Topic summary
Psychological manipulation
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Manipulation (psychology).
In popular psychology
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 (crocodile tears), excessive apologizing or forced laugh or smile. According to psychology author George K. Simon, successful psychological manipulation primarily involves the manipulator: Simon states that manipulative individuals may use a variety of deceptive techniques to exert control or avoid accountability. Methods include lying by commission, lying by omission, pretending to be in denial, rationalization, selective inattention/selective attention, and diversion. Martin 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.