I was recently sent on a field trip. If you have read my last blog post, you know that I was enrolled in Randy Marcoz’s Intelligent Communication course. Part of that course is learning how to elicit information from a target without their knowledge of your motives.

So for my field trip, I was told to go to a store and elicit personal information of a sensitive category from someone, something that could be used to log into an account or access medical records. I built a plan, gathered my tools, and went on a journey to the land of elicitation.

Elicitation is not an equation however; you cannot use the same method each time and a certain method won’t always garner the same result. The situation is fluid and as such you need to be able to adapt and switch from method to method, tweaking your approach to fit each target uniquely. To get the information you want, Randy outlines some steps that vastly improve your chances of a successful elicitation.

Suspend Your Ego 

Putting aside your ego means to put aside how highly you think of yourself. When interacting with the target you don’t have to be smarter, prettier, or more successful than them. Part of a successful elicitation is making the target feel good about themselves and the interaction once you walk away. Trying to constantly one up them with your knowledge or accomplishments will only serve to distance you from your goal.

Build Rapport

Rapport leads to influence and trust which can make or break an elicitation attempt. Find common ground, laugh at their jokes, use their name in conversation, mirror their body language and speech pattern, defer to them as being the expert, and overall make them feel good about themselves. Sometimes you need to elicit information from someone who doesn’t have the most glamorous job or might feel under appreciated. Supply them the recognition they want and it will thrust you down the path to rapport.

Don’t Ask Questions

During the practical applications we did in class, this was my biggest road block. When you ask a question you have two levels of response: the primary response, which is the answer to your question, and the secondary response, which is the person thinking “Why are they asking me this?”

This secondary response is what we want to avoid when eliciting information. If the target stops to think “why,” then they might come to the conclusion that we desperately want to avoid, that they are being elicited for sensitive information. Once they come to this conclusion their shields go up and more than likely we just failed our objective.

“Yeah, but the moral of the story is what’s your Social Security Number?”

Provocative Statement

Just like it sounds, say something that will garner a response. Imagine a simple situation where you want to find out if your target has any children. After building some rapport you can say something like “Man, my wife just gave birth to our second child and I’m exhausted trying to get everything ready in the house. It’s not as fun the second go around.” You will probably get one of three responses:

1. “Yeah, I get it. I have 3 myself. Sleep is for the weak right?”
2. “I bet. I don’t have any myself but I do know they’re a handful.”
3. “uh-huh.” Something non committal like this could mean that your target is onto you or just isn’t comfortable with the statement. Change your approach and loop back around.

The provocative statement is one of the best ways to pull out information without triggering the secondary response. Just make sure that if you say you have children, you better “know” their age, names, and sports they play.

“How old is your child?”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      -“That’s classified.”

The Hour Glass

This is a method used during elicitation to further cover what your objective was and leave the target with a positive view of the interaction. We tend to remember the beginning and end of an interaction through the Primacy and Recency effects. We remember the beginning and the end of a conversation. Randy describes this as an hour glass. Start you interaction with fluff and rapport building, narrow down to the information you want, and then broaden the conversation back up away from the desired information. This leaves your target less likely to come to the conclusion after the fact that you were eliciting information.

My After Action Report

For my field trip I had the luxury of picking my target. I chose an employee in a video game store and my goal was to get sensitive information. I suspended my ego and referred to him as the expert on all things video games, built rapport by finding common ground with games we both liked, didn’t ask any questions pertaining to the info I wanted, used a provocative statement to elicit a desired behavior from him, and then closed with the hour glass method. Within five minutes of talking to my target I was holding his driver’s license in my hand with his birth date, driver’s license number, and address.

I have no plans to do anything with this information other than to get a good grade for my field trip; however, others may have a more nefarious purpose besides practice for a class. Understand these methods and know that they can be used on you too. No one is immune to elicitation. Some are harder than others but no one is immune. Remember, as Randy always says “be swift to hear, slow to speak.”