A Can of Peas, an FBI Agent and the Limits of the “Friendship Formula”

For months, an FBI agent appears along a foreign diplomat’s route to the grocery store. He does not approach or start a conversation, gradually adding eye contact and gestures of recognition. Eventually, at the peas shelf, he takes a can too and introduces himself. According to Jack Schafer’s account, the contact ultimately leads to the diplomat cooperating with the FBI.

In Schafer and Marvin Karlins’s book about winning people over, this is Operation Seagull, an illustration of the “friendship formula.” It also exposes the central question about transferring the method to everyday life: successful recruitment and mutual friendship have different measures of success.

What stands behind the plus signs?

The authors write friendship as the sum of proximity, frequency, duration and intensity. Proximity means distance and regular appearance in someone’s field of view; frequency means the number of contacts; duration, the time spent in each contact; and intensity, meeting another person’s needs through interaction.

This is a way to break a situation into components. We might discover that two people rarely meet, barely talk, or spend substantial time together without getting anything important from it. The first chapter gives precisely such a marital example: husband and wife sit at home watching television, with proximity, frequency and duration, but no emotional engagement in their interaction. The number of shared hours does not solve the problem of contact quality.

The notation does not, however, tell us how to measure friendship or calculate the probability that a particular person will like us. It is more useful as a set of questions than as a calculator. The authors themselves describe the formula as reflecting an ordinary way relationships develop, not as magic.

Safety is not simply another term in the sum

Immediately after explaining proximity, the book introduces an important limit. If another person’s presence feels excessively intrusive and threatening, the person tries to avoid further closeness. “Appear more often” therefore has no independent meaning without asking how that presence is received.

In the Seagull account, distance and a slow pace are part of the plan. That does not mean readers should start following someone else’s route to the shop. Even if the story illustrates the authors’ framework well, it establishes no right to arrange an unwanted presence in another person’s life.

This is the boundary between an opportunity to get acquainted and a demand for an outcome. A greeting can be offered; someone else’s interest cannot be assigned. If a person does not want further contact, their refusal is not a technical fault to fix by increasing the frequency of encounters.

Recruitment does not test reciprocity

The diplomat story has another condition easily lost behind the memorable can of peas. In Schafer’s account, the service had already gathered information about his career dissatisfaction and worries about his future pension. The acquaintance developed in the context of a specific offer and anticipated benefit, not friendly gestures alone.

The story consequently cannot yield a universal recipe: repeat the steps and acquire a friend. It is an author’s case, not a comparative study of all successful and unsuccessful introductions. It illustrates an influence method, but does not by itself establish how that method will work for someone with different needs and the right not to enter a relationship at all.

The formula’s practical value is better kept modest. If, for instance, someone lacks acquaintances after moving, they can choose a shared voluntary activity with time to talk and opportunities to meet again. That creates possibilities. Whether reciprocity develops is a separate question answered by both people, not by the formula’s author.

A Ukrainian reader does not need this example packaged as a promise to make friends quickly. Shared activity, regularity and time can be arranged. Someone else’s affection is not a debt owed for properly completing the exercise.

Source

Jack Schafer and Marvin Karlins, the Ukrainian edition of The Like Switch, Chapter 1, «Формула дружби» (The Friendship Formula), read in full. Operation Seagull is presented as the author’s account, not independently established facts about an intelligence operation. This reading does not validate every neuropsychological explanation, claim about nonverbal signals or subsequent chapter. English formulations render the consulted Ukrainian translation; the English original has not been separately checked for this article.