Psychological manipulation

Psychological manipulation is a type of social influence that aims to change the behavior or perception of others through indirect, deceptive, or underhanded tactics. By advancing the interests of the manipulator, often at another's expense, such methods could be considered exploitative and devious.
Social influence is not necessarily negative. For example, people such as friends, family and doctors, can try to persuade to change clearly unhelpful habits and behaviors. Social influence is generally perceived to be harmless when it respects the right of the influenced to accept or reject it, and is not unduly coercive. Depending on the context and motivations, social influence may constitute underhanded manipulation.
Theories.
According to psychology author George K. Simon in 1996, successful psychological manipulation primarily involves the manipulator:
According to Braiker.
Harriet B. Braiker (2004) identified the following ways that manipulators control their victims:
According to Simon.
George K. Simon (1996) identified the following manipulative techniques:
Vulnerabilities exploited.
According to Braiker's self-help book, manipulators exploit the following vulnerabilities (buttons) that may exist in victims:
According to Simon, manipulators exploit the following vulnerabilities that may exist in victims:
Manipulators generally take the time to scope out the characteristics and vulnerabilities of their victims.
Kantor advises in his 2006 book "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: How Antisocial Personality Disorder Affects All of Us" that vulnerability to psychopathic manipulators involves being too:
Motivations.
Manipulators can have various possible motivations, including but not limited to:
Psychopathy.
Being manipulative appears in Factor 1 of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL).
In the workplace.
One approach to management in general identifies a very fine, almost non-existent dividing line between management and manipulation.
A workplace psychopath may rapidly shift between emotions to manipulate people or to cause high anxiety.
The authors of the book "" describe a five-phase model of how a typical workplace psychopath climbs to and maintains power. In phase three (manipulation) the psychopath will create a scenario of "psychopathic fiction" where positive information about themselves and negative disinformation about others will be created, where one's role as a part of a network of pawns or patrons will be utilised and one will be groomed into accepting the psychopath's agenda.
Antisocial, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.
According to Kernberg, antisocial, borderline, and narcissistic personality disorders are all organized at a borderline level of personality organization, and the three share some common characterological deficits and overlapping personality traits, with deceitfulness and exceptional manipulative abilities being the most common traits among antisocial and narcissism. Borderline is emphasized by unintentional and dysfunctional manipulation, but stigma towards borderlines being deceitful still wrongfully persists. Antisocials, borderlines, and narcissists are often pathological liars. Other shared traits may include pathological narcissism, consistent irresponsibility, Machiavellianism, lack of empathy, cruelty, meanness, impulsivity, proneness to self-harm and addictions, interpersonal exploitation, hostility, anger and rage, vanity, emotional instability, rejection sensitivity, perfectionism, and the use of primitive defence mechanisms that are pathological and narcissistic. Common narcissistic defences include splitting, denial, projection, projective identification, primitive idealization and devaluation, distortion (including exaggeration, minimization and lies), and omnipotence.
Psychologist Marsha M. Linehan has stated that people with borderline personality disorder often exhibit behaviors which are not truly manipulative, but are erroneously interpreted as such. According to her, these behaviors often appear as unthinking manifestations of intense pain, and are often not deliberate as to be considered truly manipulative. In the DSM-V, manipulation was removed as a defining characteristic of borderline personality disorder.
Manipulative behavior is intrinsic to narcissists, who use manipulation to obtain power and narcissistic supply. Those with antisocial personalities will manipulate for material items, power, revenge, and a wide variety of other reasons.
Histrionic personality disorder.
People with histrionic personality disorder are usually high-functioning, both socially and professionally. They usually have good social skills, despite tending to use them to manipulate others into making them the center of attention.
Machiavellianism.
Machiavellianism is a term that some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person's tendency to be unemotional, uninfluenced by conventional morality and more prone to deceive and manipulate others. In the 1960s, Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis developed a test for measuring a person's level of Machiavellianism (sometimes referred to as the "Machiavelli test").