Summary

The CIA's tactics for building trust and friendship, which involve understanding a person's background, stripping away their resources to reveal their true self, and earning trust through listening, can be applied to everyday relationship-building.

Abstract

The article discusses how CIA strategies for gaining the trust of targets can be adapted to improve personal relationships. It emphasizes the importance of understanding a person's background and distinguishing between their public, private, and secret lives. The CIA's approach to friendship involves depleting a person's resources to uncover their genuine personality and fostering trust by encouraging them to share their innermost thoughts and feelings. The process mirrors the dynamics of coaching and therapy, where trust is built through the disclosure of personal insecurities. The article also touches on the role of social media in creating a sense of closeness and trust by revealing aspects of a person's private and secret lives. Ultimately, the CIA's method for earning trust involves listening more and talking less, allowing others to feel special and valued, which is key to forming deep and lasting friendships.

Opinions

The CIA's method of building trust is seen as a distilled version of natural human friendship development.
The concept of the "three faces" or "three lives" suggests that everyone has public, private, and secret aspects to their lives, with the latter being the most truthful.
The article draws parallels between the CIA's tactics and the practices of coaches and therapists in terms of gaining clients' trust by accessing their private and secret lives.
It is suggested that people's true personalities emerge when their resources (time, energy, money) are depleted, and understanding this is crucial for forming genuine connections.
Trust is built not by dominating the conversation but by creating space for others to share, showing genuine interest, and listening actively.
The process of making friends, as outlined by the CIA, is not inherently manipulative but rather a structured approach to fostering mutual affection and understanding.

These CIA Tactics Will Make You A Better Friend

Learn about human psychology from the CIA

How on Earth do you convince a total stranger to trust you? That becomes even harder when you’re an undercover spy, targeting foreign government officials who expect to be targeted due to the nature of their job.

*CIA enters the chat*

How spies befriend the target

The process usually takes months but it boils down to:

Understanding the person’s background (more on that here)
Stripping the person’s resources to get to the real Self
Earning trust

If you think about it, that’s how we forge friendships anyway, but the CIA distilled this process into actionable steps.

The real self

Separately from the CIA stuff, I recently learned the Japanese proverb about the 3 faces. The first face people show to the world, the second one to friends and family and the third we never show to anyone yet it’s the truest reflection of who we truly are.

It seems like the CIA took this idea on and created their version, The Three Lives. According to their theory, nobody is who they appear to be, everyone has 3 lives:

Public life (how we want to appear to others).
Private life (what your closest confidants know about you like your wife knows your feet smell).
Secret life (often, you don’t share with anyone, thoughts that live in a dark part of your psyche you’re afraid to tell to others for fear of rejection/judgement).

For a spy, the objective is to get into someone’s private life otherwise you can never get into their secret life (that’s where the intel is). Once you’re in private life — become one of the few people to know their secret life. That makes the person trust you the most.

I found a lot of parallels to coaching and therapy writing this. People disclose the most insecure, shameful and dark things about themselves (aka the real Self) hoping you can help them.

The more the person shares with you, the more they trust you.

Also, that’s how social media works. People we follow reveal their private lives and create the idea that we’re in their private and secret lives, making us feel closer and trust them and ultimately buy from them. Everything is orchestrated perfectly.

Real self and resources

Think about when you approach a new person — you don’t think that’s what they’re actually like, do you? When we approach someone, we always deal with someone’s public life persona.

Although the CIA uses the Myers-Briggs personality test as an indicator of what the person is like, they also have a core personality theory.

In our public life, we present ourselves as one personality type but in our secret life, we are a bit (or quite) different.

Time, energy, and money are the only resources we humans have.

When you meet someone you need to understand what their resources are like. For example, people are more energetic and focused in the morning than in the evening. Or someone with an average income and a family of 5 will most likely have their financial resources drained.

Interestingly, the more resources are depleted, the closer you are to someone’s real personality.

As Morgan Housel puts it:

“You only know someone well if you can correctly predict how they will react in stressful situations.”

The CIA also thinks so. Getting to know someone and gaining trust, means spending time with the person when their resources are drained.

This relates to friendships too. What’s the difference between an acquaintance and a friend?

An acquaintance is someone whose private/secret life I’m not a part of. With friends it’s different — I know what they’re like when they’re stripped of resources and I love them anyway.

How to earn trust

People don’t trust you when you talk more, they trust you when you talk less.

When we hear other people talk about themselves, we unconsciously start comparing and start feeling bad about our lives.

Most people talk to share something about themselves, so when someone asks us questions and shows interest, we feel special. We like and start trusting the person.

Experiment with this: when you meet someone new, create space for them to share. Don’t interrupt, tell them how you’ve experienced something similar or that you get it. Ask questions, be genuinely interested and stay quiet. People will tell you the most amazing things.

I stumbled upon this accidentally a while ago and it works like magic. People LOVE talking about themselves. Upon leaving, the very last person I knew for a week, told me that I now know about them as much as their best friend they’ve had since childhood.

Making friends

Wikipedia describes friendship as:

A relationship between people who have a mutual affection for each other.

How do you create mutual affection then? The CIA boiled down the process to:

understanding the masks we present to the world
spending time with someone when they’re down
listening more than talking

Although this could sound manipulative and sanitized, that’s the process of forging friendships if you think about it. The more you know about the person, the closer they feel to you.

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