Secret tools to manipulate others

The secret tools to manipulate others

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.

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.