Persuasion is the effort to convince another person to change their
actions.
The problem with persuasion alone is that, so often, it is obvious to the
person that you have an incentive to convince them. They believe that you
stand to gain from the persuasion, which is unhelpful when trying to
manipulate a friendly or neutral party, and devastating when trying to
manipulate a rival.
Persuasion is most useful when you can reveal new information to change
the perception of others. If someone is likely to change their course based
on new information or new understandings of information, which you can
provide, persuasion then has a chance of success. This means providing
information which will affect either the goals of another party, or the
actions they will take to achieve them.
The only other scenario is when another party believes that your goals
somehow have a positive relationship with their own. In this case, they may
trust your judgment, and your intentions, and take up your cause.
This is great when you genuinely have new information, or the trust of
another party. But on many occasions, you won’t. On those occasions,
persuasion is only going to be effective when combined with other tools,
such as deception. That means attempting to persuade someone based on a
lie or partial truth. Once again, you are revealing new information or
leading someone to believe your goals align with theirs, but in truth you are
fabricating or hiding elements.
Deception
This is the third tool for manipulation. It forms the core of so many
approaches to manipulation and interacts with both power and persuasion
significantly.
Deception is the control of information.
Start thinking objectively and it becomes possible to imagine people as
machines. The machines are designed to achieve goals, and will do so by
reacting to inputs (information) and creating outputs (actions). If you
control the inputs, by controlling that information, you can deceive. With
that deception, you can change the outputs, resulting in different actions.
The reason deception takes a central role in manipulation is that it is
important for parties you manipulate to believe their actions are furthering
their own interests. Otherwise, they have no reason to take those actions.
The objective of deception is to control information in such a way that the
information they receive leads them to actions which further your interests.
Naturally, the main danger, with deception, is being discovered. For this
reason, deception is often best avoided where possible and, when used, to
be carefully controlled. An ideal deception would have minimal risk and
maximum reward, with plausible deniability if found out. There is also the
risk that lies can lead to further lies, in order to cover up the original
deception; in this case, the risk swells while the reward remains the same
and what might have seemed like a good idea at first can become a terrible
decision.
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