Manipulation (psychology)

In psychology, manipulation is defined as an action designed to influence or control another person, usually in an underhanded or subtle manner which facilitates one's personal aims. Methods someone may use to manipulate another person may include seduction, suggestion, coercion, and blackmail. Manipulation is generally considered a dishonest form of social influence as it is used at the expense of others. Humans are inherently capable of manipulative and deceptive behavior, with the main differences being that of specific personality characteristics or disorders.

Etymology

By 1730, the word manipulation was used to refer to a method of digging ore. The term derives from the French manipulation, which in turn comes from manipule, meaning "handful", a unit of measure used by pharmacists, later having a sense by 1828 of handling or managing people for one's own purposes. The word manipulate originated in 1827 as a back-formation from manipulation, initially meaning "to handle skillfully by hand." By 1864, its usage had expanded to include the figurative sense of "to manage or influence, especially for one's own advantage." The word is used in various different senses, but today it is most often used in psychological contexts.

Differentiation

Manipulation differs from general influence and persuasion. Manipulation, unlike persuasion, typically involves exploiting the vulnerabilities of an individual. Non-manipulative influence is generally perceived to be harmless and it is not seen as unduly coercive to the individual's right of acceptance or rejection of influence. Persuasion is the ability to move others to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. Persuasion often attempts to influence a person's beliefs, religion, motivations, or behavior. Influence and persuasion are neither viewed as positive nor negative, unlike manipulation which is viewed as negative.

Elements of manipulation

While the motivations for manipulation are mostly self-serving, certain styles of social influence can be intended to be to the benefit of others. Manipulation can be defined as the use of strategies to further personal driven goals at the expense of others and is usually considered antisocial behavior. Pro-social behavior is a voluntary act intended to help or benefit another individual or group of individuals and is an important part of empathy.
Manipulative behavior is fundamentally intentional, with the manipulator knowing full well the consequences of their actions, and what they want out of the person being manipulated.
Different measures of manipulativeness focus on different aspects or expressions of manipulation and tend to paint slightly different pictures of its predictors. Features such as low empathy, high narcissism, use of self-serving rationalizations, and an interpersonal style marked by high agency and low communion are consistent across measures.
A study by Buss, et al. explored how individuals use manipulation to shape their environments to fit their personal characteristics. Across two studies, researchers identified six main manipulation tactics: charm, silent treatment, coercion, reason, regression, and debasement. These tactics were consistent across different situations, with charm commonly used to initiate behavior and coercion or silent treatment used to stop it. The use of these tactics was linked to personality traits such as Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness, and was consistent across self-reports and observer ratings. Another paper investigated the link between one's personality and social processes, and it concluded that "persons are not passive recipients of environmental presses" and that "persons actively avoid some social situations and selectively enter others", and that people "elicit and manipulate the social behavior of persons who reside in situations that have been selected."
Another study by Buss aimed to achieve three primary objectives, to identify the manipulation tactics commonly employed in close interpersonal relationships; to empirically examine the extent to which these tactics are general or specific across different relationship types, including romantic partners, friends, and parents; and to explore the associations between the use of manipulation tactics and the Big Five personality traits. Twelve distinct manipulation tactics were identified through separate factor analyses of two instruments derived from different data sources. These included six tactics Charm, Reason, Coercion, Silent Treatment, Debasement, Regression, and six additional tactics: Responsibility Invocation, Reciprocity, Monetary Reward, Pleasure Induction, Social Comparison, and Hardball. Personality traits were assessed using three sources of data: self-reports, spouse reports, and evaluations by independent interviewers. The findings revealed consistent associations between personality dimensions and manipulation strategies. Specifically, Surgency was linked to Coercion and Responsibility Invocation; Desurgency to Debasement; Agreeableness to Pleasure Induction; Disagreeableness to Coercion; Conscientiousness to Reason; Emotional Instability to Regression; and Intellect-Openness to Reason.

In popular psychology

Harriet B. Braiker
Harriet B. Braiker identified the following ways that manipulators control their victims, with some of them including positive reinforcement, which includes praise, superficial charm, superficial sympathy, excessive apologizing or forced laugh or smile, negative reinforcement which involves removing one from a negative situation as a reward, gaslighting, punishing the victim, emotional blackmail, and guilt tripping.
George K. Simon
According to psychology author George K. Simon, successful psychological manipulation primarily involves the manipulator:

Concealing aggressive intentions and behaviors and being affable.
Knowing the psychological vulnerabilities of the victim to determine which tactics are likely to be the most effective.
Having a sufficient level of ruthlessness to have no qualms about causing harm to the victim if necessary.

Simon states that manipulative individuals may use a variety of deceptive techniques to exert control or avoid accountability. One such method is lying by commission, where someone deliberately makes a false statement or provides misleading information with the intent to deceive. This involves actively stating something untrue rather than simply omitting the truth. Manipulative tactics also include lying by omission, pretending to be in denial, where the manipulator refuses to admit any wrongdoing, rationalization, in which the manipulator justifies inappropriate behavior with seemingly logical excuses, selective inattention/selective attention, and diversion, which is a tactic in which the manipulator avoids giving a direct answer and instead steers the conversation toward a different topic.
Martin Kantor
Kantor advises in his 2006 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: How Antisocial Personality Disorder Affects All of Us that vulnerability to psychopathic manipulators can be due to being too dependent on others, having a lack of maturity, being naïve, impressionable, trusting, impulsive, altruistic, or greedy.

Assessment tools

MACH-IV

Manipulativeness is a primary feature found in the Machiavellianism construct. The MACH-IV, conceptualized by Richard Christie and Florence Geis, is a popular and widely used psychological measure of manipulative and deceptive behavior.

Emotional manipulation scale

The emotional manipulation scale is a ten-item questionnaire developed in 2006 through factor analysis, primarily to measure one's tendency to use emotions to their advantage in controlling others. At the time of publication, emotional intelligence assessments did not specifically examine manipulative behavior and were instead predominantly focussed on Big Five personality trait assessment.

Managing the emotions of others scale

The "Managing the Emotions of Others Scale" was developed in 2013 through factor analysis to measure the ability to change emotions of others. The survey questions measure six categories: mood enhancement, mood worsening, concealing emotions, capacity for inauthenticity, poor emotion skills, and using diversion to enhance mood. The enhancement, worsening and diversion categories have been used to identify the ability and willingness of manipulative behavior. The MEOS has also been used for assessing emotional intelligence, and has been compared to the HEXACO model of personality structure, for which the capacity for inauthenticity category in the MEOS was found to correspond to low honesty-humility scores on the HEXACO.

The SD3 and the Dirty Dozen

The dark triad Dirty Dozen and the Short Dark Triad also measures a callous, manipulative, self oriented style.

Other measures

There are several measures that assess interpersonally manipulative characteristics. Measures of psychopathy and narcissism have their own subscales that address manipulation. Other examples include the Honesty-Humility subscale on the HEXACO model of personality, the Agreeableness factor in the Big Five personality test, and on certain factors of the MMPI.

In mental disorders

Personality disorders

Manipulative behavior is cited as one factor contributing to the reluctance of some psychiatric professionals to work with individuals diagnosed with personality disorders. Many times this behavior can elicit strong negative emotional reactions, potentially hindering effective care and treatment.
Manipulative tendencies may derive from cluster B personality disorders such as narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Manipulative behavior has also been related with one's level of emotional intelligence. Discussion of manipulation may vary depending on which behavior is specifically included, and whether one is referring to the general population or in clinical contexts.
Under the ICD-11 classification of personality disorders, personality disorder is diagnosed dimensionally based on severity levels, with trait qualifiers providing additional specification in regards to how the pathology manifests itself. One of these is Dissociality, of which the aspect lack of empathy is characterized by deceitful, manipulative and exploitative behaviors.