By Maryann Karinch

For those of us conducting interviews or having difficult conversations in the workplace, how do we get the information we need from people? How do we motivate them to talk and share details? Here are seven conversation motivators:

1.  Childlike curiosity. A good questioner is purposeful and provocative. The questions lead somewhere and they stimulate interest in the person being questioned. In terms of seeking the truth, therefore, we can view curiosity as a two-way street. You are driven to know something, but the person who is your source of that information will probably have questions rushing through his or her brain as well: “Why do you want to know?” “What else do you want to know?”

You can exploit the fact that your questions trigger curiosity in your source. You may be asking the questions, but those questions suggest you may know something that the other person wants to know, too. When people feel they have a gap in their knowledge, it’s like an itch that must be scratched. The more you can stimulate a person’s curiosity, the stronger the itch.

2.   Incentives. Human beings are more inclined to want immediate gratification rather than wait for an incentive that comes later, even if it’s better than the quick choice.

Studies involving brain scans indicate that decisions about the possibility of immediate reward activate parts of the brain associated with emotion. Consideration of a long-term reward option activates brain systems associated with reasoning. For a lot of people, the emotion-related parts of the brain win out over the reasoning-related parts of the brain.

An important thing to note about the first two motivators is that both often relate to satisfying a desire for something as soon as possible. Another important link between them is that one of the strongest incentives is sometimes providing information that satisfies the other person’s curiosity. This is the foundation of the quid pro quo, a Latin phrase meaning “something for something.” You tell a harmless secret of yours, and you might get a big secret in return.

3.   Emotional appeal. Think in terms of positive emotions and negative emotions and how you can use your awareness of them in others to get them to tell you the truth. Also think in terms of a desire for pleasure versus an aversion to punishment.

There’s a big reason why it may be easier to get an individual to cooperate if he or she is motivated by anger, disgust, hurt, or anything else in the family of negative emotions. People tend to spend more time and energy thinking about events that evoke strong negative emotions than strong positive ones.

On the positive side of the equation, love is thought by many experts to be the most powerful motivator of all. But not just any love—the kind of love that stimulates the same reward centers of the brain as cocaine is romantic love, not selfless love like your kindergarten teacher gave you. Romantic love is an addiction, and we all know what addicts will do to get a fix: anything. Sometimes “anything” means telling the truth.

4.   Boosting and deflating ego. You may be cynical and say that flattery from an auto salesman about your good taste in cars is supercilious junk, but this technique works. Flattery is a tactic that makes people more positive about and cooperative with the source of the compliments.

At the heart of this phenomenon is the simple fact that people enjoy feeling good about themselves. Our brains are fertile ground for compliments, and people who understand how and when to plant those compliments gain a psychological advantage over others.

Deflating ego and attacking a person’s sense of self-worth enables you to move that person into a vulnerable emotional state and make him or her more compliant. It’s often best used in conjunction with another technique that later makes an individual feel better. You use the desire to reconnect with you to get your information, and then you bring the person out of a self-esteem slump.

When deflating ego is done poorly, you could easily alienate the individual if you’ve misjudged how far to go with that person. And you might get pummeled by crossing the line from ego deflation to insult. Watch the body language of someone with whom you use a deflating-ego technique. If you see the person close up—arms folded in front as though the person is in a hug, slight slump of shoulders, head down—you know you’ve succeeded in undermining the person’s sense of self-worth. At that point, give the person an immediate path to reconnect by prompting him or her to provide information.

5.   Easing fears. Mitigating or removing the fear of someone whom you want to confide in you is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal of conversation motivators. There are many possible situations at a workplace, for example, where someone’s competence or honesty comes into question, and the prospect of being fired makes that person close up and not want to divulge anything out of fear.

Offer protection—emotional, psychological, and, if necessary, physical—to help boost the person’s feeling of security and trust in you, and then carry on with the conversation.

6.   Certainty and uncertainty. Projecting certainty about what you know can get another person to talk openly. This is the value of knowing the person with whom you are speaking. You can go into a conversation with a level of detail on at least a few issues that suggest you know more about the person than you do.

A person feels a little off balance and out of control in the face of uncertainty. If your source is in that state of mild confusion—not completely disoriented, but a little off balance—the information you’re after may leak out because the person has less control over what he or she says.

7.   Silence. Japanese call it shiin. It’s that awkward silence in a conversation that causes people to glance at their laptops, shift their posture, and look at the door as though they hope someone will enter the room and end the tension. Finally, someone can’t tolerate it any longer and says something.

Creating silence in the modern world is intentional. Even in a room full of people experiencing shiin, anyone has the option of speaking up, even if it’s just to beg, “Somebody please say something!” For many people, if not most, silence is unsettling, and someone will say something; it may even contain some substance.