Rapport

I do not intend to make this blog just a recounting of what we cover in our courses and course books; rather, I want it to be an extension, to discuss and explore new ideas and research.

One topic I do want to discuss at some length, and which is central to our methodology, is rapport. I want to talk about it because as prevalent as the concept of rapport is, when I see interviews go off the rails it is most often because of a misunderstanding of rapport and a failure to attend correctly to rapport.  

Before I left the  Bureau I was engaged in something of a negotiation and something of a fight with the FBI Academy over revising their Interview & Interrogation (I&I) curriculum, trying to move from a coercive and accusatorial technique to a rapport-based, information gathering approach. We had some success, but one of the hardest things for them to let go of was the idea of rapport being a 15-minute thing that happens at the beginning of an interview. They actually timed it and if your small talk did not last the 15 minutes, points off.

Think about it, you spend 15 minutes talking to a complete stranger about football, the weather, or whatever seems a point of potential mutual interest and then, later, you expect that to create trust sufficient for them to confess to you what they’ve done or to provide information you need and that they really may not want to share.

“Remember when we were both really pleased about the sunshine? Now can you tell me about murdering your partner?” Life does not work that way and rapport certainly does not work that way. Rapport is not small talk; rapport is something much bigger, and deeper, that runs through the entire interview. In a sense, you could say it is the “big talk” rather than the “small talk”.

While we were developing our I&I curriculum at the HIG, the thing that annoyed me the most was the misperception that rapport was just about being “nice”. At one point during a presentation where I was being challenged by an Army interrogator who persisted in believing I was saying “just be nice”, I finally had had enough and said “rapport is not about being nice, but it is about not being a dick.”

Unfortunately, when I said that, the Director of the HIG happened to be in the room and felt I needed official counseling. It was worth it, as the phrase stuck as an unofficial motto and there is a reason it did. We can be very direct, frank, and honest with some people, while not being soft or overly nice, and we can still develop rapport. Other people and other situations may need us to be nice. Rapport is complex and involves the interviewer adapting to the needs of the interviewee at multiple levels…and that may not always mean simply being friendly.

Sometimes we can develop rapport naturally with someone based on our intuition or because our personality clicks with what they need, but often in important interactions we find ourselves struggling, and rapport not happening, and we are not sure why. Fortunately, there is a lot of great research out there that can guide us to being much more intentional in how we develop rapport with even the most difficult and reluctant interviewees.

My friends and colleagues Professors Laurence and Emily Alison have led the way with much of this work, and while what we do at Pyxis draws on numerous strands of research, their efforts play a central role in our approach. They recently published a fantastically readable and insightful book on their research, Rapport: The Four Ways to Read People, and I highly recommend you check it out. It’s a great introduction to the fascinating and complex world of rapport.