“When people think about CIA and they think about foreign missions and they think about secret operations, they always think about the word manipulation. What CIA taught me is that manipulation is one side of a coin, and on the other side of the coin is the word motivation, but they are still the same coin,” explains Andrew Bustamante, former CIA agent.

Generally, we think people who manipulate us are bad guys, but people who motivate us are heroes, but the truth is far more complex, argues Bustamante. “The skills that go into both motivation and manipulation are almost the same skills. The same level of persuasion, the same level of influence, the same level of charisma and dynamic creative thinking drives us to both be manipulated and be motivated.”

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: When people think about CIA and they think about foreign missions and they think about secret operations, they always think about the word manipulation. What CIA taught me is that manipulation is one side of a coin, and on the other side of the coin is the word motivation, but they are still the same coin. But somehow we think people who manipulate us are bad guys, but people who motivate us are heroes. The truth is that the skills that go into both motivation and manipulation are almost the same skills. The same level of persuasion, the same level of influence, the same level of charisma and dynamic creative thinking drives us to both be manipulated and be motivated.

- [Narrator] The psychology of spycraft.

- It's a difficult truth to accept, that human nature is inherently selfish. We have a survival instinct that puts ourselves above all other creatures. It's why when you're on an airplane, you're instructed to put your own mask on before you put the mask on the child sitting next to you, and it's also why you accept that instruction from the airline every time you hear it. Because we know we have a level of required self-preservation that has to come first. So CIA understands that sometimes you need to lean more into motivating someone to take a certain action. Other times you have to manipulate them to take a certain action, but the thing that you cannot compromise on is that you are pursuing a very specific outcome. Whether you have to motivate or manipulate to achieve that outcome, your loyalty first has to be to that outcome, and if something about your ideology or your religious beliefs or your personal convictions make you feel like you don't deserve that outcome, there's nothing that CIA or any other skill can help you with because you have to be willing to accept the truth of survival instinct and the imperative of individual success as it exists in us as human beings. One of the first things that new recruits are taught how to do is actually talk less and listen more. Because we're taught that there's an element of conversation that's often missed in society, and that element is understanding how to control a conversation. Oftentimes, we think that you control a conversation by being the person who talks the most, when in fact you control a conversation by being the person who asks the questions, because questions direct the topic of conversation. Questions prime the other person to answer whatever it is that you have proposed. Questions are an opportunity for you to collect much more information than just the question that you're asking. And when it comes to being able to quickly assess what someone believes, what they feel, what they think, how they will behave in the future, questions are an incredible tool because you get insight into what is happening behind a person's external demeanor. Because you get a chance to see what people will say and how they will behave when they're distracted processing an answer to your question. That is a more accurate representation of who that person is than when that person is talking on their own, making up their own topics, possibly even repeating something they've repeated a thousand times. One of the most powerful tools for assessment that CIA teaches us early on in our training is a method that we know as the RICE method and RICE, R-I-C-E, is actually an acronym that stands for four other words, reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. The RICE method will show you what actually motivates or drives a person to take the actions that they take. Someone who's driven by reward is somebody who will take action based on the reward that they're given. Maybe that reward is money. Maybe that reward is an opportunity. Maybe that reward is nothing more than a pat on the back or a high five. Ideology means people take actions because of what they believe in. Maybe it's what they were taught as a child. Maybe it's what they believe in their religion. Maybe it's what they believe is right of humanity, but they make decisions based off of an ideology that was taught to them at some point in their life. C stands for coercion. Coercion is all the negative things in your life. This is when you make a decision because you're ashamed or when you make a decision because you're scared or when you make a decision because you're afraid or you make a decision because you're embarrassed. All of these tie back to a core motivation that has to do with coercion, especially if somebody else is making you feel guilty, making you feel scared or making you feel humiliated. E, the fourth motivator, is ego, and ego is the most often mistaken of the four motivators because people mistake the word ego with egotistical. Egotistical means that you believe you are the most important thing in the world, where ego is simply the way you choose to look for the rest of the world. Everybody has an ego. Even Mother Teresa had an ego. She wanted to appear sacrificing, she wanted to appear humble, she wanted to appear noble. Those are all elements of ego. Ego is not good or bad even though egotistical is a vulnerability. When you understand the RICE method and you understand that all people break down into these four different types of motivators when you assess them and talk to them using open-ended questions, close-ended questions, normal dialogue, even if you just sit back and listen to them while they talk to another group of people, you will quickly start to see the indicators of whether they are reward-motivated, ideology-motivated, ego-motivated, or if they can be motivated through coercion. One of the fundamental tools that CIA gives us when we go through our training for assessing human behavior is a tool called sense-making. And sense-making is actually something that goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, because during the early years of the Vietnam War, soldiers were discovering that they could capture Vietnamese or Vietcong soldiers, but they could never get those soldiers to disclose secrets. They were so dedicated, so loyal to the cause that they would rather die than share any intelligence at all. So the US army turned to a team of psychologists to try to understand what was happening in the brains of these enemy combatants that was making them so loyal to their cause. And as a result of that research, the idea of sense-making was born. Sense-making is essentially the way that all human beings process through making sense of some situation, or more specifically, making sense of meeting a new person. And sense-making has three different phases. Phase one is called avoidance. Phase two is called competition, and phase three is called compliance. So if you imagine a cup in front of you or a bottle in front of you, as you pour energy and effort into that bottle, it starts to fill up from the bottom to the top. That's exactly how sense-making works. You have to invest through a period of avoidance, through a period of competition, before you get to a place where you have compliance from your target. Avoidance really is exactly what it sounds like. It means that anytime you meet a new person or I meet a new person, our default instinct is to avoid them. When you meet somebody new in an elevator, when you talk to somebody new on the street, when somebody knocks on your door, sometimes it's even when it's somebody you know, when you see that your mother-in-law is calling on the phone, your instinct is to avoid. That is a completely natural human instinct. It's part of our survival instinct that's protecting us from some sort of discomfort. If you have the wherewithal to push through the avoidance phase, the next phase is called competition. When I talk about competition, I don't want you to think about two competing teams, two football teams, two soccer teams, two hockey teams where one person has to win and one person has to lose. Instead, think of competition more like you think of a scrimmage, when the A team plays the B team, but you both belong to the same team. When the varsity team plays the junior varsity team, but you both play for the same team. Competition is actually an investment into the relationship that you were previously trying to avoid. So competition doesn't have to look like somebody wins and somebody loses. Instead, it looks like two people are exchanging ideas, exchanging conversation, exchanging or even debating on certain topics. But the activity of having those hard conversations is in and of itself a demonstration of the investment in the relationship. It's why anybody has ever had makeup sex, that's why the makeup sex happened because you argued and you debated and you've invested so much into the relationship that the only natural next step was to celebrate the relationship. The final step in sense-making is called compliance. Compliance happens only after avoidance is overcome and competition is demonstrated. Then you reach a point where you can literally ask someone to take a certain action and they will. Whether you're asking them for a secret, whether you're asking them for a dollar, whether you're asking them to marry you, you have a certain expectation of compliance because you have worked through all the previous phases of sense-making. Even as I explain this to you now, you can see sense-making in every aspect of your life. You can see it with your children, you can see it with your friends, you can see it in the workplace, you can see it with your clients. The people who understand sense-making have an opportunity to shortcut the process, to get to compliance faster, where all the people out there who don't understand sense-making are going to be stuck missing opportunities. Maybe they miss opportunities because during that avoidance phase they just give up. Or during the competition phase, they don't realize it's an investment in the relationship. Either way, they never get a chance to capitalize on the compliance that comes only after the other two steps are achieved. One thing that people often ask about is whether or not rapport is an important tool for sense-making, and my answer is both yes and no because it ties back to the fact that most people don't understand what rapport really is. Many people think rapport is just having somebody who thinks well of you or having a good positive relationship or even having friendly banter. The truth is rapport is a very practical tool. In fact, we at CIA call it social capital because rapport is not really about having a positive relationship. It's about having a currency that denotes leverage in a relationship. That's much more like capital than it is like good faith or goodwill. You're being nice today so that you can get what you want tomorrow. You're being assertive today because you wanna set a tone for when you call in a favor later on. Rapport is important, yes, but rapport doesn't mean that it's all goodwill. Rapport actually means that you're building a sense of leverage. You're building an actual measurable currency, a social capital that you can use to call in leverage in the future to get what you want. We previously talked about how we are all still creatures based on our core wiring of survival instinct. What people don't realize is that survival instinct isn't actually an instinct that makes us put more effort into something. It's actually an instinct that makes us conserve our effort. In a way of speaking, we are actually very lazy creatures. We wanna find a way to survive with the least amount of effort. So understanding that we are actually always trying to keep energy in reserve, we start to understand why the path of least resistance is so attractive, why so many people quit early. Why it is that avoidance and sense-making is where so many people bow out and stop trying. It also helps you understand why the people of success are so successful, because even though they know they could have saved energy, even though they know they could have played it safe, they pushed harder anyways. They pushed through that survival instinct that tried to convince them to quit early when the avoidance was easy, when the competition got difficult, they pushed through that to achieve a place where they have the power and the authority and the compliance of the people around them. Everything we've just talked about is really just a series of psychological tools and tools that you can use to achieve very specific deliberate outcomes that benefit you. But it's important to understand, just like the tools that exist in your garage or in your basement or in your closet, tools are ambivalent to the outcome. They're just a tool along the way. So whether you're screwing in a screw with a screwdriver or hammering a nail with a hammer, the truth is that the screwdriver and the hammer are just tools. They can equally be used to do terrible things to people just like they can be used to do helpful things for people. RICE and sense-making are exactly the same thing. You can use them as tools to achieve very positive outcomes that benefit you and benefit the world around you, or you can abuse them and use them to hurt people. But the important thing to understand is that whether you use the tool for good or for evil, there are other people in the world who know and have the same tool and they can use that tool on you. And oftentimes, the best way to identify someone who you can trust is by understanding whether or not they're showing behaviors that are trustworthy, or if they're using good tools for bad reasons.