The key ideas

The Like Switch

Jack Schafer, Marvin Karlins, 2015

A former FBI agent spent years recruiting spies and getting confessions, not through pressure but through friendship. Jack Schafer breaks liking down into four parts and shows the signals people use to decide whether you are a friend or a threat before a single word is spoken. You will learn how to win over strangers and how to make the people close to you want to keep coming back.

Who it is for

For anyone who finds it hard to connect with new people, and for anyone who wants to understand why some friendships happen on their own while others never happen at all.

Vladimir told me everything openly and honestly, not because he was forced to, but because he liked me and considered me his friend.

A newspaper against silence

An interrogation room. A man in handcuffs sits at a table. He entered the United States illegally to spy, and when he was arrested he was carrying classified documents about the country's defense. The author calls him Vladimir. At their first meeting, Vladimir swears he will never say a word to the agent, no matter what. The agent does not argue. He sits down across from him, opens a newspaper and reads. After a set amount of time, he folds the newspaper neatly and leaves without saying anything. This goes on day after day, week after week.

That agent is Jack Schafer. For twenty years he worked at the FBI, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a behavioral analyst. His job was to persuade people to spy against their own country, to track down foreign agents and to get them to confess. In 2015, together with Professor Marvin Karlins, he wrote a book about how the same techniques work in everyday life: at work, in friendship, in love.

Schafer's main idea sounds strange to anyone who believes in chemistry at first sight. For him, liking is not an accident. It has parts, and those parts can be named, which means you can use them on purpose. A person decides whether you are a friend or a threat long before the first words, and you can help them decide.

You will learn the four parts that friendship is built from, which signals without words draw people to you and which quietly push them away, and what to do so that people want to come back to you. And near the end, we will find out how Vladimir's silence ended.

Two students got there before the teacher

Toward the end of his career, Schafer taught young intelligence officers how to recruit spies. On the first day of class with a new group, he arrived half an hour early to set up the room. Two students he did not know were already sitting in the front row, looking at him with obvious impatience.

They explained why. Their friend Tim, a graduate of the previous course, had been bragging in a bar that Schafer's classes taught you how to meet women. His friends did not believe him and put him to the test. Tim was the one who won that bet in the club. Now the two of them had come to find out how he did it.

Schafer's first reaction was irritation: he trained intelligence officers, not seducers. His second reaction surprised even him. He realized that the techniques used to recruit a spy work for any meeting between two people. A salesperson looking for clients can use them, and so can a manager, a parent who wants a better relationship with their child, and anyone who is simply looking for friends or for love.

Schafer jokes that nobody reads FBI as the "Friendly Bureau of Investigation". Yet his work depended on exactly that: winning people over. Recruitment of a spy is long, patient work to get a wary stranger to trust you. After leaving the FBI, Schafer earned a doctorate in psychology, began teaching and turned his professional methods into rules for everyday life.

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About the author

Jack Schafer is a former FBI special agent who spent twenty years in counterintelligence as a behavioral analyst, and later earned a PhD in psychology and became a teacher. Marvin Karlins is a professor at the University of South Florida and the author of many books.

All books by this author: Jack Schafer, Marvin Karlins

Terms from the book

  • Intensity
  • personal space
  • Ego
  • Fight or flight
  • Vladimir: A foreign spy Schafer interrogated at the FBI. The author changed his name, along with his identifying details.
  • FBI: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, a US agency whose work includes counterintelligence, that is, finding other countries' spies.
  • Karlins: Marvin Karlins, an American psychologist and professor of management at the University of South Florida, co-author of the book.
  • Tim: A graduate of the course where Schafer taught people to recruit spies. His bet in a club gave Schafer the idea for the book.
  • Recruitment: Drawing a person into secret cooperation, for example passing classified information to an intelligence service.
  • Seagull: The code name of a foreign diplomat in Schafer's story, recruited by the FBI with the help of the friendship formula.
  • Charles: The FBI agent in the Seagull story who kept crossing the diplomat's path for months before speaking to him.
  • Friendship formula: Schafer's model, not a scientific law: friendship is built from proximity, frequency, duration and intensity.
  • Friend signals: Schafer's term: gestures and facial expressions, without words, that tell the brain a person is not dangerous.
  • Eyebrow flash: A quick movement in which the eyebrows rise and fall in a fraction of a second. According to Schafer, a sign of friendliness when people meet.
  • Carotid artery: A large artery in the neck that carries blood to the head.
  • Foe signals: Schafer's term: signals without words that the other person's brain reads as a threat, such as a long, hard stare.
  • Curiosity hook: A technique from the book: a detail that sparks another person's interest and prompts them to speak first.
  • Golden Rule of Friendship: Schafer's rule: if you want people to like you, make them feel good about themselves.
  • Empathic statement: A technique from the book: putting what the other person said or feels into your own words, so the conversation stays about them.

All terms

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