20 Manipulation Techniques You Need To Learn | Power Dynamics™

Manipulation is not an anomaly; it’s the norm.

In any social species, cooperation, competition, or exchanges of value create powerful incentives for manipulation.

Most discussions of manipulation focus on bad actors, the dynamics of manipulation run deeper to include context and asymmetric payoffs of cooperation.

This article maps manipulation at its structural level, as a system of recurring dynamics that appear in relationships, organizations, markets, media, and ideology.

Let’s start.

Contents

• Intro
• Interpersonal Manipulation
  • Social Scalping
• Psychological Manipulation
  • Normative Cognitive Restructuring
  • Emotional Manipulation
• Social Manipulation
  • Prosocial Mask & Free-riding
  • Competitors Suppression
• Sexual Manipulation
  • Competition & ‘Market Clearing’
  • Cultural Wars For Control
  • Dating & Relationships Manipulation
• Business Manipulation
  • Employees Manipulation
• Leadership Manipulation
  • Group Identification: Giving Up Self-Interest
  • Channeling Anger For Power & Attention
  • Intrinsic Motivation
• Self-Manipulation
• Socio-Cultural Manipulation
• Benefits and Risks
• Spotting & Avoiding Manipulation
  • Manipulation As A Life Skill

Intro

Manipulation is a form of influence that disguises objective truth for selfish ends, and can be costly to the receiver

Manipulation is omnipresent and embedded in human socialization and communication, and it’s as natural as life itself.

Manipulation is bound to evolve in any complex organism. In nature, whenever there is a “signal” (like a bird’s song or a human’s promise), there is an evolutionary incentive to fake that signal to get the reward without the cost or the value to back it up.

Manipulation further grows and spreads in social animals that cooperate.Cooperation must emerge against the constant threat of defection. But manipulation belongs to cooperation just as much as it does to cheating: it helps the manipulator to control others, and get more of the cooperative pie.

Many forms of manipulation are also innate. And children cry, get in between parents, and act seductive to maintain love and gain extra resources (Pinker, 1997).

Read more:

• Manipulation vs persuasion
• Why most manipulation resources such

Let’s now explore some of the main forms of manipulation:

Interpersonal Manipulation

Interpersonal manipulation refers to manipulation between individuals, in a constant arms race between deception and detection.

Social Scalping

A form of social exchange manipulation to inflate one’s contribution and devalue the victim’s contribution to take more and give less

Social scalping, short of ‘social exchange scalping’ exploits the social exchange norms of reciprocity (Cialdini, 1994), feelings of indebtedness, and people’s natural ‘social accounting’ to keep track of give and take.

The manipulator tries to inflate the value he gives while deflating the value he receives, and to inflate other people’s debt with him while deflating his debts with others.

Debt Inflating Examples

Debt inflating seeks to increase the victim’s burden of repayment.Some techniques include:

1. 🗨️ ‘It took me 3 days of 12h work a day’ <— Inflates the costs of the favor
2. 🗨️ ‘This is just for you, I’m making an exception’ <— Make the favor feel special
3. 🗨️ ‘This was good for you wasn’t it?’ <— ‘Thread expands’ the usefulness of their favor

Here’s an overview of social exchange manipulation:

Thanks to Ali & Matthew on the infographics thread

Some real-life examples:

• ⛏️ Tinder player seeks to manipulate the TPM community
• ⛏️ Woman spins leftover into a gift
• ⛏️ Social scalping counter-strategy

Interpersonal Manipulation Tactics

There are countless manipulation tactics, just to name some examples:

• Get denied to deny: propose something they’re forced to say “no” to deny their future, fair request
• Manipulative win-win frames: fake collaboration while competing or trying to exploit. ⛏️ Example: “stop being so defensive“
• Manipulative tit for that: offer something useless just to ask for something valuable in return
  • Manipulative Self-Disclosure: offer unrequested personal information to then ask for the victim’s more valuable information. ⛏️ Example: manipulative informational tit for tat

Read more:

• Manipulation tactics

Psychological Manipulation

Psychological manipulation changes targets states, emotions, or beliefs.Many forms of manipulation are psychological in nature.

Normative Cognitive Restructuring

To change a target’s system of moral and beliefs for those preferred by the manipulator

There are two forms:

• Manipulative shaming to frame the target’s beliefs and morals as immoral and inferior
• Manipulative moralizing, presenting the preferred norms as morally superior

They work best when delivered by a high-power, authoritative figure, like a ‘judge‘. Judgments of ‘good’ or ‘not good’ are used to change the target’s norms of reference, and gain his conformity.

Public Shaming

Concentrated, intense, and public moralizing browbeats targets into compliance while setting the norms for everyone else.It’s the psychological version of public hanging, setting the normative precedent for everyone to obey.An example here:

Julien Blanc shamed on CNN

Emotional Manipulation

Emotional manipulation uses emotions to gain leverage or compel the target into action that benefits the manipulator.

Some examples include:

• Provoking to get an emotional reaction from the target. It can be used to induce mistakes, make the target look unhinged, or blame the target for aggressiveness
• Inducing fear with aggression, veiled threats
• Guilt tripping & pity plays: use others’ conscience and sense of duty to manipulate behavior

A real-life example of guilt-tripping:

Research suggests guilt tripping can work, but it can also easily backfire, and reeks of manipulation (Singh, Crisafulli, & Quamina, 2020).

Also read:

• Emotional manipulation
• Guilt-tripping culture: breaking free from social guilt
• Frame control

Social Manipulation

Social manipulation refers to manipulation between individuals and groups, or between and among groups.

Prosocial Mask & Free-riding

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To encourage individually costly prosocial efforts, while defecting or gaining from others’ effort

Prosocial free-riding exploits the asymmetrical payoffs of group contributions vs. selfish behavior.Everyone gains with universal contribution, but the manipulator gains more by promoting contribution, while defecting himself.

The manipulator also gains social points by looking selfless and prosocial.

⚠️ In-group freeriding

To encourage in-group support that’s costly to the target, but beneficial to the manipulator

Sometimes they take the form of nasty in-group and out-group frames that increase social combativeness, make people bitter and angry, and may even harm humanity.

Here are some examples:

• Politicians’ patriotism: to encourage giving and fighting for ‘the country’, empowering those who lead that country
• ‘Honor’ for dead soldiers: generals and politicians promote nationalism and tribal ‘honor’, but only soldiers on the ground risk their lives
• Proxy warfare, stoking hatred in others to let them fight the war for you 🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s note: I see this dynamic in some branches of feminism and manosphere red pill, enticing others to join the influencer’s personal war

Understanding this dynamic is not a call to join an opposing ideology, but to exit manipulative games altogether.

Competitors Suppression

Spreading subpar information and offering subpar advice to disempower the competition

Some examples include:

• Naive self-help: devoid of crucial knowledge for life effectiveness like manipulation and power dynamics
• Weakness & withdrawal as virtue, making targets feel good for exiting the competition⛏️ Examples: monk mode, NoFap (see video 📽️ ‘why NoFap can be manipulative‘)

Read more:

• Naive self-help
• Ceiling effect
• Law of balance

Sexual Manipulation

Sexual manipulation seeks selfish gains on dating and reproduction, and may be the main driver behind all social discourse and hierarchy-formation.Write Pratto and Sidanius:

intrasexual competition among males may encourage men (…) control women’s sexual and reproductive behavior, but also to form (…) coalitions against outgroup males (…) will result (…) in class stratification among men.

While oppression can be part of it, much of that competition is more subtle, based on narrative control and manipulation.

Competition & ‘Market Clearing’

There are two types of sexual manipulation:

• Intra-sexual manipulation to disempower same-sex individuals
• Intersexual manipulation to disempower or influence the opposite gender

Value and ideologies are frequently used as competitors suppression.For example, a woman promoting ‘extreme independence’ to her peers is performing a ‘market-clearing move’—reducing the number and effectiveness of active competitors for high-value mates while she herself may secretly defect from those same rules.

Some examples:

• Slut-shaming (women on women): to discourage short-term dating and maintain more negotiaton leverage for long-term dating
  • Slut-shaming (men on women) to limit sexuality and increase the odds of finding a loyal partner
• Feminist ‘strength as a virtue’: ‘strength and independence‘ in women can decrease dating options. The manipulator can defect, or avoid being the outcast for choosing a single or ‘career-first’ life
• Rational males quitting dating: framing women as manipulative and untrustworthy discourages men from dating and lowers the competition for the manipulator.
• Body positivity and body shaming, See here:

Her: I wonder why women supported me in my ‘all in’ journey <— The support handicaps the target and conveniently benefits the manipulator

Read more:

• Sexual conflict

Cultural Wars For Control

Much public discourse is self-interested manipulation framed as moral virtue.

Writes Atari in The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology:

(…) a culture of honor (…) evolved in response to the adaptive problem of mate retention (…) religion may function as a strategy to restrict women’s mating opportunities

While self-interest for the majority sometimes splits along gender lines, it must not always be the case. Quoting The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology:

parents support ideas and practices that benefit their offspring. For example, families with single, adult daughters are more likely to support women’s reproductive rights, whereas families with more adult men are likely to oppose those rights (Betzig & Lombardo, 1992)

“A” stands for “adulteress”. The scarlet letter is an example of socio-cultural manipulation to repress sexual freedoms and ensure fidelity

Dating & Relationships Manipulation

Early pick-up artists studied hypnosis to improve their dating outcomes (Strauss, 2005)

Few, if any, date with maximum honesty and genuineness. But while basic manipulation is expected, some take it to more ‘dark psychology‘ levels. Some manipulative tactics include:

• Jealousy-stoking: triangulation, flirting with others, talking about exes, etc.
• Disempowering the target: ‘negging’, ignoring, etc.

Read more:

• Dating red flags
• Games women play
• Psychopaths’ sexual strategy

Relationship Manipulation

Manipulation in relationships can be divided in:

• Increasing control
  • Isolation from support
  • Increasing dependency, for example, convincing to give up one’s job
• Disempowering the partner
  • Lowering self-esteem with criticism, or belittling achievements
  • Gaslighting

Dig deeper:

• Women’s relationship control strategies
• Becoming the prize

Business Manipulation

Business manipulation can be understood at different levels:

• Lobbying to get undue support or protection, nationalizing costs (externalities) while privatizing the profits
• Public relations to look more moral and virtuous
• Marketing:
  • Brand emotional association is the higher strategy
  • Response marketing is the tactical level (scarcity, promotions, experts’ opinions, etc.)

An interesting example of a marketing tactic:

This marketer pretends to personally care about a prospect to increase attendances adn conversions

Learn more:

• Manipulative negotiation tactics
• Corporate manipulation

Companies gain from workers’ prosociality and teamwork at the expense of selfish pursuits. That creates fertile ground for manipulation

Employees Manipulation

Owners and employees have some converging interests, and several diverging interests that promote manipulation.For example:

• ‘Big family’ frames: owners benefit when employees feel like a family because people give much more to family
• HR as employees’ support, instead of a tool of management

Example: Ray Dalio’s ‘principles’In his book Ray Dalio’s principle for his company was “what’s good for the whole is good”. But Ray Dalio owns the whole. This is the principle of the owner/employee incentive misalignment.Leadership manipulation refers to the manipulation of followers and in-group members.

Leadership Manipulation

While leaders and followers share some interests, the areas of diverging interests create a fertile ground for manipulation.

Group Identification: Giving Up Self-Interest

Leaders encourage individuals to give up up their individuated identities for group identities

The more followers identify with the group, the more their self-interest becomes the interest of the group.That benefits the group and the leader, but it rarely benefits the individuals.Some tactics include:

• “We” & “Us” talk
• Individual disempowerment to increase group dependence
• Ingroup vs outgroup frames and making up enemies, which increases dependence and cohesion (Haslam, 2006)
• High powers and missions to serve, and against which individuals don’t matter. Like in religious cults

Also read:

• Healthy individualism as the solution

Fake Prototipicality

Leaders get the largest share of the group’s collaboration returns, but hide their special status and play up the similarity with other group members.

Thus, you get PR stunts like CEOs serving fries or wartime leader photo-opping on the frontlines.

Leaders often use ‘costumes’ (military uniforms, factory jumpsuits) to bridge the status gap of a top 0.1% and manufacture a false sense of shared struggle

Leading By Example, Hiding The Payoffs

Leaders can be more honest in their prosociality because of the status-related asymmetric returns of prosociality.Such as, as the main beneficiary of the group’s payoffs, prosociality provides higher payoffs to leaders than to lower-status followers.

Thus, leaders can ‘lead by example’ because they hide or downplay their higher payoffs.

Channeling Anger For Power & Attention

Populist leaders inflate enemies and troubles and channel people’s discontent into the promise of positive revolt and change.

Angry and resentful men who feel short-changed by the demonized group are easier to mobilize, radicalize, and leverage.

The more discontent available or stoked, the more extreme the leader who emerges.Historical examples could be Robespierre, Savonarola, Lenin, Hitler, etc. However, these dynamics apply at all levels, from influencer fueling and channeling bitterness to angry social media posts chasing likes.

Also read:

• Populism power dynamics

Intrinsic Motivation

Higher motivation = lower pay

Effective leaders use intrinsic motivation to get the most out of their team, and manipulative leaders exploit the same dynamics to underpay the team.

The principle is this:

⚖️ The more intrinsic motivation you elicit, the less material benefits people require

In the simplest terms, psychological motivation substitutes material compensation. At the highest level, the target is happy to do the work without even wanting any material benefit.

This is how the most successful leaders and strategists operate. Men and women with the strongest relationships don’t criticize their partners, they make them feel good to be with them, or to protect and provide.

Great leadership and manipulative leadership share the same foundational dynamicsIntrinsic motivation is crucial for any leader, including value-adding ones. This is why we say that “great leadership is great manipulation“. But the same principles can be used to extract maximum resources from followers, underpay them, and benefit poor leaders and goals.

Some tactics:

• Shine up and praise down: ‘kiss up and kick down’ lacks sophistication and demotivates the team. Strategic operators instead shine up and praise down to combine the best of both worlds
• Higher goals that attract and motivate people beyond self-interest
• Patriotism and contribution as a value, so people exchange hard work for more ethereal social prestige

Self-Manipulation

Self-manipulation is both the best source of manipulation and a major source of disempowerment.

Robert Trivers first proposed and later tested that self-deception, or believing in a certain lie, better allows one to convince others.But self-manipulation is also costly when we avoid facing real issues. For example:

• 🗨️ She’s not so bad, she just got emotional and broke all our dishes <— Minimizing out-of-control emotionality
• 🗨️ She had an abusive father, I must just keep loving her <— Psychologizing abusive behavior away

Integrating Your Manipulative Tendencies

Believing you have no drive to manipulate others is also a form of self-manipulation.It’s better instead to own up to your own drive to power and control, and channel it for better ends.

Socio-Cultural Manipulation

Individuals and groups seek to change the culture to what they prefer or benefits them most.For example:

• Success is about character and hard work: successful people like this frame because it makes them look more virtuous and higher value (as opposed to strategic or lucky)
• Success is earned: framing the underclass as high in warmth, but low in competence can help stabilize the status quo (Fiske and Cuddy, 2002; Sapolsky, 2017)
• Framing: framing techniques change the way people think about issues. For example, when expressions such as “tax relief” or “pro-life” spread, conservatives are more likely to win debates and influence policy (Lakoff, 2004)

Media Manipulation

The media operates under a widespread belief that it reports information and news.In truth, the simple selection of what to report is a form of bias (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). Plus, media’s incentive to capture attention naturally leads to forms of manipulation such as:

• Sensationalism: “new record”, “never seen before”, “first woman ever to…”
• Fear-mongering: fear sells and attracts viewers. The media overstates risks while downplaying long-term, positive trends (Pinker, 2018)

Greta may have been a victim of sensationalist media and the weaponization of youthful Idealism. Global warming is a serious issue we must tackle, but better doing so with rationality and level-headedness

Benefits and Risks

Manipulation offers large benefits, but as for most things, there are risks and costs, including:

• Exclusion from cooperative circles if overdone
  • Reputational loss. 🙋🏼‍♂️ See a real-life example from my brother
  • Loss of high-quality cooperators: high-quality men and women don’t like inveterate manipulators
• Poorer relationships. The longer the relationship, the higher the odds of being found out
  • Potential for lower life quality since good relationships are crucial to health
• Weakness when it covers a lack of assertiveness: unassertive people often come across as sneakier/manipulative trying to get their needs met, without direct talk

These costs are on a spectrum depending on frequency, gravity, and context.In general, blatant and constant manipulation is a poor strategy, but:

Strategic manipulators still enjoy a life edgeIt would be naive to think that because of the obvious costs, manipulation is a losing strategy. Instead, costs and payoffs largely come down to skills and calibration. The advanced player may only manipulate in competitive settings and with the right targets, while enjoying close, genuine relationships.In general, poor manipulators bear the costs, and skilled ones get most of the benefits.

Spotting & Avoiding Manipulation

Steps to help you recognize and avoid manipulation:

1. Read people’s character, because people differ. For example, dark triads (narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths) tend to manipulate more (Lyons, 2019).
2. Develop critical thinking ⛏️ Example: critical thinking vs. marketing
3. Think in terms of power and exchanges, leverage, and next steps
   • Always ask ‘what’s in it for me’, and consider ‘what’s in it for them‘
4. Look at areas of diverging interest, where most manipulation attempts cluster⛏️ Conflicts of interest at work
5. Quit projecting your own ‘goodness’ into the world: honest people project too much honesty in others and default for “truth by default interpretations” (Levine, 2014)
   • Always ask about possible second motives

Helpful resources:

• Smart cooperator
• Outsmarting a manipulator

Can you reform a manipulator?

Redemption is possible with good and moral people and when you have leverage over them.

Change is less likely with low leverage, when genetic influences are present, and with conscious manipulators. Conscious manipulators tend to be “ego-congruent“, and some may even consider manipulativeness a strength. In these cases, you must constantly call out the manipulation. And at that point, you may want to consider whether the relationship is even worth it.

Manipulation As A Life Skill

Manipulation is a foundational life skill for self-defense and for competing against others who are not honorable.

Sometimes manipulation is also fair to use, and the same principles can be used for honorable and value-adding ends.For example, guilt tripping may be used to raise money for a good pro-social cause.

The inability to manipulate doesn’t make you virtuous. It only makes you ineffective, and a target for manipulator

-The Power Moves

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