MANIPULATION
This book explores the theory of manipulation by breaking down
manipulation into its component parts, forming useful, objective definitions
and offering practical advice for manipulating others.
The first part of the book is primarily concerned with introducing ideas and
explaining them, in order to form a grounding for the practical sections of
the book later on. It is important to remember that much of the information
is general, because effective manipulation requires actions which are
situation specific. Rather than telling you what to do, this book will give
you the ability to form effective manipulation strategies, whatever your
goals and situation.
Examples are included to provide context to some of the general advice in
the book, illustrating how to apply the knowledge in a practical sense.
In addition, the book covers areas relevant to forming and executing
effective manipulation strategies, including analysis, cold reading and body
language. The book does not define manipulation as something inherently
bad, despite its negative connotations. Ethical issues surrounding
manipulation are addressed in a dedicated chapter.
After reading the book, you can expect to have greater insight into your
own actions and the actions of others. You will have a strong grounding in
the mechanics of manipulation, allowing you to make your own decisions
about manipulating others, and recognize when others are manipulating
you.
Unlike many charlatans, who claim to have shortcuts to recognize when
people are lying, and make others bend to your every command, this book
is honest about its limitations and recommends caution where it is sensible.
What Is Manipulation?
It of primary importance to establish a clear definition of manipulation for
the purposes of this book. Without understanding exactly what constitutes
manipulation, there will be a great deal of difficulty in separating instances
of manipulation and other forms of influence.
While you probably have your own idea of what counts as manipulation, it
is important that you adopt the book's definition, in order to make sense of
the practical advice in later chapters.
Basic Ideas
In a broad sense, manipulation is the effort to affect the behavior or
perception of others. Most definitions extend that to include "via the use of
abusive, deceptive or otherwise exploitative means" or something similar,
as a means of differentiating between manipulation and other influencing
behaviors, such as persuasion.
That raises even more questions, such as what constitutes "exploitative".
Deception is relatively easy to define as a willful concealment or alteration
of the truth. But does deception really preclude persuasion?
At a job interview, you probably won't mention the times you came in late
to work at your previous job due to hangovers; is that manipulation? You
could argue that anyone hiring for a job is already operating on the
understanding that people are likely to highlight their positive traits, and
draw attention away from the negatives. In that sense, it isn't necessarily
dishonest to omit certain information in that situation. So expectation can
also play a part in determining the ethics of manipulation and where the line
is drawn between manipulation and other forms of influence.
Putting ethics aside for now, there is another word, in that broad definition,
worthy of attention. Defining manipulation as an "effort" suggests that
manipulation is still manipulation regardless of success or failure – the act
of manipulation is defined as the attempt. Ironically, those least successful
at manipulating others, who are most frequently discovered, are more likely
to gain a reputation as manipulative than those who succeed.
You can probably point to someone in your orbit, a relative or co-worker
perhaps, who you consider to be manipulative. Yet, consider how others
view them. Are they well known as a manipulator? Does this impact their
success? The answer to this, too, may be complicated. If someone is
considered by their peers at work to be manipulative and yet holds sway
over the boss, they might still be judged successful. When thinking about
manipulating others, it's important to define clear goals. This will allow you
to make rational, objective decisions, which is key to success.
At this point, there are too many questions and too few answers. The
remainder of this chapter will tie up some loose ends, and establish a
definition that will give bearing for the rest of the book.
Manipulation Vs Influence
The modern world has adopted the term influencer for people with a large
social media following, capable of influencing others with their content. It
doesn't take a particularly critical mind to recognize the source of this term
as advertising. As consumer behavior evolves, advertisers have taken note
and increasingly look to harness the power of influencers to gain attention
for products. This is done variously through paid or unpaid sponsorships,
promotional deals and agreements.
In some cases, influencers disclose these agreements while, in others, they
don't. Ethical questions are again raised, particularly if an influencer is
ostensibly just a happy consumer but secretly on the payroll of the company
which sells the product.
Surely this whole moral quandary could have been avoided, if advertisers
instead coined the term manipulator! Yet it's hardly surprising that they
didn't. What this highlights is that, although people expect advertisers to be
manipulative, it is still unthinkable that they would admit to it. Instagram
stars happily list themselves as influencer on their profile page with
seemingly no negative connotations.
But the goals of many influencers, especially those who work with
advertisers, are fundamentally manipulative. It's not even a grey-area issue.
Influencers aim to shift products to their followers in order to make money.
It is not possible to know if everyone they influence would benefit from the
product, nor is it possible to know their financial situation or any specific
circumstances. In this case, the influencer is putting their own interests first.
Manipulation does not necessarily include an attempt to harm others.
However, it must, to some degree, place one's own goals and interests first.
This is part of the puzzle.
Additionally, it is safest and most logical to refer to influence as a parent
term of manipulation; one which includes manipulation and other methods
of influence, such as inspiration and emulation.
Manipulation Vs Persuasion
These terms might seem diametrically opposed, with persuasion acting as
the "honest" form of manipulation, where the actor is up front about their
goals and opinions. However, for the purposes of this book, it will be more
useful to consider persuasion as a tier below manipulation.
Persuasion, then, becomes a method of manipulation, which is a form of
influence. Persuasion also happens to be one of the less effective methods
of manipulation. How often have you been in a debate with someone else,
only for them to hold up their hands and say "I concede, you are absolutely
right"? It is probably possible for you to count these instances on one hand.
It may be easy to persuade someone that smoking is unhealthy but is it easy
to persuade them to quit? If it were so, governments wouldn't see the need
or benefit in placing heavy taxes on tobacco products in order to discourage
use. According to this book's definition, the government is trying to
manipulate the consumption of tobacco and using a range of methods,
including persuasion, to achieve that end.
So what about other forms of influence? And other methods of
manipulation? Well, manipulation needs to have intent and it ought to have
some form of goal – even if that goal is just to create anarchy. A great
filmmaker may influence the work of many others but it is clearly distinct
from manipulation. The filmmaker doesn't set out to influence others
(although they may), rather they achieve influence through the reaction of
others to their work, resulting in inspiration and even emulation.
Persuasion, likewise, is not the only method of manipulation one could
employ. An easy alternative is lying, a form of deception. To lie and to be
believed will inevitably change the perception of those who believe the lie.
As has already been established, it is still manipulation whether it is
successful or not.
Persuasion, like influence, doesn't suffer from quite the same image
problem as manipulation. In fact it's seen as a positive thing to be able to
make a "persuasive argument." Although it does have a sinister tinge; the
phrase "I can be very persuasive" implies some exertion of power over
another party – possibly even an abuse. Also, when employers refer to the
soft skill of "persuasion," it is correct to understand this as a euphemism for
manipulation. At least in part.
Defining Manipulation
Concluding this chapter, it is now possible to create a suitable and helpful
definition of manipulation for the purposes of this book.
Manipulation is a form of intentional influence, characterized as an
attempt, by a person or party (the manipulator), to change the
behavior of another person or party (the target), typically with a view
to achieving a goal in the manipulator's interests.
There is no nefarious implication, nor is it specified whether or not the
manipulator is acting in, against, or with no regard for the interests of the
target. All are possible. This achieves a definition of manipulation which is
not constrained by subjective ethical ideas. Although that doesn't mean you
should abandon your morals as well!
This definition is useful because it is objective and clear. Also, it is helpful
because, in this book, you will learn techniques for manipulation that will
help you to achieve your goals. In that respect, it would be a mistake to
exclude persuasion, which absolutely can play an important role in
manipulation and is inextricable from the advice in this book.
Two problems remain, however. The first relates to "intended influence."
Intent is difficult because it implies responsibility. In actual fact, everyone
manipulates everyone around them all the time, even from a young age. It
would be wrong to exclude a child's temper tantrum from the umbrella of
manipulation, just because they aren't old enough to rationalize their
behavior. The same applies to adult temper tantrums, for that matter. Intent,
therefore, does not imply conscious behavior – it can also be instinctive.
This also allows for the, very real, presence of "naturally manipulative"
persons.
The second problem is the disappointingly vague ending: "typically to
achieve a goal in the manipulator's interests." Not only is it problematic to
define "the manipulator's interests," there is a catch-all ambiguity in the
inclusion of "typically." This part serves only to create a normalized idea of
manipulation for the purposes of this book and absolutely wouldn't suit a
more general definition. After all, how can someone perfectly know their
own interests? It is of course possible to successfully manipulate someone,
and for the result to still be one's own demise.
The latter problem is addressed during the course of the book, at points
where it happens to be relevant. Despite its flaws, this definition of
manipulation is sufficient for the practical parts of the book.
Examples of Manipulation
With the definition established, it is now of use to recognize some examples
of manipulation. Some of these are common in everyday life, while others
relate to unique or spectacular events. While this book relates primarily to
personal manipulation, there is little theoretical difference between
manipulation on an individual level and on a grand scale. The same
principles almost always apply but the practicalities of manipulation
methods, such as deception, can be more complex between, say, warring
nations.
Advertising
Even the most innocuous advertising is trying to inform you, with a view to
changing behavior or perception. It is, by this book's definition,
manipulation. Some advertising may have positive intentions, such as
adverts to raise money for charities (although the ethical practices of
charities can and have also been drawn into question on many occasions) or
a positive impact, such as an advert that informs you of genuine savings or
advantages offered by a product or supplier.
On the more insidious end of the scale, you have advertising methods such
as influencers, who attempt to affect your purchasing decisions by
encouraging emulation of their lifestyle. There are also online adverts
which are often indistinguishable from other content – even the most ethical
websites normally only flag up paid ads with a small "sponsored" tag; other
times, adverts may be completely undisclosed.
Advertising can manipulate by highlighting the positive features of a
product or service. It is difficult to trust adverts as an accurate source of
information because they are inherently biased. Techniques such as
subliminal advertising sometimes go to extremes to drive messages about a
product into your subconscious. You may have seen famous examples of
sexual figures or messages woven into cocktail glasses to advertise alcohol,
but that's just the tip of the ice-cube.
Military Strategy
History offers countless examples of military foes attempting to manipulate
one another. Like in advertising, this manipulation is completely expected.
If you believe in the cause for which you are fighting, it is also morally
justifiable to manipulate your enemy in any way.
The Battle of Hastings (1066 AD), saw the Norman William the Conqueror
(spoiler alert) invade England with his army, comprised of many mounted
knights. He was met by Harold Godwinson, the recently coronated King of
England at Hastings, near the English Channel. According to legend,
Harold took position atop a hill and waited for the approaching invaders.
William, seeing the disadvantage of fighting uphill, ordered a retreat, with
the intention of luring the defenders into a pursuit. The plan was a success.
Sensing victory, Harold pursued William's army down the hill and, in the
process, sacrificed their advantageous position. The rest, they say, is
history: William's mounted knights were able to overwhelm the largely
infantry-based army of Harold and his victory thwarted his only significant
opposition in England.
Although the accuracy of this account has been called into question, the
lesson of the legend prevails: manipulate your enemy and you will achieve
victory.
You can also find many instances of wars fought as characterizations of
military leaders. Rommel, a German WWII general, was famed for his
tactical brilliance in North African campaigns against allied forces, earning
his nickname: "the Desert Fox." Techniques to obstruct or distort the
information received, by a military adversary, follow the same principles as
those you would use for another person.
It is also possible to draw parallels to games such as chess and real-time
strategy video games, where successful strategies often revolve around
deceiving your opponents with regards to your own intentions.
The Professional World
If you work in a company, it's likely that you've been exposed to ambitious
individuals whose goal is to climb the corporate ladder. Again, in the
professional world, a certain level of manipulation is to be expected. This is
one of the reasons that working together with personal friends can create
complications, as a conflict exists in managing these two different kinds of
relationships – competitive and supportive.
In professional life, you are presented with a range of different relationship
paradigms. Your relationship to fellow team members will vary to that with
your boss, or to those who work under you. Modern corporate structures
tend to be flatter and a managerial approach that relies purely on authority
is less viable than it used to be. It's up to managers and team-leaders to
"motivate" their employees. Well done if you immediately identified
motivation as another form of manipulation.
This book concerns itself specifically with professional and personal
relationships, so expect some relevant examples for manipulation in the
workplace.
Personal Relationships
This is inevitably the most controversial arena for manipulation, yet
ironically it is probably the most natural. From the moment you're born,
you come preprogrammed with the ability to cry – a simple and effective
way to communicate immediate needs, in order to receive care and
attention.
Manipulation happens in family relationships as well as in friendships and
romantic relationships.
The reason for controversy is rooted in the idea that contriving to
manipulate others, in personal relationships, is something unnatural and
rooted in a need for control. Although, once again, there is some grey area.
It's quite normal for a parent to manipulate a child's behavior by using a
system of incentives and punishments. This is normally considered to be
part of a child's education and a healthy part of development, preparing a
child for adulthood.
Manipulation in a romantic relationship, however, is viewed as something
less than chivalrous. It conjures up the idea of an individual lying and
emotionally blackmailing their partner in order disguise behavior or trap
someone in a relationship. On the other side of the coin, it's plausible that
people would praise manipulation, including deceit, if the end goal was to
help a partner quit smoking or lose weight.
These ethical questions are addressed later in the book. For now, it's just
useful to consider the different scenarios where manipulation may be
present. Try examining the world around you to spot examples of
manipulation and understand the mechanisms with which they operate.
Advantages of Manipulation
This chapter isn't long. The benefits of manipulation are plainly obvious,
much like the benefits of bank robbery. Successfully manipulating others is
a way to impact the world around you and bend it to your will. That might
sound sinister, but remember it's extremely likely that you're already doing
it to some degree.
To differentiate between what you might already be doing and what you can
learn from this book, instead interpret this chapter as the benefits of
consciously, deliberately and effectively manipulating others.
Achieve Your Goals
By successfully manipulating others, you can alter their behavior, their
views and possible even their goals to help further your own interests. It's
as simple as that.
Effective manipulation, however, is about improving your rate of success. It
might be that everyone is manipulating the boss, to some degree, in order to
get that promotion – but only one candidate is going to get the job. Working
hard is a good place to start, and working effectively is even better.
However, leaving it to merit alone might not get you through. How can you
make it so that your boss wants to promote you, rather than anyone else?
Understanding that will give you the edge.
Likewise, it's one thing to tell your crush you like them, but another to be
the object of their desire. Effective manipulation is about cultivating a
situation where your success is the most likely (or ideally the inevitable)
result.
Help Others
If you believe in a cause, you can support it by using manipulation to
further its success. This can be anything from using a swear jar to stop a
relative cursing, to earning support for your political party.
It's the same as achieving your own goals but you're transplanting the
interests of someone or something else in place of your own. As stated in
the definition, manipulation is a form of influence.
Guard Yourself Against the Manipulation of
Others
The more you understand about manipulation, the better equipped you'll be
to avoid being manipulated by others. Recognizing manipulative behaviors
in other people will not only protect you against their influence, but you'll
learn more about their goals, feeding your mind with information that you
can use to manipulate them.
It's not hard to be aware of situations where you can expect to encounter
manipulative behavior. What's more difficult is to always spot the ways in
which you are being manipulated.
A key part of this is understanding the goals of other parties and how they
are attempting to achieve those goals at any given moment. With this
information, not only can you recognize and capitalize on the behavior of
others, you can develop the ability to predict the future actions of your
adversaries.
This requires emotional intelligence, as it is absolutely necessary to be able
to place yourself in the shoes of your target. In developing this ability, a
good place to start is by assessing your own behavior through your actions
and learning to understand your choices from an objective standpoint.
Doing so will require some practice, but later chapters will cover that in
some detail.
Manipulation Fundamentals
Without further ado, it's time to get into some of the crucial aspects of
manipulating others. Thanks to the early chapters, you should now have the
groundwork to give context to the ideas in this chapter and form a general
understanding of effective approaches to manipulation.
In the chapter Methodology, you will learn how to use these ideas in order
to form a coherent strategy that will improve your chances of successfully
manipulating others, and achieving your goals.
Goals
Your Goals
Given that you're probably already manipulating the people around you to
some degree, and being manipulated yourself, the first significant step in
achieving effective manipulation is to understand and define your goals.
Without defining goals, it's impossible to measure the effectiveness of your
current manipulation efforts.
That's not to say you aren't already manipulating with some level of
effectiveness. Some people are naturally more manipulative and some
people are natural manipulators; however, the two don't always overlap.
Start by thinking about your actions, and your behavior around others.
Consider who you view positively at work, or in your social circle, and who
you view negatively. Consider, further, how you behave around different
people and whether it aligns perfectly to your opinion of them. There is a
good chance that it doesn't. In fact, what you are probably already doing is
working to earn the good opinion of others who you believe to hold power
and influence.
This is a very general approach that everyone takes in society. To use an
obvious example, your behavior around your boss is probably different to
that of your peers, regardless of your personal opinion of them.
You may even have a set goal, such as reaching "X" position. Otherwise,
you might just be broadly trying to impress. You might even be trying to
carve out an easy work-life for yourself, shedding responsibility and doing
what you can to obscure your low productivity. Maybe you're acting to
bring yourself closer to a co-worker in whom you are romantically
interested.
These are just ideas. At the end of each day, think about your own behavior.
What did you spend your day thinking about and trying to achieve? These
are the goals you are naturally working towards already. When you really
understand what your current motives are, you might surprise yourself.
In order to start manipulating effectively, it's time to clearly and
consciously define your goals. If you've already done so, that's great. Make
sure you have something with a clearly defined end point. Rather than just
"do well at work," consider "earn a raise," or, even better, "earn a salary of
$X per year by MM/DD/YY." By not only defining a goal, but a date as
well, you are giving yourself the added motivation of avoiding failure.
With a clearly defined goal, you can start assessing your actions against
your objective. Ask yourself "will this action help me achieve X?" and you
might already be able to make smarter decisions. Don't stop reading just
yet, though! There are some important considerations to make before you
suddenly change your behavior. Watch out for snakes in the grass…
The Goals of Others
While your own goals are the way to measure the success of your efforts,
the goals of others are key to forming a successful manipulation strategy.
The key to manipulation is using the goals of others to further your
own.
This is the most all-encompassing theory of manipulation and the core of
this book's approach to manipulation.
At times, you might hold the cards and can help someone to achieve their
own goals. This might be as an employee who possesses vital assets for
your boss to achieve success in their role. It might be the case that you are
the boss and have the power to promote people… not discounting the power
you have to help those people achieve their goals by not firing them.
Having what it takes to help other people achieve their goals gives you
inherent value to them.
Here are some examples of situations in which your goals can interact with
those of another, in order to benefit you:
Sticking with the professional field as a reference, say that
one of your co-workers is put in charge of a business trip to a
trade expo. Whatever their broader career goals may be at
that point, it is likely that part of achieving them will be to
have a successful trade expo.
If that person has reason to believe your assets will help them to
achieve that success, they are likely to take you as well. Gaining
that experience will be valuable to your career, potentially
raising your value as an employee and putting you in greater
standing for a promotion.
This is a simplified example to illustrate this line of thinking. It
seems obvious, but by breaking it down, it's possible to make an
evaluation of where you fit in to the goals someone else wants to
achieve.
It might be that your employer, whose goal is to achieve
higher profits, plans to expand your division. They might
decide to do this based on the success of your division or the
emergence of an expanded market for the service you
provide. The knock-on effect would be an increased
requirement for your labor – suddenly you've gone up in
value and it might be harder for your boss to refuse offering
you a raise.
For example, say that you work in a construction company, and a
new technology comes into the fore, which happens to require
specialist crane operation and you happen to be an experienced
crane operator. In this case, your boss is probably looking to hire
more crane operators, which takes time, potentially requires
training and other investments on their part. It's likely that, even
giving you a raise, your boss would still avoid cost of hiring
someone new, let alone the bother.
In both of these examples, you have the power to help someone achieve
their goals. This is what drives your success. There is no element of
manipulation here – it is simply an analysis of how your goals can relate to
those of others. The manipulation will come with cultivating these
situations, by working to ensure the actions others take, to achieve their
goals, align with your own.
Now, consider personal relationships. Imagine that you are romantically
interested in someone else. Your ultimate goal might be to enter into a
relationship with that person. All of a sudden, things get extremely
complicated.
Not only is it unclear what a person might want from a relationship to you,
it might be unclear even to themselves. Many people have not considered
what forms the basis of their attraction to others. So if you want to
effectively manipulate the situation to result in the start of your relationship
together, it may be necessary for you to understand that person better than
they understand themselves.
For now, just hold onto the idea as a thinking point.
Actions
Having mentioned actions frequently already, it is appropriate to dedicate a
paragraph to them. Actions are the things people do. The actions of a person
define their behavior. Repeated actions can be recognized in identifying
behavioral patterns. An action can be anything from a facial expression, or
involuntary body movement, to speech and decisions as well as acts of
violence or sabotage.
Tools
Understanding goals provides the necessary information for effectively
manipulating others. Tools, on the other hand, are the raw materials you
have at your disposal for affecting those goals, or the actions taken by
others to achieve them.
In this book, persuasion was previously referred to as a method. However,
tool more accurately describes the way in which these following concepts
behave – tools to effectively manipulate.
Power
In the last section, Goals, you read some examples relating to the
workplace, specifically regarding situations in which you might be able to
help someone else achieve their goals. This translates to power.
Power is the ability to help other people succeed.
This is an interesting definition because it appears to subvert the normal
idea of power as an ability to exert force over others. However, breaking it
down, the two are closely related. Having the ability to exert force over
others can mean not harming them, not invading their country, not throwing
them in jail, not creating laws which negatively impact them; these are all
forms of power – the power to help other people succeed is much the same
as the power to make other people fail, left unexercised.
These are just positive and negative perspectives of the same thing. The
difference is often negligible.
What can you provide people that will help other people achieve their
goals? The most obvious thing is extraordinary abilities. Talent is valuable
in every aspect of life, from sports competitions, to business, to raising
children. If you have talents that other people can use, that's a powerful
thing.
Another form of power is authority. The boss gets to decide who is
promoted and who is fired. A police officer can arrest you or let you off
with a warning, thanks to their legally sanctioned authority. A judge may
decide your sentence, based on certain constraints, and their opinion of your
nature.
However, there's a problem: you might have the same, or greater, talents as
another person. And yet, they may be more successful than you, held in
higher regard and enjoy greater benefits.
The other aspect to power is reputation. This relates to the belief, held by
others, in your power. It's reputation that is often key to manipulation. The
judgment of others regarding your ability, and your authority.
Persuasion
One previously mentioned tool is persuasion. Having examined persuasion
in relation to manipulation, and established it as a tool within the umbrella
of manipulation, it is now worth making a comprehensive definition of
persuasion and examining its use.
Persuasion is the effort to convince another person to change their
actions.
The problem with persuasion alone is that, so often, it is obvious to the
person that you have an incentive to convince them. They believe that you
stand to gain from the persuasion, which is unhelpful when trying to
manipulate a friendly or neutral party, and devastating when trying to
manipulate a rival.
Persuasion is most useful when you can reveal new information to change
the perception of others. If someone is likely to change their course based
on new information or new understandings of information, which you can
provide, persuasion then has a chance of success. This means providing
information which will affect either the goals of another party, or the
actions they will take to achieve them.
The only other scenario is when another party believes that your goals
somehow have a positive relationship with their own. In this case, they may
trust your judgment, and your intentions, and take up your cause.
This is great when you genuinely have new information, or the trust of
another party. But on many occasions, you won't. On those occasions,
persuasion is only going to be effective when combined with other tools,
such as deception. That means attempting to persuade someone based on a
lie or partial truth. Once again, you are revealing new information or
leading someone to believe your goals align with theirs, but in truth you are
fabricating or hiding elements.
Deception
This is the third tool for manipulation. It forms the core of so many
approaches to manipulation and interacts with both power and persuasion
significantly.
Deception is the control of information.
Start thinking objectively and it becomes possible to imagine people as
machines. The machines are designed to achieve goals, and will do so by
reacting to inputs (information) and creating outputs (actions). If you
control the inputs, by controlling that information, you can deceive. With
that deception, you can change the outputs, resulting in different actions.
The reason deception takes a central role in manipulation is that it is
important for parties you manipulate to believe their actions are furthering
their own interests. Otherwise, they have no reason to take those actions.
The objective of deception is to control information in such a way that the
information they receive leads them to actions which further your interests.
Naturally, the main danger, with deception, is being discovered. For this
reason, deception is often best avoided where possible and, when used, to
be carefully controlled. An ideal deception would have minimal risk and
maximum reward, with plausible deniability if found out. There is also the
risk that lies can lead to further lies, in order to cover up the original
deception; in this case, the risk swells while the reward remains the same
and what might have seemed like a good idea at first can become a terrible
decision.
Irrational Behavior
So far, in the fundamentals of manipulation, there has been an assumption
based on the idea that parties act rationally. This is, broadly, a good
assumption. What may seem like irrational behavior, to some people, is
often a case of someone having unexpected goals.
It is of little interest, to your manipulation efforts, to assess the rationality of
anyone's goals. While the volatility (liability to change) of those goals is of
interest, the rationality of them is not. The important thing is to determine a
person's goals via their actions and use those goals to predict, and
manipulate, their future actions.
For example, a co-worker may seemingly be slacking off at work. They
might not be doing any of the things required to achieve a promotion or
make a good impression on your boss. Is their behavior irrational? It may
seem so, but only if you assume their main goal is to advance their career.
In actual fact, they may be looking for an easy ride, or focused on pursuing
a love interest in the office. They might be more interested in their life
outside of work and simply choose to earn some respite during work hours,
so they can party it up all night again. In that sense, their actions are not
irrational – they are simply geared towards achieving another goal. Is that
goal rational? It hardly matters.
Irrational behavior is a cognitive failure to perform actions which help
achieve one's goals.
The person in the previous example might have a stated goal to become
head of sales in the next two years. However, that doesn't mean their real
goals align. If someone is not consciously acting to achieve their goals, they
can no longer be called their goals. Therefore the behavior is still not
irrational.
Irrational behavior is more like a tick of the mind. It is a mistake, based on
either a failure of human instinct or a lack of understanding. This is distinct
from a lack of information, whereby a person can still make a mistake,
however it is rational behavior based on the knowledge available to them.
A good example of irrational behavior is playing the lottery. Everyone
knows how unlikely it is that your ticket will win, but many people play
anyway, for the chance to win big. Something about human instinct
encourages people to gamble for a reward.
The same approach is used by social media apps, who have discovered that
an endlessly scrolling feed is the perfect way to tap into a twitch of human
instinct. People scroll down and down the page, revealing new posts and
content, each time gambling on whether something will be of interest or
more drivel. It plays into the same risk/reward mechanisms as the lottery,
manipulating human instinct to get more ad views, keep people using the
apps for longer and increase their revenue.
Not everyone is as vulnerable to these methods of manipulation as others.
The way rational behavior fits into this book's approach to manipulation is
as part of observed behavior. Just because behavior is irrational, it doesn't
mean that it is random; it can often be predicted. This makes it just as useful
as rational behavior in understanding a person or party.
The important thing is to be aware of the possibility of irrational behavior,
identify it and work it into your approach to manipulation.
Manifestations of Manipulation
Approaches to manipulation are ways of using of the above tools to affect
the actions of others. It can vary from manipulating a single person, to
manipulating a group, to manipulating an array of people within an
organization in different ways.
Once again, you're almost certainly already doing this to an extent.
Examine some of the following approaches and consider how they might
relate to your life already.
The Carrot and the Stick
This classic, and well known, approach to manipulation is the basic idea
that good behavior is encouraged with a reward and bad behavior is
discouraged with a punishment. It's common in families, schools,
businesses, and basically all societies.
It's something humans do instinctively. It might even be called justice.
However, the carrot and the stick may also form part of your efforts to
proliferate your own world view or improve your comfort. If a romantic
partner cleans the bathroom and mows the lawn, you might give them a kiss
and be more inclined to cook dinner; if they spend all day watching TV in
their underwear, God protect them from your wrath.
At work, it's normal for a boss to incentivize workers with bonuses and, of
course, there is the ever-present threat of losing your job should you prove
unsatisfactory. But what about the carrot and the stick between peers? If a
co-worker's actions somehow enhance your work or make it easier, isn't it
natural to mention that and attempt to reinforce the behavior? What about if
they create an extra problem for you, that you feel could have been
avoided? That's likely to affect your relationship. You might give them the
cold shoulder.
So it's something present in all relationships. However, learning to
manipulate people, you might find that your actions don't always have the
desired effect.
If you thank Jeff, because his work helped you out, the next time he's in a
pinch, don't be surprised if he neglects to go the extra mile.
Imagine that Jeff was short on time and needed to decide between helping
you out and helping Bill out, who gave him the cold shoulder last time Jeff
failed to help him. Assuming that all is equal: the work for both you and
Bill was the same and Jeff was under no additional obligation to complete
either; that person has made a calculated decision: rather than disappointing
someone else and receiving "the stick," they'll assign more time to their
needs and forgo your "carrot."
What's just happened is you've unsuccessfully manipulated the situation.
The attempt is there, by thanking Jeff, but you failed to get a result.
Breaking this down:
Your power, or ability to help that person, was judged as less
than the power of a third party to hinder them.
Your persuasion failed because you didn't provide
information that convinced that person of your power.
The lack of deception in your approach resulted in more
work for you.
There are a few possibilities. It is possible that Jeff simply responds more to
the stick than the carrot. Despite the fact that he is obligated to complete the
work for neither you nor Bill, he will do so primarily to avoid conflict,
rather than to curry favor. An alternative is that he simply judged Bill as
having more power than you – that means a greater ability to help Jeff
achieve his goals. Perhaps Jeff predicts Bill has a higher career trajectory,
more influence with the boss or greater social influence in the office.
This isn't to say that the stick works better than the carrot. You might find
that Ted prefers to be rewarded and generally doesn't respond at all to
negative feedback. The important thing is to find out what drives people,
and discover their goals.
Emotional Manipulation
This is not wholly distinct from the carrot and the stick but much of
manipulating people involves emotional intelligence.
There are a variety of ways in which people emotionally manipulate others.
All of these, in some sense, work with the tools above to affect the actions
of another. It might seem natural to conclude that the goal of emotional
manipulation is to provoke irrational behavior – however, that's rarely the
case. Emotional manipulation is much more likely to distort the truth, to the
extent that someone's alters their path to achieve their goals, through a
perceived change in reality.
Examine an approach to emotional manipulation called the guilt trip. The
guilt trip involves trying to make someone feel worse about an action they
have taken (or an action they have failed to take, which amounts to the
same thing i.e. sitting around and not tidying your room is an action).
By guilt tripping someone, you are attempting to affect their emotional
reaction to their error. The return is for that person to feel indebted. You are
altering their perception of a situation, so that they will either: correct their
behavior at the next opportunity or make amends for their error.
Here is a breakdown of the mechanics:
They are concerned about their loss of reputation. If they
develop a reputation as someone who cannot or will not help
others to achieve their goals, the result will be a loss of
power. Solving the issue by making amends is a way to
salvage their reputation.
You are persuading them of the severity of their error. As
previously mentioned, failing deception, this requires you to
either offer genuine new information, such as a previously
unknown negative impact of their error – perhaps a financial
cost to yourself or another – or have enough of their trust
that they believe your opinion of opinion of events to be
valid, causing them to reassess their own.
Naturally, you can use deception to fabricate the above –
inventing a detail that changes their perspective. An example
could be lying about an injury they caused to someone else
unintentionally, playing up its severity. While you will be
found out eventually, this might be an effective short term
tactic to provoke a confession.
The person who has committed the error is also affected by
your power. If you have the ability to remedy the problem
they have caused, they are likely to be submissive to your
demands. Your power is the ability to help them achieve
their goal of saving their reputation and naturally that
increases, the greater they perceive their error to be.
Guilt tripping is far from the only form of emotional manipulation. It is
difficult to draw the line between ethical and unethical emotional
manipulation. For example, what constitutes guilt tripping as opposed to
simply expressing disappointment? They are essentially the same.
Likewise, what is the difference between intimidation and
Fortunately, this book is avoiding these issues for now but you'll find more
information on the ethics of manipulation in the next chapter.
There are many terms for many different types of emotional manipulation.
It is not necessary to memorize, or even learn, all of them. By
understanding the mechanics of emotional manipulation, you can easily
analyze and understand them as they arise. Here are a few examples:
Intimidation – Provoking fear in a target, such that they
may alter their strategy for achieving their goals. In
particular, intimidation that carries a threat of violence can
encourage a target to change their course of action in
ensuring their own self-preservation (a fairly universal goal).
Acting to appease their intimidator is a way for the target to
survive, and becomes their future behavior.
Note that there is nothing irrational in the behavior of the target
here. Emotional manipulation is not necessarily the provocation
of irrational behavior. Bonus points if you recognized that this is
hardly distinct from the "stick."
Seduction – Manipulating a target by presenting them with
an object of desire, and withholding it until the target
performs an action. The object may be the seducer or some
other asset, like money. Scam emails from Nigerian princes
work by seducing the target with the prospect of easy money.
Sexual seduction may include provoking irrational behavior,
based on the promise of endorphins. An alternative way of
viewing this is as a persuasion to manipulate the goals of others,
prioritizing a sexual encounter above everything else.
Seduction revolves around power, as it is presenting and
persuading the ability to offer somebody what they want. Bonus
points if you recognized that this is hardly distinct from the
"carrot."
Minimization – This is the effort to reduce someone's
perspective of an issue, or error you have caused. It may
involve any manipulation tools to reduce the magnitude of
the issue.
It normally involves persuasion and deception, highlighting or
fabricating facts to demonstrate the lack of importance. It can
also involve rationalization, which is explaining the reasons for
one's actions in an attempt to justify them.
Although this bears no direct relation to power, observe how
differently people respond to this behavior from someone who
has perceived power, compared to someone who is perceived to
lack it.
Blaming – Passing the blame for an error onto someone else
is a way to preserve your power, by protecting your
reputation, using either persuasion or deception.
Note how easy it becomes to break down familiar actions, like
blaming, using these three tools.
As well as passing the blame, creating blame can also be a useful
smokescreen. Blaming a victim is a way of persuading a victim
that their reputation is under threat, in order to manipulate a
vulnerable person.
At this point, you may also recognize that blaming is closely linked to
intimidation. There is damage or the threat of damage to someone's
reputation, which can alter their actions by making them feel responsible or
concerned that others will hold them responsible.
Charisma
It is difficult, but not impossible, to learn charisma. However, it is still
crucial to mention charisma in this book, as it holds great power to
manipulate others.
Charisma is the illusion of power. And the illusion of power is powerful.
Imagine a charismatic person. You're probably thinking of a charismatic
speaker, who can hold an audience, and tell an anecdote. What good is
persuasion, or even deception, if nobody pays attention to you? Charisma
dictates much of what is referred to as natural magnetism.
And yet there are people in positions of great power who don't seem to be
naturally charismatic at all. Politicians, performers and CEOs are possibly
all charismatic figures but for every great speaker, there are a dozen
fumbling, stuttering slouchers.
Charisma isn't everything but it can get you a long way. By creating the
illusion of power, you can appear to have value to others around you.
Although, deep down, everyone knows that charisma is just an illusion, it
remains powerful all the same. Charismatic behavior coincides with the
way talented, intelligent people are expected to behave. And it's likely there
is some correlation to that.
It's safe to broadly divide charisma into two component parts, each fairly
useless without the other:
Confidence – Confidence is a natural result of competence,
which is a natural result of ability and experience. It follows
that, to appear confident will give the impression that you
have either, or both, natural ability and experience i.e. useful
traits which could help others achieve their goals.
Wit – Wit is the ability to think quickly, on your feet. It is
the equivalent of a somersault for the mind. It demonstrates
mental agility, providing further evidence of your superior
natural abilities and understanding. Even better if you're
funny, too.
Imagine each of these traits without the other. Who is likely to make a
greater fool of themselves than a bragging, witless fool. Anyone who
possesses confidence, without wit, is destined to expose themselves as an
idiot.
Equally useless is the silent genius. The wittiest remark in the world isn't
going to increase anyone's perception of your power if you haven't got the
confidence to share it.
It's possible to work on your charisma by improving your confidence
naturally – that means accumulating understanding and developing skills.
Try also watching charismatic people talk, watch what kind of comments
they make and how they earn positive reactions from others. You should
observe that charismatic people appear to find it easier to relate to an
audience – a sign of emotional intelligence. Later chapters in this book
cover analyzing others and you can use those skills to develop your
charisma.
Charisma is not necessary for manipulation, but it offers a shortcut to
power.
Ethical Considerations
You may wish to skip this chapter…
A joke, of course.
This book has already established a broad definition of manipulation, for
practical reasons, which allows for a range of manipulative behaviors and
does not include immoral behavior as a prerequisite. This chapter is a
necessary exploration of ethics within the broad definition of manipulation
provided.
There is a lot of grey area here. Ultimately, deciding what is right and
wrong is up to each individual. This may vary depending on cultural values,
laws, religious beliefs and a learned moral compass. What this chapter
establishes is an understanding of the impact of manipulative behavior, in
an effort to allow any readers to make informed judgments about their
actions.
Deception
Reading this book, so far, you may already have run into examples of
manipulation that you believe to be morally wrong. Congratulations on
having a moral compass!
One example of a difficult area, ethically, is deception. For some, all forms
of lying are wrong. This includes white lies and partial truths. If you are one
of those people, you can still use the advice in this book but it's going to
change the way you approach manipulation. Specifically, it your approach
will avoid the use of deception and focus, instead, on power and persuasion.
For everyone else, you might need to decide how much and with what
forms of deception you feel comfortable.
First, consider the issues with deception. Deceiving others can lead others
into actions which act either against or without advancing their own
interests. A side effect of manipulating them into acting in your own.
Deceiving others could also be of benefit to them, tricking them into actions
that will improve their health or career in the long term, but which they
were not capable of doing themselves. Telling a child that their favorite
super hero enjoys vegetables is an example of this. The deceit is intended to
improve the child's diet, which could benefit their long-term health.
Deception can also have unintended consequences. In most cases, telling
such a lie to a child is unlikely to end in disaster, but isn't it feasible that a
child could discover the ruse, and develop distrust towards the deceiver.
This could harm them by hardening their susceptibility to future
manipulation in their interests or it could encourage lying tendencies in the
child. There is no knowing, for certain, the ultimate impact of a given
action.
Consider, also, the situation where deception takes place. It's perhaps
expected behavior to try and completely deceive your counterpart,
regarding your intentions, in a game of chess or checkers, a war or even in
contract negotiation. However, many people would consider it immoral to
hold even the smallest untruth from a future spouse.
You might even take the stance that deception, and any other behavior, is
only a crime if you get caught. It's a potentially cynical world view but
there's an argument to say that it's a dog-eat-dog world and if you're not
willing to be ruthless, someone else is going to do the same to you.
It's not the place of this book to decide where you draw your lines in the
sand. However, some advice would be to establish some ethical boundaries,
such as "no lies that I have reason to believe will cause harm to another."
You might find this too stringent or too lenient, so define your own
boundaries and if the moment arises where you recognize a chance to break
that boundary, for your own potential gain, at least you will have the
opportunity to confront your own morality, whether you decide to go ahead
or not.
Abuse
With the reminder that this book is not telling you how to align your moral
compass, it is necessary, still, to mention that most people consider abuse to
be a bad thing. The issue is how to define abuse.
You have almost certainly heard the phrase "abuse of power." Consider
something that most people would place at the worst end of the spectrum,
such as the sexual abuse of mentally handicapped minors. It is abuse on
multiple levels, because the minor has a number of vulnerabilities.
Significantly, parents and guardians of these individuals are in a position of
trust, to protect these individuals. They have little defense against, and lack
the judgment to understand the ways in which sexual abuse can impact their
psychology. It's an awful, sobering thought to establish the extreme end of
the abuse spectrum.
At the other end of the spectrum, there may be more nuanced or
controversial examples of what some people call abuse, such as ordering an
extra portion of fries when charging a meal to the company account. It's an
unnecessary indulgence which allows the "abuser" to benefit excessively
from the trust they have been given.
Taking this even further, it's possible to draw into question the nature of
business relationships. You might consider the idea of someone "sleeping
their way to the top" to be dismissive. However, how is it possible to
reconcile personal relationships where one person clearly has power over
the other; for example a boss and an employee, with ideas of the abuse of
power? Are these relationships possible without elements of abuse?
A person may naturally be drawn to their boss due to the power they hold,
as has been established. At the same time, it may be impossible for a boss to
enter into a non-abusive relationship, given the inherent vulnerability of
their employee. Perhaps it is completely possible to separate work and
pleasure but these situations are sticky, to say the least.
More pertinent to the times, it is possible to draw comparisons to the role of
a casting director for Hollywood movies. Many people have said that it is
inherently wrong for someone who has power over another, i.e. they can
help their progress towards achieving their goals, to enter into a romantic
relationship. Isn't it the case that, in some of these instances, aspiring actors
are throwing themselves at people in positions of power? The implication,
then, is that power brings responsibility. Certainly, that carries an element of
truth in the eyes of many people and much of the media.
Once again, you will need to decide what constitutes abuse in your eyes.
This may be defined by the potential victims of your actions, in which case
you might not view a large corporation as a particularly tragic casualty, and
order that extra basket of fries. Additional food for thought would be to
consider what makes a person "vulnerable" and whether or not it is truly
possible to decide that a person is "not vulnerable." If you successfully
manipulate another person then, surely, to some degree, they are vulnerable
– if only to your cunning.
Honor
Navigating all of these ethical issues may, to some degree, force you to rely
on a code of honor. This might be dictated by a culture, or a creed. It may
be created by yourself or your peers. It may even be part of a commitment
made to uphold a certain level of integrity – as is common among reputable
media outlets.
This can help you to make ethical decisions, by placing boundaries for you.
However, it's rare that, when push comes to shove, a code of honor will
actually stop you from taking an action outside of its bounds. That is up you
alone.
The Ends Vs The Means
One alternative to establishing clear ethical boundaries is to judge each case
completely on its merits. In this instance, there is more flexibility. In
particular, you may decide that any action can be justified, if the result is
positive enough to outweigh the means of achieving it.
There is a further issue, which even the most flexible moral gymnasts ought
to consider. Even if the ends justify the means, could those ends be
achieved with less wrongdoing?
Once again, it is not the place of the book to enforce a specific moral code.
However, even if your approach to ethics, in manipulation, is flexible,
would you lose anything by defining boundaries anyway? At least in that
case, you can recognize when you cross those boundaries, and it gives you a
prompt to address and justify your reasons for doing so.
Intent and Unscrupulousness
This book has already partly addressed the issue of intent in manipulation.
Consider the child who screams; young children make a lot of decisions
based on emotion and instinct. The intent may not be to manipulate, but the
manipulation is still present.
If you have spent time around children, you may know that, when a child
hurts themselves, there is a pause before their reaction. In many cases, they
will look to their parent. If the parent's reaction is shock, they may become
unsettled and start to cry; if the parent's reaction is to remain calm, often the
child will remain calm themselves.
They are learning to navigate the world and their influence within it. It is
difficult to assign blame to the child for manipulative behavior, even when
you would find such behavior to be unimpressive or undesirable in an adult.
On the subject of adults, you may also differentiate between
unscrupulousness (willful disregard for morals or laws that stand in the way
of one's goals) and a complete lack of knowledge of those boundaries.
Although both are potentially ethical breaches, the latter indicates a lack of
responsibility, while the former is an extreme form of egoism – total selfinterest.
In practice, this shouldn't be a choice you're able to make. Effective
manipulation should involve an analysis of your actions and, at the very
least, a reasonable estimate of their results. That means you'll already have
the inform
Additionally making moral decisions, based on information and
consideration, will allow you to rest in the knowledge that you took
responsibility for your decision and actively understood the consequences.
It could prevent you from making a decision you live to regret.
The Law
Despite the non-committal nature of this chapter, there is one aspect against
which this book advises you completely. That is breaking the law. Under no
circumstances is it recommended that you break the law and, if you suspect
that you are engaging in criminal activity, including fraud or another form
of illegal deception-based manipulation, you are advised to investigate the
law thoroughly and avoid any wrongdoing.
Ending up in jail is almost certainly not a way to achieve your goals and the
best way to avoid jail is to not break the law.
Methodology
This chapter is where things get really practical. In this chapter, you will
learn to apply the ideas established in previous chapters and create an
effective strategy for manipulation.
The core of developing an effective manipulation strategy revolves around
influencing others to perform actions which further your goals.
Step 1 – Define Your Goal(s)
This is the focus of your manipulation strategy. Without this, you run the
risk of manipulating people aimlessly. While diversion can be part of an
effective manipulation strategy, it should be done deliberately, rather than at
random.
One important consideration, regarding your goals, is to determine if they
are something you really want to achieve. It's no good saying that your goal
is to rule the world, if you aren't willing to put in the effort – who needs
that kind of pressure, anyway?
It's also better to define goals, to which there is already a clear path. You
may have larger goals, such as becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500
company – however unless you already have a clear idea of your path to
that goal, it's probably better to start smaller. Take that goal, and break it
down. The first thing you might need is managerial experience.
Give yourself a goal of reaching a managerial position in your company,
and have at least 50 people to you, either directly or via the chain of
command. Break that down even further, if you need to, and set your first
goal as becoming the leader of your team.
Career success isn't the only type of goal this methodology works for. You
might set a goal to carve a niche at work which gives you more free time
and allows you to work with less stress. You might set a goal to find a
loving spouse. The goal itself doesn't matter, as long as you really want it.
Don't forget to set a date on your goal as well. It doesn't matter how you
arrive at your estimate – even if you make simple guess – you can always
revise it later based on improved information. What a date gives you is a
restraint, encouraging you to think creatively in order to accelerate your
plans.
Now take a note of all your goals, long-term and short-term, big and small,
and order them in terms of immediacy.
Remind yourself of your goals every single day.
In doing so, you are focusing your brain on a task. Think of a time when
achieved highly at work, school or college. Think about what it took to
achieve something that made you proud. Was it working a moderate amount
of hours or did it involve going the extra mile? Were you thinking about the
project night and day, running it through in your head before you went to
sleep and structuring it in your mind? Of course you were. That's what
made the difference.
By focusing your brain on a task, you dedicated all your resources to
achieving highly. The more attention you dedicated to manipulation, the
more you'll be able to accomplish and the better you'll succeed at it.
Oh and keep your goals a secret from everyone for now, naturally.
Step 2 – Map Out Your Paths to Success
Now that you have your goals, and you've broken them down sufficiently, it
should be fairly easy to find a path to success. If your goal is a promotion,
you'll need a boss to promote you. If your goal is finding a loving spouse,
you'll need to find someone who's going to provide that and for them to
agree to marriage.
Consider alternate paths to success as well. For instance, if you want to take
your boss' position, one path might be for them to get fired, leaving a
vacancy for you. In another situation, they could be promoted, leaving a
spot open.
Map out as many paths as you can and consider them all possibilities for
now.
Once you've done that, it's time to establish the parties involved. Who
would be in charge of the decision-making process for your promotion?
Who are your potential rivals? How does information flow between these
people?
In the case of achieving a promotion, your manipulation strategy should be
to make the people, who have the power to promote you, want to do so.
You've seen the movie Inception, right? Unfortunately hacking into
someone's dreams isn't an option.
In order to manipulate your target, you need to start understanding their
goals and behavior.
Step 3 – Gather Information
This book's final chapters will directly address analyzing people, including
yourself. For now, it is enough to include it as part of your manipulation
strategy.
Consider the goals of the people whom you need to influence – those who
will decide whether or not you are promoted. Map out all of their actions,
starting from now and as much of their previous behavior as possible. Look
for patterns and attempt to relate each of their actions to what you perceive
as their goals. Then look for ways in which they don't align and reassess
their goals to see pinpoint what matches.
Make an assessment of your own assets. Include hard facts, such as your
time at a company, your currently salary and your qualifications, as well as
soft skills, such as charisma and persuasion.
Profile all the parties involved, including those who have the power to
promote you, your rivals and anyone in orbit of your path to success.
Include their goals and try to record their actions, spotting patterns and
connecting them to their goals. Keep organized notes of all of this
information and conceal it from everyone.
The aim here is to give your brain as much information as possible. Once
again, imagine your brain as a machine. It has the best chance of producing
the correct outputs (actions) if it has access to the best inputs (information)
and the better you can objectively organize this information, the easier it
will be to make smart decisions, rather than subjective decisions based on
instinct.
After a while, say a few days, you should start to build a picture. Take more
time if you feel like you need it. However, you don't need to have a perfect
understanding of the situation to begin the next stage of information
gathering, which is to identify key figures among those who you are
profiling and start doing the same thing for people related to their goals. In
the case of those who have the power to promote you, this may very well be
the people who have the power to promote them.
Going a step further is going to give you an even deeper understanding of
the way that these people operate, what drives them and what is likely to
impact their decisions.
You will continue gathering information indefinitely, even as you begin
manipulating others. Make it a habit and you will get better at identifying
the goals and behavioral patterns of others faster and more accurately.
Focus on understanding where power lies and how the parties involved
reach their decisions – try to identify what provokes them to take certain
actions. Relate this back to their own goals.
Step 4 – Identify Opportunities and Threats
This is where it's time to use your brain. You should be thinking about your
goals every day by now and developing a deeper understanding of the
mechanics of your situation.
Opportunities
Remember the goal you have set for yourself. And remember your essential
aim is to want the parties in charge of your promotion to want to promote
you. What have you learned about their goals? Take a typical scenario and
say that they want to achieve good figures – they want to improve the
efficiency of your team by increasing its profits.
Relate what you have learned about the parties in orbit of your goals back
to the paths you mapped out. Start using that knowledge to assess the
likelihood success in each case. Is it more likely that your current team
leader will be fired or promoted? Is there another opportunity for you to
reach the same tier of management elsewhere, within or even outside the
company? Weigh the options against one another.
Say you have reason to believe that your current team leader is
underperforming, and you expect them to be fired rather than promoted. In
this instance, you need to be careful of the timing. The opportunity is
presenting itself and when it arises, you need to be in pole position.
What if you're in pole position right now? Then it's time to get your team
leader fired as soon as possible.
Relate this to the three main tools of manipulation identified in earlier
chapters:
Power – As the candidate in pole position, you are perceived
to have the most power to help your potential new bosses
(those who would promote you) to achieve their goals.
Likewise, you have also identified that your current boss,
your team-leader, is facing the chop. This is, almost
certainly, because they are perceived to lack the power to
help their immediate superiors achieve their goals.
However, they haven't been fired yet. This might be for a
number of reasons. Perhaps they haven't had enough opportunity
to prove themselves. Perhaps their superiors aren't certain about
you as a replacement.
Persuasion – Forget marching up to those with the power to
promote you and giving an epic speech about why you're the
perfect candidate to be the next team-leader. This isn't a
Hollywood movie. More to the point, the world won't
simply bend to your knees because you ask it to.
Deception – What you can do is act to control the flow of
information that reaches your boss' superiors. The aim, in
this instance, is to decrease their perception of your boss'
power and get your boss fired more quickly.
The ways in which you could achieve this are too many to list.
How close are you to these people, whom you need to influence?
Who has their ear and what makes them tick? Perhaps another
team-leader, reliant on the actions of your team, is likely to
complain about your boss if your team fails to deliver.
Now think: who has their ear? Possibly someone on their team.
Possibly someone with whom you're on talking terms. Now you
have an opportunity, sufficiently distanced from yourself, to
indirectly influence the people directly above your boss.
Recapping, this refers to someone, of roughly your level,
working for a team, roughly the same level as your own, which
is dependent on the actions of your team. Immediately begin
profiling this person, their goals and their actions.
Bear in mind, this is a hypothetical example, but it gives you the
idea of the kind of person you might stand to gain by
influencing. You will have to analyze your own situation and
form a strategy based on these ideas.
Note that so much of what goes into effective manipulation is deciding who
to manipulate. You are likely to be manipulating everyone at once, to some
degree. Later chapters will give you advice on how to project power using
body language and speech, giving you increased opportunities for
manipulation in general. Right now, you are forming a strategy for
manipulating a specific situation through extraordinary means.
Threats
A threat, in this instance, is any rival who has the potential to be promoted
ahead of you. An additional threat is your boss recovering their reputation
(perceived power) and getting out of the danger-zone. Consider anything,
which can serve to disrupt your path to success, as a potential threat.
Look for threats constantly and use the same principles to thwart them.
Specifically, act covertly to reduce the power of any parties which threaten
to disrupt your plans.
Step 5 – Take Action
Leaving threats aside, refocus on the current example. Here, an opportunity
has presented itself to create a deception. It may well be the case that you
have a close relationship with the person identified to start the flow
information, in which case it might be possible to conspire. If your boss is
truly useless, and your target's team is truly dependent on an improvement
in your team's performance, and your target aims to see that happen, you
could theoretically agree to work together, in order to perpetuate some
information that will damage the reputation of your boss.
But take a moment to look at some of the risks:
Your collaborator is another person who can be discovered
and the conspiracy could come back to you.
You have revealed to another person that you wish to
conspire. This will have an effect on their opinion of you,
and your trustworthiness.
Your collaborator may change their mind, in which case you
will have sabotaged your chance to deceive them by
revealing your goals.
Your collaborator may alter the plan to suit their own goals
and compromise your strategy.
With deception, you only run the risk of being found out yourself and it's
quite possible to attempt a deception with plausible deniability.
For the purposes of this example, say you are on friendly terms with this
person and may eat lunch or take coffee with them roughly once a week.
Show an active interest by asking them questions. Mix in questions about
their work with a normal, personal interest in the person. Try to focus on
pursuing lines of conversation about which they're willing to talk. There is
a good chance this will relate to their interests, which will relate to their
goals.
Look for something in their goals which is affected by your boss' actions.
Say their team handles delivery, while your team handles production. This
is a simple paradigm, given that the example relies on their team's
dependence on yours. Establish the issues facing delivery and analyze
elements of your boss' behavior which could be revealed, in order for your
target to arrive at the conclusion your boss is bad news. This could be a
tendency to ignore the demands of shipping when forming a production
schedule.
It's important not to do this at a time when your target is specifically talking
about their issues. You should also reveal the information in such a way that
does not arouse suspicion. For example, when a natural opportunity arises,
you might explain the way your boss scheduled production, which clearly
illustrates the absence of shipping.
At this point, the example has reached such a degree of specificity, that it is
almost certainly impossible to directly relate to your circumstances. You
will always need to look for opportunities specific to your own situation
when engaging in manipulation. This will require you to act ingeniously, by
giving yourself as much information as possible.
You have now planted the seed of an idea in your target's head. Your boss is
having a negative impact on your target's professional success due to their
methods. In the eyes of your target, the goals of your boss fail to align with
their own. They must go. You have recruited someone to do your bidding,
without arousing suspicion. You have maintained a normal co-worker
relationship but achieved a deception by actively controlling the flow of
information to those who have power over your future.
If all goes according to plan, the next time your co-worker falls behind in
their work or struggles to make a deadline, they'll know exactly who to
blame. Their team leader will relay this information to their superiors and
your boss will become even more of a problem than before, edging closer to
their professional doom.
Step 6 – Learn and Improve
Unfortunately, your plan has every chance of failure. It might be that your
boss manages production in the way they do for an important reason – one
which might be recognized by their superiors. In that case, it could even
backfire. But at least you weren't rumbled. Take note from this
manipulation attempt and use it to inform your future efforts.
There is no way to predict the future perfectly but looking at the past is the
best way to get an approximation. Use the ideas of this methodology to
develop your own strategies and manipulate the world around you for your
own ends.
Analysis
This chapter relates back to aspects of the previous chapter on the
methodology of manipulation.
By learning methods of analysis, you can develop a better understanding of
the parties which have power to help you achieve, or prevent you from
achieving, your goals. A large part of this is practice – practice observing
behaviors and then try to predict actions based on patterns you have
observed. Test your accuracy in this regard, reflect on why you failed to
make an accurate prediction and then try to remedy that in future. You will
naturally improve with time.
Self-Analysis
An excellent way to begin understanding the actions, and determining the
goals, of others is to start analyzing yourself. Keep a note of your actions
and observe yourself as if you were observing a third party. Understand
why you took an action and, in particular, whether it helped or hindered
your efforts to achieve your goals.
What you are trying to do is achieve objectivity, which you can use to make
good decisions regarding your own future. Note that the terminology used
here is "good" decisions. You may already be making rational decisions but
that does not mean they are necessarily "good."
You could be making those rational decisions based on your ill-informed
knowledge of what type of behavior works in your favor and what type of
actions work against you. By improving your knowledge, and gaining
perspective through objectivity, you can make better decisions.
Analyze, too, your instincts. Consider your instinctive reaction to a
situation. What provokes an impulse in you to become emotional? What
provokes you to make clearly irrational decisions – i.e. taking actions
which offer you no value at all, yet you take them all the same.
With self-analysis, you can recognize the occasions a decision has a
negative effect on your power. When people see you out of control, for
example, they will judge you to be a less reliable option for assistance in
achieving their goals, reducing your perceived power. The natural
conclusion, and lesson to learn, is that controlling your immediate reaction
is almost always the correct choice. Do not act until you can truly
understand a situation and form an appropriate strategy to turn it in your
favor.
Identifying these impulsive instincts will also help you to discover the goals
of others. Impulsive actions, taken by others, offer insight into their goals.
People are most likely to become provoked when their power or the
likelihood of achieving their goals is under threat. Use your self-analysis to
empathize with people in these moments, place yourself in their shoes and
understand what drives them.
Analyzing Others
Along with empathy, using your self-analysis and lived experience to place
yourself in the shoes of others, you can also recognize the behavioral
patterns of other objectively.
The introduction to this chapter offers a nice summary. Here is an
opportunity to present the process of analyzing others in a more systematic
manner:
1. Begin by observing and recording every action that a person
takes. Provide yourself with as much data as possible.
Include every unusual mood, action, reaction and impulse.
2. Hypothesize obvious and suspected goals which that person
many possess.
3. Test their actions in relation to these goals. Try to understand
if the person is acting to achieve these goals, in which case
your hypothesized goals are correct, or if the actions and
your hypothesized goals fail to align, in which case you may
need to consider that the person is pursuing alternative goals.
4. Predict the actions of a person, based on their goals and the
behavioral patterns (patterns in the actions they take) you
observe. Specifically, when something unusual occurs, try to
predict how they will react. Analyze your success and
failures in prediction. Where you fail, try to understand why
the person reacted as they did, why you failed to predict that
and use it to inform your future predictions.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 ad infinitum, until you can accurately
predict the behavior of that person.
With this ability to predict the reaction of a person to a given event, it only
requires your creativity to reverse-engineer an event based on the reaction
you wish to produce. The event might be as simple and innocent as
mentioning a certain topic of conversation, revealing a piece of information
or thanking them for some work they've done.
Cold Reading
Cold reading is the practice of analyzing a person on a first meeting, or
even a first glance. This is a particularly useful skill because it allows you
to manipulate someone even in a single meeting. If you can analyze
someone in a short space of time, to the extent where you can predict their
reactions to a stimulus, you only need to provide that stimulus in order to
achieve the desired result.
Everyone already cold reads, to a degree. Using stereotypes, it is common
and perfectly normal to form an opinion of someone based on their
appearance, including the clothes they wear, the look on their face, the
shape and size of their body, their accent, and even their ethnicity. The
problem is that cold reading tends to be fairly inaccurate. You cannot
guarantee anything about a person based simply on their appearance and
people are liable to surprise you.
Effective cold reading is going to take practice and data. Make predictions
about new people you meet, memorize them or quickly record them, if you
have an opportunity, and then test them as you find out more about a
person. Relate your findings back to your first impressions of someone and
consider if there was anything you could have spotted, which might have
given it away.
Body Language
Body language is useful as both a source of information, and an approach to
manipulation. It can form a part of both deception and persuasion.
You have probably heard quotes like "body language makes up 55% of all
communication," before. Although the number, "55%," is actually pretty
useless, the message remains clear that body language is an important part
of the way people communicate to one another.
Considering the fact that body language is so important, it's no surprise that
everyone is able to read body language and react to it, to some degree. On a
sub-conscious level, you can probably already understand when someone
disagrees with what you are saying, or is interested, or just wants to stop
talking to you altogether. These cues are intended to be understood –
without that, there would be no point to their existence.
However, there are important ways to read the body language of others,
which can help you to analyze their intentions, even when they are
attempting to deceive you.
Facial Expressions
It's a famous poker trope that everyone has a particular behavior which they
exhibit when "bluffing," a form of deception intended to lead opponent
players to believe they have a stronger hand than they actually do. This is
known as a "tell."
While there is some truth to this, and you may be able to spot giveaway
signs to recognize when a person is lying. However, this will be limited in
accuracy and, particularly in the poker, you might fall prey to a deception,
in which someone is deliberately putting on a tell, in order to throw you off
the scent.
In reality, facial expressions tend to be extremely unreliable when
determining if someone is telling the truth or not. They are easy to fake and
don't offer much in the way of help when it comes to analyzing others.
However, as a tool for manipulation, facial expressions happen to be
somewhat useful. One general tip is to give people a big eyebrow raise and
light up your face with interest upon greeting people. Most people greet one
another with stern professionalism – it's such an easy tip but raising your
eyebrows and smiling at someone can create a lasting impression. There's
no need to be obsequious; don't coo or gaze. Just show comfort, confidence
and a project a genuinely positive reaction from seeing someone.
The power of positivity indicates to others that you have a willingness to be
constructive and helpful to others. People crave the influence of positive
people, as a positive attitude breeds achievement.
Reading Body Language
So, if the face is limited in reading the non-verbal communicative cues of a
person, where should you look? The answer happens to be relatively
simple: the feet.
Most people reflect their desire and their attention by pointing their feet. If
you sense something off about a conversation, and get the feeling someone
would like to be somewhere else, glance at their feet and, if they're pointing
towards the door, there's your clincher.
Naturally, you don't want to spend all your time staring at someone's feet.
But take a glance and use their position to recognize whether someone
wants to be in the conversation or not. If they're pointing right at you,
they're likely to be a lot more receptive to what you're saying.
If they're pointing away from you, it's possible you might as well be talking
to a brick wall. Now, the reason for that can vary. It doesn't necessarily
mean they don't like you; they might just be late for another appointment or
have other things on their mind. You need to use your learned analysis and
incorporate body language to form a complete picture.
Thank you for reading. You are now armed with
powerful techniques that you can use in many
different ways. Wield this knowledge wisely and
judiciously.
Sincerely,
Arthur Horn
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Copyright (c) 2019 Arthur Horn.
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This book does not offer advice, but merely provides information. The
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does the author encourage any person to pursue any specific course of
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