How To Detect Manipulative Tactics And Their Appeal To Emotions

Some of them can just be too subtle to notice.

The word “manipulate” has come up so frequently in human relationships. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word “manipulate” is defined as:

to control something or someone to your advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly.

As an engineer by profession, there are many different parameters that I can manipulate to improve the operating efficiency of a process. To speed up production and to reduce wastage.

In that same vein, I can then look into manipulating people to do things for my own benefit. Which, if I do actually do it, will raise eyebrows among many people. Because it does present a situation of unfairness or dishonesty to the manipulated person.

Chemical processes won’t feel the unfairness of being manipulated. But humans can, if they are wise enough to it.

Unfortunately, manipulation does occur frequently throughout our lives — whether we’re aware of it or not. The more subtle it is, the less likely we are to be aware of it — but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The subtlety of the manipulation is something that I believe we ought to be aware about, because it can drastically shift the way that we (as individuals) can perceive situations at hand.

How consumers operate is a big deal

We keep hearing of the term “herd immunity” when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. As it is said in this article:

When most of a population is immune to an infectious disease, this provides indirect protection — or herd immunity (also called herd protection) — to those who are not immune to the disease.

For example, if 80% of a population is immune to a virus, four out of every five people who encounter someone with the disease won’t get sick (and won’t spread the disease any further). In this way, the spread of infectious diseases is kept under control. Depending how contagious an infection is, usually 50% to 90% of a population needs immunity to achieve herd immunity.

But what about “herd mentality”?

If a sizeable proportion of a given population gets an iPhone, would it be easier for the others to flock towards the purchase of an iPhone? As this article does mention:

You’ve probably had a parent or teacher ask you, “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”

Of course not! That’s insane. You’re a strong and independent free-thinker. Why would you do that?

…but what if your friends weren’t jumping off a cliff?

Instead, what if they’re all buying the latest iPhone? Every day you see them playing with cool apps, taking great pictures, and talking about how great the phone is. After a while, it’s not so much a question of if you’re going to buy an iPhone but when.

This is herd mentality (or mob mentality).

And, unfortunately, the study of behavioural economics and consumer psychology doesn’t do herd mentality much help. When the dominant consumer mindset is exploited even more, as according to an article in Brand Quarterly:

Today, we know to be successful with our customer experience, we need new thinking. This new thinking can be summarized in the following three foundational concepts to today’s customer experience efforts:

People’s decisions as customers are driven by emotions, even if they appear to be rational.

To better understand why people do things, we need to understand the psychology of their decisions, especially if we want to improve their customer experience.

Buying decisions are far more complicated than we thought; believing that customers buy based only on price is a fallacy that can destroy your customer experience.

Behavioral economics takes the analysis of customer behavior past the surface attributes of price, product, placement, and promotion to a new level of depth and detail. However, this level is necessary to understand a customer’s rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological experience. Consumer psychology adds to this an extensive analysis of how internal and external influences further affect the outcome. Together, they provide a robust understanding of all that contributed to the buying decision.

Because if most people (the herd) were driven by an emotional desire to purchase an item that they didn’t really need, then understanding that concept from a consumer psychology standpoint would allow me to design advertisements that can manipulate them into parting with their money on my product, so that I’d be able to exploit their psychology to maximise my profits on a product — even if it weren’t useful at all.

Would you purchase used bath water, for instance? I wouldn’t.

But yet an Instagram influencer did get her bath water sold, according to The Guardian:

Belle Delphine, the social media star and so-called “gamer girl”, made headlines this week for selling her used bath water online.

Delphine, 19, who has a global following (4.2 million on Instagram), announced she would be selling $30 bottles of “bath water for all you thirsty gamer boys” in an Instagram post that garnered more than 500,000 likes.

Although the sale was widely mocked, the bottles of bath water sold out immediately. But who’s buying it?

It’s a good tactic of manipulation right there. As a “thirsty gamer boy”, I might be none the wiser if it really was used bath water or if it were just a bottle of tap water with some added soap.

But I’d be $30 poorer just to fuel my emotional “thirst”.

Using authority figures to market products is also massively important.

Now, if we weren’t medically trained — or rather, if we didn’t have a single inkling about how our bodies operated, would we treat the medical professional as an authority figure about all things health-related?

After all, we do go for doctors’ consultations with regards to various ailments that our bodies are facing. And doctors do prescribe medications that address the symptoms of the problems that we’re facing.

So we do consider them as authority figures about various health-related issues in life — even if they can slip up and provide the wrong diagnoses.

But the thing is — once the medications are sold, there is zero chance of getting a refund.

After all, we don’t want the medications to be contaminated or tampered with. The United States Food And Drug Administration has this to say about the returns of prescription drugs:

A pharmacist should not return drugs products to his stock once they have been out of his possession. It could be a dangerous practice for pharmacists to accept and return to stock the unused portions of prescriptions that are returned by patrons, because he would no longer have any assurance of the strength, quality, purity or identity of the articles.

Many state boards of pharmacy have issued regulations specifically forbidding the practice. We endorse the actions of these State boards as being in the interest of public health.

The pharmacist or doctor dispensing a drug is legally responsible for all hazards of contamination or adulteration that may arise, should he mix returned portions of drugs to his shelf stocks. Some of our investigations in the past have shown that drugs returned by patrons and subsequently resold by the pharmacist were responsible for injuries.

And that’s why most doctors do have the caveat that one is allowed to request a second opinion elsewhere — because their initial diagnoses may not be accurate.

But what about other inaccurate things that doctors have learnt over the years that they’re treating as “fact”?

For example, the idea that eggs raise cholesterol?

Propagating that myth is one thing…

Having a herd to enforce that myth is yet a second layer of misinformation.

It’s one thing to believe in something — it’s a whole new thing to propagate that idea, especially when one buys into the idea passionately enough.

We can only look at what Donald Trump’s most fanatical supporters were doing at the Capitol Building to see what an ugly propagation of Make America Great Again (MAGA) can do. It was a great tactic for Trump to use social media to pull that off, though.

But it also requires dedication and passion to believe in an idea and to carry out ridiculous actions to reinforce that idea… do we not call that “love”, too?

Because love is a mix of emotions and passion

Being fuelled by that cocktail of emotions and passion can cause me to lose quite a fair bit of my cognitive reasoning skills, that I must admit.

And it’s doubtless that we’ve heard this line before:

If you loved me, you would do ABC…

And that’s a big classic red flag sign of manipulation right there.

Does loving someone equate to doing specific things just to please them?

That’s what manipulation tactics would have us believe, would it?

For example, the giving of flowers on Valentine’s Day as a romantic gesture…

A flower is “the part of a seed plant comprising the reproductive organs and their envelopes if any, especially when such envelopes are more or less conspicuous in form and color”.

We’re giving it on a day that is meant to honour the death of Christian martyrs…

If we were to examine the situation logically, we’d see that the day itself ought to be observed as a religious thing, and not a romantic thing.

And we choose to give dead parts of reproductive organs to “show our love”. Yup, they ain’t great as fertility symbols either.

But we’ve already been manipulated into thinking that flowers are romantic for Valentine’s Day, it’s actually a lucrative day not just for florists, but, according to Fox Business:

The retail industries that stand to see big sales boost during the holiday are jewelry at $3.9 billion, clothing/lingerie at $2.1 billion, flowers at $1.9 billion, candy at $1.8 billion, gift cards at $1.3 billion and greeting cards at $933 million.

These implicit forms of manipulation that exist aren’t that great for us financially, isn’t it? But it appeals to the emotions of the other party…

So even if we do want to be logical, we’d have to turn stupid every once in a while.

Because… the things we do for love, emotions and passion cannot be measured quantitatively on a logical yardstick!

Joel Yong, PhD, is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com in Kindle format) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about, and will then proceed to deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should.

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