Every influence attempt is an information leak

There is a peculiar mistake people make when trying to influence you: they focus entirely on what they want you to see.

Be it the credential, the threat, the compliment, the urgency or the carefully selected piece of information.

What they fail to realise is that while they are trying to modify your perception of them, they are simultaneously giving you information... about themselves.

Here, people like me become slightly inconvenient.

You cannot spend years working with human sources, deception, influence and competing versions of reality without developing a reflexive relationship with human interaction.

While I listen to what someone is saying, part of my attention inevitably moves to the interaction itself.

Why this argument? Why now? Why this particular piece of information? Why mention that person? Why suddenly introduce urgency? Why assume that would matter to me?

The fact that I speak openly about these subjects online brings an interesting assortment of people into my orbit.

Some I work with. Some become friends or collaborators. Some want information. Some want access. Others want to recruit me, associate me with their organisation, bring me into their network, or simply move me closer to whatever outcome they have in mind.

Most of this is normal. Human relationships are full of influence. There is nothing inherently sinister about wanting someone to join you, trust you, work with you or change their mind.

But recently, in several completely unrelated situations, I noticed something that amused me.

Someone would try to influence me using a particular lever. And the lever itself would become more interesting to me than whatever they were trying to obtain.

The funniest instances are when this comes from people who present themselves as experts in intelligence, influence, "cognitive warfare", psychological profiling or adjacent fields.

Because expertise in the vocabulary of influence does not necessarily translate into psychological finesse, to say the least.

So you find yourself watching someone deploy status against a person who is... indifferent to status. Or scarcity against someone who is comfortable walking away. Or institutional access against someone who deliberately built her career outside institutions. Or belonging against someone comfortable not belonging.

They believe they are profiling you.

But the method they selected to influence you has started profiling them. That is the part of influence we discuss surprisingly little.

Every influence attempt is also an information leak.

In what follows, I want to look at influence as a two-way information exchange: first at the message, then at the choice of leverage behind it; at what that choice reveals about someone's model of you and where projection enters when that model is incomplete; then at behavioral anomalies, unnecessary lies and contradictions.

My argument is simple:

If you only analyse what people tell you, you are leaving information on the table.

The interaction itself is the intelligence.

• Every influence attempt contains two messages
• Where their model of you ends, projection begins
• The unnecessary lie
• Contradictions should not be resolved prematurely
• A survival guide for operating in the grey (15 things you should NEVER do with a Grey Zone Operator)

Every influence attempt contains two messages

Every attempt to influence another human being contains, at minimum, two streams of information:

1) The obvious one: the message itself
2) The less obvious: the choice of mechanism used to deliver the message.

Let's take someone repeatedly emphasising their proximity to powerful people.

When most people would rightfully ask "is this person actually influential?", I tend to wonder: "why do they believe that proximity to power is important for me to know?".

Those are very different questions.

Perhaps the person genuinely has influence. Perhaps they are compensating for having very little. Perhaps they operate in an environment where status determines access and assume yours works the same way. Perhaps they think they have identified status sensitivity in you. Or perhaps status is the lever that would work... on them?

You don't know yet.

A behavior is not a definitive answer. It is more like a hypothesis generator from which you can start working on.

The same applies to threats.

If someone threatens to exclude you from a network, remove access, damage your reputation or close a professional door, don't only evaluate whether the threat is credible.

Look at the leverage they selected. They have just told you something about their model of you. They believe you need what they think they control.

Now you have useful questions to work with!

Why do they believe that? What previous behavior of yours produced that assessment? Is this leverage specific to you, or do they use it habitually?What does their choice of leverage reveal about the environment in which they themselves operate?

This is where influence becomes profiling.

Projection is the amateur manipulator's weakness

Sophisticated influence requires modelling another mind.

You identify what the other person values, fears, protects, desires and cannot afford to lose. Then you adapt, accordingly.

But humans are imperfect profilers.