When you are able to maintain emotionaldetachment embracing your inner Spock, if you will you can trade the emotional impulses of others in a contrarian strategy.
He gives children ritual pats on the cheek, but reveals his emotionaldetachment during a 1938 Munich "celebration for dead comrades" when, confronted by a girl convulsed with grief presumably for her dead father he administers a pat that amounts to the kind of whack one would give a playful dog.