinct government. The arrangement seems very similar to a tribal human government. There is a ruling class not typically “elected,” and the other members of the colony understand their place.

Chimps develop a rhythm to life that is based on deference. An alpha chimp is alpha in anything he chooses. Other chimps do not challenge his choice about which leaves will be good to nest in: If he is alpha, he can direct the group to nest in whatever leaves appeal to him. That primate behavior is just as prevalent in humans. Once someone proves herself more intelligent than you in accounting, she is likely going to get deference in other areas as well. It's analogous to Taylor Swift's popularity on Twitter: She can sing and write great songs about old boyfriends, so she's “earned” the deference of 82 million followers on Twitter; who cares what she thinks about shopping and politics?

Think you're above that? Have you ever deferred to an actor for pain relief advice? Or to a musician for guidance on which candidate should sit in the White House? There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that model, because we are not cloistered. We have access to information about the same issues from other sources. They are only preying on our drives from a distance—unless we choose not to access information from alternative sources.

This is the dark side of our exposure to alphas through media. Depending on our response to media stars and their messages, we can become cloistered.

One of the fastest growing branches of the American Psychology Association is Division 46, the Media Psychology Division, which is devoted to the impact of media on people. A 2006 article written by Zak Stambor for the American Psychological Association says that, with some media experiences, we get hooked as a means to unwind and escape. With others, we crave connection. We become oddly “connected” to celebrities and to people with whom we share some affinity, even though we are not likely to ever meet them.

To an increasing extent, these virtual connections are shaping our sense of place in the world. How we interpret information, our opinions of issues and candidates, who is behaving heroically and who is monstrous—media has an impact, and the more we let ourselves become media sponges, the more likely it is for us to retreat to cloisters of like-minded individuals. Media will “help” us find safe, comfortable places in a chaotic world. This is compounded belonging and a new virtual cloister.

Morphing Behavior Standards

When humans are cloistered, and there is no mainstream outside influence to serve as a reminder of what's normal, then normal begins to look more and more like what is in the mind of those people on the bell curve who exceed what's normal—the people we call supertypicals. Sometimes this group image is distorted by forced deference such as violence or threats of violence, but more often it is distorted by human nature.

When collective thought begins to move in the direction of what is normal for a supertypical person, he becomes even more of an authority. Wanting to be more like him, others in the group continually struggle to emulate the supertypical, whose behavior and tastes become the new standard. This action reflects the natural drive to differentiate the self from the group and assert one's own distinction. The supertypical rewards this behavior—unless the acolyte attempts to bypass the master, in which case the upstart may find himself smacked down a rung on the status ladder. This progression toward the group's standard is viewed as an accomplishment, and it leads directly to respect and a feeling of accomplishment.

This dynamic played out in ugly during the Iraq war; the abuse at Abu Ghraib was one of the most notorious. Nobody was around to watch as Charles Graner warped his team's sensibilities. Whatever he considered fair treatment of prisoners became normal for the group. A little-known fact is that all military police who guard prisoners are reservists. Why? We only need prison guards when we have a war. The by-product is that a group of schoolteachers, bank tellers, short-order cooks, and electricians may show up to guard prisoners. What if one of them is a penitentiary guard in his day job, as Graner was? Imagine the deference right out of the gate. Rank aside, he gains the role of informal leader.

The supertypical people can prey on the two fundamental drives—to belong and to differentiate—to get what they want. Many people are uncertain of where they belong in a group, or if they belong, when in fact they are squarely typical. This can come from a bad or misshapen self-image or simple insecurity that creates a distorted view regardless of input from the outside. The supertypical helps them to feel needed or wanted, and thereby creates a sense of community. The stable, well-adjusted leader uses this to create a harmonious team; the unstable or demented leader creates an ever-morphing reality that progressively separates adherents from society. This negative use of positive tools was a primary mechanism for Charles Manson.

In social media, a common practice is to have a pithy dialogue with “friends” and then cast off the “friends” who disagree with a certain point of view. In contrast, those who agree are rewarded with “likes” and posted videos that affirm their point of view. Used with acumen, social media platforms allow people to weaponize the platforms.

The people who barely cling to subtypical status within a group find other outlets to make themselves special. To differentiate, a person needs to belong. Because a person is not fully invested in his workplace group, for example, he finds belonging with another group and differentiates as much as he possibly can. Joe is a nobody at work, but outside the office, he turns into the trivia champion of the local bar or the best bowler at Victory Lanes. This differentiation may be much more important than anything at work—at least for now.

After reaching the pinnacle of success in an organization, people commonly look for peers somewhere else. Look around; how many successful people do you know who find pastimes to create a sense of belonging? In some cases, these people have differentiated themselves so much within the group that they are barely members, yet they stay where they are. They are so uncomfortable with leaving the small pond for fear of not being typical in a bigger pond that they stagnate. In the case of people such as the Heaven's Gate cult leader, Marshall Applewhite, the supertypical creates a new group: a place for the displaced to feel at home.

Putting the Dynamic to Work

You picked up this book to learn how to get others to do what you want, and what you know so far is that manipulating human behavior depends on understanding the human needs to belong and to differentiate.

Where do you fit on this continuum? Are you trying to belong? Or does the need to differentiate outweigh it? Maybe you're above that on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and your focus is self-actualization. In any case, your self-awareness will help you understand the dynamics of your own groups, and where the members sit on the bell curve. By analyzing the groups, you hone the analytical tools you need to examine groups of which you are not a member, as well as their members.

Our cited examples also helped you learn about how influence is peddled. If the aberrant mind of Jim Jones—a self-proclaimed religious leader who initiated a mass suicide—can convince others to do something horrendous with no master plan to guide the action, imagine how much simpler it should be for you to implement a plan for getting what you want.

Human Nature—the Trump Card

The Jim Jones example provides a perfect segue to another key group dynamic: fragmenting. It's a natural situation in which, even when a persuasive model is operating, the group splinters. The more complex the social dynamic, the tougher it is to make everyone understand where they belong. Some members become so distanced from the big fish that they create subgroups with their own super-typical members. (This happens in companies all the time because the CEO or division head is inaccessible to most of the workers.) Although we will never know exactly what happened with the Peoples Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana, we do know that the group fragmented. Allegations of abuse brought a member of the United States Congress to investigate, and the result was tragedy. If everyone in the Peoples Temple bought into Jones's thinking, then Congressman Leo Ryan's murder would have been prevented and 909 people would have died by their own hands—but they didn't. Many of them were also murdered for noncompliance or for acts that were overtly threatening to the cult.

Was it predictable? Fragmenting is always predictable. Whether you are a chimp or a human, politics creates fracture. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed this kind of fracturing in her years with chimps, too. Even in their relatively simple organizational structure, the chimps do not just fall into line and create an idyllic Kumbaya-style community with an alpha benevolently ruling until death. As in the case of chimp siblings Freud and Frodo, Freud ruled until he suffered from mange, and Frodo overthrew him. Frodo ruled harshly, so as soon as he had a weak moment, he had to hide from the community that got tired of his ways. Sheldon moved in with his own power base and supplanted Frodo.

Although humans may not be so overtly violent due to our larger and more evolved brains, we are proportionately more political, and our political games are just as dangerous. Some of the most savage politics in life revolve around a truly frustrated person who cannot achieve his true goals, and so he transfers all that energy to a surrogate goal. That could range from a benign hobby to serial criminal acts.

In order to apply the skills associated with getting people to do what you want, you have to be able to predict these fracture points and take advantage of them as well as know the dynamics of belonging and differentiating.

The Interrogation Link

Psychologically speaking, every person has a part of him or her that needs to be touched. She may have close friends and family who know a great deal about her, but they don't know everything. If you, a perfect stranger, come along and trigger that person's need to expose a secret part of herself, she will tell you things she's never told anyone before.

Engaging a person's trust through body language, questioning in a way that leads her down a path of your design, and application of certain psychological levers will motivate that individual to bond with you.

That's the positive side. You offer her an opportunity.

On the negative side, you can use all the same tools to engender a sense of helplessness, which is arguably an even more powerful emotion than trust or optimism.

As the American social philosopher Eric Hoffer (The True Believer, 1951) suggested, true believers take shape when they confront hopelessness and realize they have no option to improve their state unless they trust you (or in the case of religion, a pastor, rabbi, or other religious leader). The religious leader provides a model to which the fledgling believer cannot equal or compare, and then continues to pare options until the true believer emerges; in other words, the person who embraces that the only path to success is the way of the leader. The wider the path, the narrower the gate.

Interrogators know this approach to motivation well. It's the secret weapon.