Shut Your Eyes Tight Read Online Free PDF Page B

genius detective. Like God.”
    “Big emotional benefit,” said Gurney. “Could warp a man’s vision.”
    “Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Big time.”
    Gurney saw a hand go up in the back of the room, a brown-faced man with short, wavy hair who hadn’t yet spoken. “Excuse me, sir, I’m confused. There’s an interrogation-techniques seminar here in this building and an undercover seminar. Two separate seminars, right? I signed up for undercover. Am I in the right place? This, what I’m hearing, it’s all about interrogation.”
    “You’re in the right place,” said Gurney. “We’re here to talk about undercover, but there’s a link between the two activities. If you understand how an interrogator can fool himself because of what he wants to believe, you can use the same principle to get the target of your undercover operation to believe in you. It’s all about maneuvering the target into ‘discovering’ the facts about you that you want him to believe. It’s about giving him a powerful motive to swallow your bullshit. It’s about making him
want
to believe you—just like the guy in the movie
wants
to believe the confession. There’s tremendous believability to facts a person thinks he’s discovered. When your target believes that he knows things about you
that you didn’t
want him to know
, those things will seem doubly true to him. When he thinks he’s penetrated below your surface layer, what he uncovers in that deeper layer he’ll see as the
real
truth. That’s what I call the eureka fallacy. It’s that peculiar trick of the mind that gives total credibility to what you think you’ve discovered on your own.”
    “The
what
fallacy?” The question came from multiple directions.
    “The
eureka
fallacy. It’s a Greek word roughly translated as ‘I found it’ or, in the context in which I’m using it, ‘I’ve discovered the truth.’ The point is …” Gurney slowed down to emphasize his next statement. “
The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth
. So what I’m saying is this: Let your target think he’s discovering something about you. Then he’ll feel that he really knows you. That’s the place at which you will have established Trust. You will have established Trust, with a capital
T
, the trust that makes everything else possible. We’re going to spend the rest of the day showing you how to make that happen—how to make the thing you want your target to believe about you the very thing he thinks he’s discovering on his own. But right now let’s take a break.”
    Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break. Now, for virtually everyone, it meant a cell-phoning or texting break. As if to illustrate the thought, most of the officers getting to their feet and heading for the door were reaching for their BlackBerrys.
    Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.
    The female Hispanic officer waited for the tide of cell phoners to pass, then approached Gurney as he was removing the videotape from the machine. Her hair was thick and framed her face in a mass of soft, kinky curls. Her full figure was packed into a pair of tight black jeans and a tight gray sweater with a swooping neckline. Her lips glistened. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said with a serious-student frown. “That was really good.”
    “The tape, you mean?”
    “No, I mean you. I mean … what I mean is”—she was incongruously blushing under her serious demeanor—“your whole presentation, your explanation of why people believe things, why they believe some things more strongly, all of that. Like that
eureka fallacy
thing—that really made me think. The whole presentation