The Psychology of Manipulation: How to Become Manipulation Resistant

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened to before, welcome back. Nobody wants to be easy to manipulate. But the uncomfortable reality is that most manipulation does not feel like manipulation. It feels like love or guilt or maybe just a really good opportunity. The manipulator might be somebody that you trust, like a partner or a parent, a political figure, or an influencer. Hey, am I an influencer? Who knows whose content you happen to like? The bad news is that everybody can be manipulated. Research suggests that believing that you're too smart or too cynical to be fooled actually makes you easier to fool.

0:47Forrest Hanson: But the good news is that anyone can also become manipulation resistant. And the best way to do that is by learning the manipulator's playbook. That's what we're going to be doing today. We'll walk through some common tactics, look at what makes somebody more or less manipulatable, and cover how to build the skills that will help you become a little bit more difficult to manipulate. And to help us do that, I'm joined by clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. So dad, how are you doing today?

1:14Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm good, and I'm fascinated by this topic and really happy that we're getting into it.

1:19Forrest Hanson: Same. We had a really good conversation about it yesterday when we started kind of figuring out what we wanted to talk about. I wanted to start by asking you, Dad, one of the things that we were kind of talking about a little bit yesterday, which is what's the difference between manipulation and other more normal forms of influence, particularly inside of relationships where we're constantly saying, you know, hey, I want to go to this restaurant, not that restaurant, and I'm kind of trying to talk you into it or whatever your version of that is.

1:45Dr. Rick Hanson: I think the essence of manipulation is deception. So one form of deception would be to act as if you're operating in the best interest of another person when actually you're not there in good faith and you're trying to get something for yourself. Maybe you also fake that they're a kind of a thou to you, but you're really treating them as an it that you are using toward your own ends.

2:10Forrest Hanson: Totally. I think that's a great sort of simple definition of it. Some other stuff that I bumped into as I was, like you were saying, doing some background for this. One of the big things I think is about safety. Can you say no without being heavily punished for it? And I think that punishment and consequence could be maybe slightly different things here. Of course, we say no to things all the time, and there are consequences associated with our choices. If we say no to going somewhere with our friends, we won't have that experience. But afterwards, they're not going to come to us and heavily punish us for not participating in that kind of a thing.

2:42Forrest Hanson: Also, I think there's an aspect here that's about general fairness inside of a relationship that you have with somebody else, inside of the kind of interaction that you're having, where we both get to apply some degree of power to each other, if that's the standard that we've created. So if I'm trying to talk Elizabeth into something, she's also able to try to talk me into something. And if you have relationships where the power is constantly flowing one direction, that's, I just think, something to maybe keep an eye on here. Have you bumped into anything related to this, even when you were doing couples counseling, dad?

3:12Forrest Hanson: How did some of these dynamics come up?

3:14Dr. Rick Hanson: classic issue, especially early in dating, for example, A and B are dating, let's say. And the truth is, A already knows that they don't want, you know, this is not going to be a long-term relationship. This is going to be a fling for a few weeks, let's say. And B would love to have it be more and is kind of thinking that it's going to be more. And on the basis of believing that there will be more in the offering. B is open to sex or open to spending time with A, and A knows that there's going to be nothing more in the offering. And A also knows that if B knew that, B would disengage. B would cut their losses and say, no, I'm looking for a long-term partner.

4:01But they don't disclose what's really going on to B, right?

4:07Dr. Rick Hanson: That's a kind of manipulation. and people develop pretty hard feelings about it, understandably afterward. So definitely situations like that. Manipulation shows up sometimes in the form of guilt tripping. Oh, I guess I'll just do the dishes again for everyone rather than just coming straight out and saying, hey, other people need to pull their weight around here, right? It's like emotional manipulation around guilt tripping is pretty common too. I don't know.

4:37Forrest Hanson: How about you? The way I see people really talk about this is in relationships, particularly with people who have more dark triad-y traits. We did an episode on the dark triad a couple of years ago, so that's narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy, if I'm remembering correctly. And particularly manipulation is a word that people will associate with narcissism a lot. Yeah, when I think about extreme versions of this, it's people who are often kind of charming, and they're also kind of domineering, and their words don't mean

5:13Dr. Rick Hanson: anything to them. They just generate words for some kind of purpose. But their word is not good in the sense that they stand by their word. You know, when people old school would say, my word is good. You know, we can shake on it. We don't even need any lawyers here. And it's real. You know, my word is good, right? And you can trust my word. But there are people, I think, including in this era in which we live that's so focused on bamboozling and misinformation, disinformation. Relative truth. Yeah, trolling, spinning people up. rather than engaging discussions in a good faith kind of way, in which there's a shared interest in getting at truth and the common good.

5:53Forrest Hanson: That's some on the kinds of people who might be more likely to be a bit manipulative. I want to kind of turn it around during most of this episode and focus on the person being manipulated. Because again, we've done episodes on narcissism and dark triad and that kind of stuff. I'm more sort of pragmatic during this one in terms of like, hey, for you, how can we get better at recognizing this or avoiding it? And this takes me to some really interesting research that I bumped into about who is manipulatable. The short version is everybody is manipulatable. And particularly people who think that they're pretty manipulation resistant, like I'm a really cynical person, so you can't manipulate me.

6:36Forrest Hanson: I'm a really educated person who can't manipulate me, those people are actually probably more manipulatable. Cynicism does not protect you from manipulation. And this gets to really interesting research from this guy named Peter Fonagy. I've mentioned him on the podcast in the past. He did really foundational work around mentalization, and particularly the treatment of BPD. And he has this idea of what's called epistemic trust, which is why should I believe the words that are coming out of your mouth or that are like appearing in a book? How do I take information that's out in the world and decide that I'm going to let it affect me in some kind of way, right?

7:12Forrest Hanson: And there are three different ways that a person can orient. They can be trusting fundamentally, and that's kind of viewed as the healthy default. So somebody that you believe has a good reason to know something tells you that thing, and then you let it in. So when you say something, Dad, I, as a baseline, kind of start by believing it. I start by going, oh, you know, Rick's a credible person. I should probably take what he's saying seriously, right? And so we need to be able to do that. We need to be able to do that to learn from anything. Then the second version is what he calls epistemic mistrust.

7:44Forrest Hanson: And this is a general wariness of what other people tell you. It doesn't really matter if the source is reliable or not. You start with a stance of skepticism. Then the third version is epistemic credulity. And this is taking in everything that somebody says to you, right? You don't have a good filter. If it's an unreliable source, it's an implausible claim, whatever, you just kind of take it out. And most people view this as a spectrum, where they've got mistrust over here on the far right side, and they've got credulity over here on the far left side, with the ability to assess somewhere in the middle, right?

8:16Forrest Hanson: Trust, epistemic trust is in between those two extremes. The problem is that that's just not true. When researchers actually measure people in these different studies that they do on these three variables. What they find is that mistrust and credulity are actually positively correlated with each other. On the other hand, both mistrust and credulity, believing too much, are negatively correlated with trust. So what's going on here? How is it possible for somebody to be both mistrustful and excessively trusting, essentially, at the same time, right? These are actually two forms, it turns out, of the same underlying problem.

8:55Forrest Hanson: The person's ability to discern whether information is good or bad. And that discernment is kind of messed up for some reason. And a lot of this can get back for people to more childhood experiences. The Fonagy group calls this the epistemic dilemma. When good forms of trusting weren't modeled for you growing up, you don't actually learn how to do source by source discerning. So you end up doing something that's a lot easier. You break groups of people into good and bad, and you move into either blanket rejection or blanket acceptance based on what group that information came from. So this is how your uncle on Facebook can express a lot of skepticism toward like ex-government institution on the one hand, but then send you that message from allvaccineskillbabies.net at the same time, right?

9:50Forrest Hanson: They're both highly mistrusting and very credulous, right? Like they have too much trust and too little trust all at the same time. And I thought that this was just absolutely fascinating to me because it's such a good response to the instinctive thing that people say about this, which is, I should just be more cynical. That way, I won't have the wool pulled over my eyes. What do you think about this, Dad? What did you think when you bumped into this?

10:14Dr. Rick Hanson: The words themselves, I found initially, in terms of the categories, a little confusing. Essentially, it seems like people vary, and some people seem to be high in mistrust and a broad swath of mainstream sources. and on the other hand, vulnerable to being credulous and over-believing, very ready to drink the Kool-Aid from some kind of specific, maybe cult-like, if you will, or charismatic source, right? Okay, I get that. And then I'm wondering from what you've learned, what's the good way to be? In other words, if this means that a person is not vulnerable to manipulation from sources they quote unquote mistrust, but highly vulnerable to manipulation from sources regarding whom or which they're very credulous.

11:10Dr. Rick Hanson: How can a person tell the difference? Because people really believe, you know, the sorting that they've got going.

11:18Forrest Hanson: I think that a big part of this right off the bat is appreciating our own fallibility. That's a good place to start, nice neutral position to have, and to go, hey, okay, we're not going to be able to perfectly discern anything here. There might be good reasons for being mistrustful towards certain kinds of information. But we talk a lot on the podcast about how studies work or things like that. Even as a podcast that does a lot of reporting on this study set fill in the blank, we also have episodes talking about how studies are not the be-all end-all for information for a whole bunch of different systemic reasons in terms of what goes into a study or how credible a certain study is based on the sample size or the unique situation of the people in that study or whatever it is.

12:03Forrest Hanson: So that's an example of having a prior, which is that for us, education matters. Whether that be some kind of main media outlet that has good standards for what gets through their newsroom, or that be medical information coming from one source versus another. Are you going to listen to a doctor who's sort of credentialed through a tradition or somebody who is sharing medical advice but doesn't have that same credentialing? Like our prior is to trust the previous person more than the latter person. But I think you still have to kind of go case by case a little bit here. And you still want to be discerning about where that information is coming from.

12:41Forrest Hanson: Does that maybe answer your question a little bit, Dad?

12:43Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, it draws me into attachment theory and the poignant. There's a poignance here. In other words, if someone is insecurely attached, which is a way of describing those to whom or regarding whom we're mistrusting, we're insecurely attached to those we mistrust, if you will. If we grow up and we have some form of insecure attachment, we're going to tend to be mistrustful of certain people that fit those categories, right? Which then leads to a kind of longing. that drives credulity, a kind of longing to find at least some source that we can count on, and then we become vulnerable to manipulation by that source.

13:28Forrest Hanson: I think you're right on. And another maybe supportive idea here is this idea of the third-person effect. And this is that people tend to believe that persuasive messaging has a greater effect on other people than on themselves. This means that they both overestimate the impact on other people and underestimate the impact on themselves at the same time. So they'll do these really interesting studies that are looking at somebody consumes a piece of propaganda, like old school political propaganda. And that person will say, well, I evaluate this as being quite propaganda-y, but I'm sure other people are really taken in by it.

14:05Forrest Hanson: And it turns out that actually everybody in the study was like, yeah, this is propaganda. This is totally over the top and ridiculous, right? So it's funny how both of those things are going on for us at the same time.

14:14Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. Okay, so you got one big idea already laid out that each of us is probably more vulnerable to manipulation than we're realizing. So we ought to do something about it. So how do we do it?

14:28Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I think the other big point as we're doing some setup here is that you can become more manipulation resistant. And it's actually pretty easy to. There's this thing called inoculation theory. This comes from psychologist William McGuire, and it attempts to explain how people either keep their existing attitude and how they keep that in even in the face of a attempt to change it. And it works basically the same way that a vaccine does. You show people kind of a weakened version of something and they're better at resisting the same thing later. So that's actually what we're going to be doing today.

15:00Forrest Hanson: Basically, we're going to be trying to open up this playbook and go, hey, here are the techniques that people generally use so you can be more aware of them in the future. And this is one of the really cool opportunities that we have on a podcast like this because a lot of the time when we're doing like psychoeducation work, I can't actually do anything about the relationship that you have with your partner or boss or whatever, right? And sometimes we kind of like bemoan the universality of all of this, how everybody who's listening has their own unique situation and like how well can we actually speak to that specific situation.

15:32Forrest Hanson: This is one of those cases where this kind of psychoeducation actually makes a big difference. So it's part of the reason that I wanted to do this episode.

15:38Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm super glad about it. And in my own background in kind of quasi-cults and other situations, and watching people in those situations and talking with people who've come out of them, again and again and again, what you hear is that it was the virtues, it was the good qualities of the individuals that enabled the manipulators to hook them, right? It was their sense of personal responsibility. It was their longing for enlightenment. It was their kind of sweet, good, open heart. And it was their work ethic that just made them susceptible to getting taken for a ride, frankly. And so I think that it's helpful to appreciate that we tend to have some awareness of what we might call our negative qualities.

16:29Dr. Rick Hanson: that were a little watchful, like irritability or anxiety or I don't know what, being an impulse shopper, that you're kind of on the watch for. But your good qualities, your positive attributes, you don't tend to think about, oh, how could those positive attributes get me into some kind of trouble here? So in a funny kind of way, those are the ones to be particularly aware of. Like, for example, I've been looking a lot at my tendency toward loyalty. I'm a very loyal person. And so I'm loyal to a goal. If it's a virtuous goal, I'm very loyal to other people. And that loyalty can lead me into perseverance to a fault sometimes or a kind of intensity around that which I'm loyal to.

17:15Dr. Rick Hanson: So the loyalty itself exposes me to that kind of a risk. So that might be a kind of thing for people to think about.

17:22Forrest Hanson: Totally. This gets to the idea of a handle, as it's sometimes called in this area. So there's something about you that the manipulator can exploit. And one of the ideas that I thought was cool was that the manipulator normally can't create a handle. They just are using the ones that already exist. So this could include anything from a person's loneliness to their desire to be seen and supported. Or like you were saying, Dad, that loyalty could be a kind of handle where somebody knows that you're somebody who's probably going to stick around. And so they're able to get a little more from you in one way or another than maybe they would be able to get from another person.

18:03Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, true that.

18:04Forrest Hanson: How about you? Do you have a particular quality that... I'm conflict avoidant. I could imagine that being pretty easy to work if somebody wanted to. So I think that that's probably the one that I would want to keep an eye on. I tend toward more of a kind of fun response-y response to stress. I'm typically not super combative. And I would imagine that if we were kind of ranking the stress responses in terms of like easy to manipulate, Fawn would probably be toward the top of the list. So that's probably mine.

18:36Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I'm going to have to think about that and how to exploit it, you know?

18:42Forrest Hanson: Thankfully, I don't think there's that much of that going on inside of our relationship. This actually does get to another big thing that I bumped into that I thought was a huge deal, which is that state beats trait when it comes to manipulation. So the single most consistent finding across all of the fraud literature, which is where a lot of this comes from, right, like scams and fraud, phone fraud, that kind of thing, is that susceptibility is more a matter of underlying state, like emotional or physical, than who a person actually is, like how educated they are, how intelligent they are, how cynical they are, all of that kind of stuff.

19:15Forrest Hanson: So if you're emotionally aroused, or if you're under time pressure, or you're feeling lonely or sad in that moment, even if the person is able to make you feel hopeful, sometimes hopefulness can be a very exploitable emotion. These are all conditions that make everybody more vulnerable to manipulation, including very smart, put-together people. And I think that we can look at that instead of our own experience, right? Like, if I'm a little tired, if I'm frustrated, if somebody is doing the you-gotta-act-now because if you don't, this deal is going to go away. That puts a kind of pressure on you that's going to make it harder to make a good, thoughtful decision.

19:53Dr. Rick Hanson: And you can think about people who are manipulative. They're doing a lot to establish these conditions to draw you into these states in a kind of a progressive way so that then they can hook you.

20:06Forrest Hanson: So I want to start by maybe asking you this, debt. As somebody who's spent a fair amount of time opining around the dinner table about manipulative individuals of different kinds of stripes, mostly political, I will say, is your typical bugaboo here. Are there particular tactics or things that tend to come up when manipulation starts to show up?

20:28Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I'm very interested in authoritarian appeals to grievance. and I'm not sure that that is what I would call a manipulation. It would be more a kind of, it's a tactic, passionate persuasion, you know, but in all that, I think the elements of deception that are used often is to play up the grievance. In other words, to really play up the ways in which some particular group has been wronged by purportedly by some other group. And there, there's deception. Overclaiming is a deception. If you don't know what the truth is, you don't know what the truth is. But if you know that the truth is X, but you're saying Y, including blowing up the degree to which, let's say, our group is being harmed by that group, well, that's manipulation right there.

21:21Dr. Rick Hanson: It's deception. It's foundational. Deception is manipulation. So that's definitely true. So I think that's worth naming, and it's worth naming as a tendency throughout history, whether it's used by bullies on a playground to kind of play up the ways in which some other kid did them dirt or some other group of kids did them dirt or by major leaders throughout history. That's worth paying attention to.

21:46Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I think that the two ones that are the biggest are probably speed and scarcity that come up just over and over again with this stuff. It's really hard to manipulate somebody who's good. There's not a lot of handles there. If I feel like I've got enough, if I feel like I'm good to go, if I'm content with my relationship, if I feel like my job pays me reasonably well, a lot harder to manipulate.

22:10Dr. Rick Hanson: That's so true. And that's why I've really banged the drum of gradually cultivating an unshakable core that we explored in our book, Resilient, of feeling safe enough, satisfied enough, and connected enough. Because when people feel that, just like you say, that's great for us. The handles are not so available. I'm thinking about dirty pool, if you will, sometimes in couples. One is around A, making B feel like B needs A. So A, making B feel like B is missing some things or is inadequate compared to A, you know, needs A and therefore should put up with certain things from A because B needs A. I think of that as a form of definitely manipulation.

22:57Dr. Rick Hanson: Intimidation. You know, bullying is a kind of manipulation, in effect, in which these painful consequences are promised. But very often, the bully doesn't have the capacity to follow through. It's an empty threat. An empty threat is also a kind of deception, kind of manipulation. It's one thing to say, you know, if you don't eat your vegetables, you won't get dessert. Or if you don't come to work on time, you know, we can't keep giving you a paycheck. Okay, that's straightforward. But, you know, just these outlandish threats of terrible consequences. My lawyer will be contacting you if you don't, you know, get your apples out of my backyard.

23:36Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, it's just really over the top. I think of that as manipulation, too. Dirty pool. You know what I mean? It's kind of like we can feel it. What's okay inside the lines? And what starts to feel like it's moving outside the lines? We'll be back to the show in just a minute.

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26:13Forrest Hanson: Now, back to the show. So as we go here for a good chunk of the rest of the episode, I want to kind of like walk through some of the typical things that you'll hear people talk about when it comes to manipulation. These are probably a lot of terms that people have heard. But again, psychoeducation episode, this is what we're trying to do. So I would group these into three categories here because we love categories on the podcast. The first one I'm going to call reality distortion. So this is trying to loosen a person's grip on what's true. Second one, emotional manipulation. This is trying to exploit your feelings.

26:46Forrest Hanson: And then the third one, we could call it something like situational engineering, although that sounds like a little technical. It's kind of influencing somebody's psychology by trying to control these other variables that are around them, right? With the reality one, the classic example of this is gaslighting. So this is making you doubt your memory or perception of an event that happened all the way up to somebody going, wow, am I just like totally out of touch with reality? Have I kind of lost it here? This actually comes from a movie that I think was in like the 40s or 50s. I think it was titled something like The Gaslight Effect, if I'm remembering correctly.

27:20Forrest Hanson: And it was a situation where a husband was trying to drive his wife crazy by like manipulating the gaslights in the house. And he would like dim them and she would go, are the lights dimmer? And he would be like, no, honey, I don't know what you're talking about. These days, gaslighting has become a kind of euphemism for just like, we remember that differently. But that's not actually the technical meaning of the word. It's more this sustained, persistent attempt to really cause somebody to doubt their relationship with reality. And I think that word has some usefulness because it helps people who've had that experience actually describe it.

27:54Forrest Hanson: So as we've cheapened the word, we can also make it harder for those people to really speak to what happened to them. So just something to kind of be careful about in general.

28:01Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, as you know, there's this thing called self-concept clarity. In other words, how clear are you about who you really are and your value, your capabilities, your history, where you're going? And if you're not very clear on who you are, well, then you're pretty vulnerable to gas lighting. I think as you put it, if you rely on other people to tell you who you are, they will.

28:28Forrest Hanson: Yeah, that's a big one for people, I think, particularly for people who are going to be more likely than average to listen to a podcast like this one. People asking questions about, like, who am I? What do I care about? What are my wands? Where am I going in life? All of that. Those people tend to be a little bit more manipulatable and particularly more susceptible to things like gaslighting.

28:48Dr. Rick Hanson: Is that really true, Forrest? I want to ask you about that. I just started thinking about what you said, like, huh. Because one might argue that people who listen to wonderful podcasts like ours are people who actually have a lot of center of gravity in themselves. And therefore, from that secure base, they're open to inquiry about who am I and new ways of regarding themselves. And therefore, they might be less vulnerable to gaslighting than the general population.

29:16Forrest Hanson: What do you think? I think this is the classic person to person. And again, this kind of psychoeducation does tend to be quite helpful for people. So if If you've learned about this stuff in the past, it's fair to believe that you could be a little inoculated to it. These are more broad trends in the research in terms of people with self-concept questions or things like that. But again, I think that as with any sort of research, if you're looking at a sample of 100 people, what you're going to see is the numbers are all over the place on any individual person. And it's just when you look at the broad arc that you're able to start drawing some conclusions from it.

29:48Forrest Hanson: I do think that like, I think in relationships with my friends, the people who tend to be more, well, I just don't know. I'm just not sure. I see those people land in less functional relationships for longer periods of time. True that. Then I see the people who go, I really know what I want from this life, just as a broad, you know, broad brushstroke.

30:09Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, as you go through these different tactics used by manipulators, one thing that is like a through line for me is to keep asking oneself, huh, who am I to you, right? And am I someone to value and treat with respect, to cherish, to protect, to honor, to support? Or am I just a means to your ends? Am I a bucket of resources that you're just going to try to take as much as you can from? Who am I to you? And related to that, what are your intentions toward me? What are your actual real intentions toward me? And that's an important question as well. So yeah, so keep going. You've got this thing called DARVO.

30:50Dr. Rick Hanson: I thought it was a defense department thing or something.

30:52Forrest Hanson: Yes. Yeah. It sounds like that. It sounds like a defense against the dark arts kind of thing. Deny, attack, reverse victim, and offender. So you raise a concern. They say that didn't happen. They attack your credibility for raising it. And you're the one somehow kind of ends up apologizing. This is a word that's become very popular over the last decade or so. And I think like any word that becomes popular, it starts to be applied to a lot of situations where maybe it's not exactly what's happening, but I understand why it's coming up more. The whole idea of like, I'm the real victim here is a good example of this.

31:27Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, we see it really in politics. That's huge. And a lot of that is preemptive attacks. If I attack you for your grievance and actually say no, I have that grievance here, then it really disempowers you from advocating for your very genuine grievance. And I've definitely seen this in couples. They just kind of go Darvo. How dare you bring up such and such when in fact such and such, and I'm the real victim here, and you're the person who needs to clean it up. And I just think that very often in couples, of course, it's crucially important to just stop it. Just take one person's grievance at a time.

32:09Dr. Rick Hanson: We'll get to yours. Let's just go back and forth. Or even sometimes we'll say, look, we're going to do five minutes on my complaint. And then we're going to do five minutes on your complaint. Then we're going to come back to my next complaint. And then we're going to do your next complaint. But we're going to do it in that structured kind of way.

32:27Forrest Hanson: And this is totally a power thing. If you're never allowed to have complaints and they're always allowed to have complaints, that's a big red flag. The final one I'll kind of say here in the reality manipulation zone is the fuzz, which I've talked about on the podcast in the past. Word games, moving the goalposts, they're difficult to pin down. Well, what do we really mean by fill in the blank word? And I think that getting to specific agreements is really important just in life in general and maybe particularly in relationships. And if you feel like you can just never actually get to what the real agreement was with somebody else, if they're slippery in that way, that's, again, a bit of a red flag.

33:06Forrest Hanson: And I'm sure you've seen this a lot in couples counseling as well, Dad.

33:08Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, yeah. And sometimes people are operating in good faith. You know, okay, you know, A says, you know, oh, I'm going to clean the kitchen. And to them, that just means dishes in the dishwasher, but the counters are still a disaster. Fine, they clean the kitchen. But to the other person, oh, no, you lied. You lied. You broke an agreement here. It's like you always do. Whoa. And so very often it's quite helpful to clarify, what do you actually mean? And then you can tell. That's another thing I want to say is a kind of manipulation that's deceptive. In other words, in which one person refuses to be pinned down to reasonable expectations and deliberately is always trying to give themselves a kind of a wiggle room in which other people think that they are actually reliable to do X, Y, or Z, but in fact, they're preserving wiggle room so that they're not actually accountable for X, Y, or Z.

34:05Dr. Rick Hanson: And again, there you have the element of deception.

34:07Forrest Hanson: The next category I wanted to get into, Dad, was emotional forms of manipulation. And this is one where I'm basically going to just toss the ball to you because again, I think that probably most of these show up in couples and families in particular. And I just want to start by asking, are there particular forms of emotional manipulation that you've seen come up for people?

34:27Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I'll give you, there's, yeah, yes. Like one could be called fear, obligation, and guilt, FOG, after everything I've done for you, or well, if you really loved me, or if you wanted to make up to me your bad behavior over here, you would do this over there. So fear, obligation, and guilt. That's a big one, I think. And people who are particularly particularly conscientious, people who are particularly willing out of their virtues to take personal responsibility, to look at their fault in the matter. I'm thinking about my own history in a cult. We are really, I'm a card carrier.

35:05Forrest Hanson: We're going to have to get the full cult story from you someday, Dad, because you've mentioned this probably five or 10 times on the podcast, typically with conversations like these are the ones that we're having. I'm very curious about it. We might extract it from you yet one of these days.

35:20Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. Okay. Maybe. Anyway, you're vulnerable to this. Okay. That's one. Another one is glove bombing and that whole slot machine intermittent reinforcement. So A and B, A is the manipulator. A, love bombs B. Whoa. And then B opens her heart. It's kind of a Trojan horse phenomenon. They come in with the big package. You're so special. You're amazing. You're unique. For example, a very conspicuous case of this is summarized again and again and again in this profile of Andrew Tate that recently appeared in the New Yorker magazine. And I would encourage people to take a look at it because one of the very deliberate and explicit and self-congratulatory techniques that was used by these men to draw women into really, really abusive circumstances was to start with extremely high praise of the women, so beautiful, so special, so amazing, I love you so much, to hook them deceptively and draw them in.

36:30Dr. Rick Hanson: And you can see for yourself what you think when you read the article. That's an example. Some reforms of love bombing are ones in which a person knows that if they're particularly kind to another person, that it will soften them up, and then they can give them the sales pitch later. I think there's kind of a gray zone between ordinary things that happen in couples where you realize, don't talk about it tonight, be nice tonight, keep the peace, and then it'll be a lot easier to discuss this in the morning. You know, there's a place to that. But if you're, you know, setting them up in a way that's deceptive, if you're kind of working them to get them to say yes when they wouldn't otherwise do it, unless you had, if you had not already sweetened the pill in the front end, well, then I think that's an example of this kind of love bombing.

37:25Dr. Rick Hanson: I'll say two more. Another one is playing the victim and weaponizing fragility, you know, carrying your reproaches as badges of honor and claims upon others. That's pretty manipulative. And it's basically creating dependencies in others, you know, sustaining your own, metaphorically speaking, you know, broken feet so that they have to carry you. And then last, you know, baiting people. It's when you do something to provoke a reaction from them, and then you present their reactivity as the real problem to disguise attention from and swerve attention away from the real issue on the table, which is your behavior toward other people.

38:11Forrest Hanson: Last category, again, that situational engineering one. These are the ones that are like, these are the classic structural forms of manipulation. So urgency and scarcity, we already talked about those. Deadlines, only this many left. The sale lasts until midnight tonight, all of that kind of stuff. Another one called commitment escalation. This is starting with small asks that then escalate over time. This is the format of most kind of classic Ponzi schemes and things like that. Manufactured authority is a big one as a social proofing. So that person has 2 million Instagram followers. They must know what they're talking about, that kind of thing.

38:48Forrest Hanson: particularly in a world where Instagram followers can be purchased, like that kind of thing. Isolation is a huge one, particularly in relationships. This is, again, maybe top two tell around relationship manipulation. Can't you see that all of your friends have turned against me? They're trying to take you away from me. You can't trust them, that kind of stuff. Then finally, one that maybe we could spend a little bit more time with is what's called reactance hijacking. This is this really cool idea. And psychological reactance comes from this guy in 1966 who talked about the drive to restore threatened freedom.

39:26Forrest Hanson: So this is basically the whole category of big fill in the blank is lying to you, right? Like they don't want you to know this, but I kind of have the truth over here and I'll share the real truth with you. And man, And that is absolutely everywhere these days.

39:42Dr. Rick Hanson: I love, by the way, how you find this stuff. These are like the buried treasures in the closet of clinical psychology.

39:52Forrest Hanson: Just me and Google Scholar Man going to town at 9 p.m. at night occasionally.

39:58Dr. Rick Hanson: Professor Brim from 1966. Way to go.

40:01Forrest Hanson: I've got a bee in my bonnet and I'm trying to figure out what's going on with something. So from here on out, I would love to kind of go big picture and go, what to do about all of this? Like, how can somebody become a little bit more manipulation resistant outside of just being aware that these are all tactics that get used? If everybody is manipulatable, and if cynicism or skepticism does not actually protect us, then what does? What can we actually do about any of this? This gets to that question that you were initially asking me, Dad, about like, okay, so how do you become more thoughtful about the kind of information that we consume?

40:37Forrest Hanson: And I think a big part of this is what you've already talked about, which is self-knowledge. You know, the more aware you are of your tendencies, you know, your trusting nature, my tendency to kind of like fawn in response to authority, then, okay, I can actually maybe do something about that. I can see that handle. I can be conscious that it can be manipulated. And hopefully that helps me do a little bit better in the future.

40:57Dr. Rick Hanson: We haven't really talked about this angle in, but I think it's worth naming it. To look internally. In other words, if you want to understand what other people are doing when they're manipulating, and if you want to be aware of your own vulnerabilities to being manipulated, one way to help yourself is to turn it around and get in touch with what do you do when you're crossing lines and being a little or a lot manipulative toward another person or other people. and also what do you try to do to get them susceptible to the appeals of your manipulation? I think that's a kind of haunting to look at.

41:40Dr. Rick Hanson: And as I sit here, I think there's a place in life to be deliberately open to squirming. If you're not someone who's squirmable on, you know, kind of staring hard at something moral, because in a way we're talking here about, if you will, immoral behavior, unethical behavior. Manipulation, grounded in deception, harms those who are manipulated. So manipulators are harming, right? We don't want to do harming. And there's a place for squirming a little when you realize, oh, you know, I was harming someone. I was a little deceptive there. I wasn't fully honest.

42:21Forrest Hanson: I think that even the version of this that I was talking about earlier, that I want to go to get food from this place, you want to go to get food from that place, you know, very first world problem kind of stuff. We can see some of this machinery operate for us. And I think that you're right, that we can learn from it a little bit. We can go, okay, like, what's the version of this that I'm doing or I'm aware of? And how can I be conscious of that when the lens gets kind of turned on me? I think another big one here is developing more tolerance for other people's discomfort or disappointment with you.

42:54Forrest Hanson: And again, as a fond response type of person, historically, I'm pretty aware of this one. Most interpersonal manipulation is running on at least a threat that somebody else will be disappointed with you, or that they won't like something that you did, or that they'll get mad at you, or that kind of thing, right? And I was watching these clips the other day from Dr. Orna on the couples therapy show. I think it's on HBO or something. I forget where it is, but it's a great show, couples therapy. Dr. Orna's great. Love her. And she talks about bearing that insult is a phrase that she'll use. Like, well, yeah, bear that insult.

43:31Forrest Hanson: Or like, well, yeah, you got to bear that feeling. Like, yes, this is a thing. And it feels a certain kind of way for you. And it becomes your job to hold that to a certain extent if you want to get the things you want from life. So you sometimes need to be able to hold or to bear other people's disappointment, irritation, anger, frustration, in order to get the things you want from life, including not being manipulated. This can be a really difficult thing for people.

43:57Dr. Rick Hanson: That is such a far-reaching and important idea. I mean, it may be a little tangential to the manipulation topic, but I actually think that being able to tolerate the discomfort of other people opens up a lot of freedom for full self-expression in relationships. This does not mean lacking compassion for the discomfort of other people or being motivated by cruelty to increase their discomfort. But if you're operating inside the lines, as it were, in the normal full contact sport of an important relationship, and you're saying what needs to be said, that you have the right to say, in part because you grant them the right to say it and say it in that way.

44:40Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, if you're really constrained around saying it because, oh, they would get so uncomfortable, then you can't really be free in that relationship. And other people will then have, you know, access to being in certain ways in relationships that you don't have access to. And that's not really fair. Back to the show after a quick break.

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47:10Forrest Hanson: So an example of this could be like good record keeping about who said what or what our agreements are. Okay, how do we feel about like actually writing this down on a piece of paper. Oh, is that kind of edgy for people? Keeping a journal, having a paper trail at work, getting a prenup, you know, whatever a relationships version of this is, that can be difficult to navigate because yeah, it increases safety, but it also increases friction. And a lot of the time, what you'll see in relationships is people keep on kind of like kicking friction down the road, but then, you know, the bill comes due and they don't particularly like what it costs.

47:47Dr. Rick Hanson: You're giving me a lot to reflect on with this one. And I'm thinking about, on the one hand, the pitfall of scorekeeping, where people in relationships or families, sometimes you'll see this in couples that have divorced and are still raising kids together, in which there is a kind of nitpicky scorekeeping around tiny little things that are then used as claims on others or as ammunition in the guilt tripping of other people. Like that's a problem. That's a problem. On the other hand, oftentimes you'll have situations in a relationship in which one person is not really realizing the extent to which there's an asymmetry of contribution in some ways.

48:39Dr. Rick Hanson: Like for example, one person is taking up two thirds of the airtime when they get together to hang out with each other, let's say, or one person thinks that they're more involved in the care of the children and clocking more time in that regard than they really, really are. And so in those particular cases, yeah, I've definitely seen situations where it's really helpful to track the time. My dad, incredibly sweet guy, I, you know him, of course, no longer with us, bless his memory, was a little garrulous. You know, he could start talking and he didn't really realize how long he was talking. And so one time I realized that this was just not going to change.

49:19Dr. Rick Hanson: So I started timing how much time he was talking in a call. And I remember this moment where he was going on and on and on and I was watching the clock and then he paused her breath for a second. And I said, that's wonderful, dad. You know, can I tell you now about something or other in my family? And he said, well, yeah, but I've got more to say. And I said, well, actually, you've been already speaking for five and a half minutes now. And I kind of want a few minutes myself. He said, really? I was? And he's a sweet guy. He had no idea he was doing that. So some of these people don't really quite realize, you know, what they're doing.

49:56Dr. Rick Hanson: And record keeping can really be useful in various ways. One of the most useful things I've seen happen in a couple when they're raising kids is to track their time carefully for a week. Each person tracks their time carefully, and they do it in a way that takes no more than five minutes a day. Simple, but they really do track it. Then they add it up across the week, and very often it surfaces significant inequities of various kinds, or it makes you realize that that other person is putting in more time than you thought they were, and they deserve more credit for that. So that's a really useful thing sometimes for a couple to do.

50:31Forrest Hanson: That balance is really tough, practically. I mean, we've gotten mailbag questions from people being like, hey, we have a scorekeeping model inside of our relationship and it feels like now nobody can just do something good because they want to. It all gets written down and that can remove the joy for the whole thing. Of course we don't want that. Yeah, so this is an act of balance. You're gonna have to decide for yourself where you wanna draw the lines here. I think I kind of lean dispositionally toward being a little more careful, particularly if historically you've been a little less careful and you've been kind of burned by it in the past.

51:03Forrest Hanson: So the last thing that I wanted to talk with you about today, Dad, was what happens when you are faced with something in the moment where your hackles start to go up a little bit? Or the thought balloon starts to appear above your head of like, huh, what is this? What's happening right now? Are we starting to get into the fuzz territory? and how can people get a little bit better about managing that when it happens? Do you have particular advice for people that you would start with?

51:33Dr. Rick Hanson: Listen to your body. I have an embarrassing confession. I don't think I've ever made it to you or publicly, I'll say it. When I was in high school, late in high school, I was shy and socially awkward and kind of big for my britches in some ways. And so for several days, I deliberately used my verbal skills to say things that essentially were put-downs of other people, but were done in this sort of abstract, brainy, egghead kind of way that would be hard to track conceptually for a lot of people. And I just did that for several days. But what I began to notice was that other people started responding to me in negative ways.

52:23Dr. Rick Hanson: And I realized that while there maybe is a wide variation of intellectual ability, most humans are pretty good at reading the vibes they're getting from other people and developing a reasonable kind of suspicion and hackles going up in their body when other people are working them in some way. You know, there's this other element that I've talked about, and I wonder what you think about it as a fawning kind of person a little bit, which is, I think it's good to develop, especially if you belong to a group of people that's been pushed around the innermost feeling that, no, I'm not going to be pushed around.

53:07Dr. Rick Hanson: Now, maybe when you start getting, you know, your spidey sense tingling that there's something going on here. It's very important to quickly assess your situation. Is this safe enough even for me to talk about? Is this safe enough for me to reveal that I'm recognizing the con job here? Maybe it would be unsafe, given the authority structures of the moment or the fact that I'm outnumbered. It's a dark alley, you know, whatever the deal is. Maybe you need to go along for the moment superficially while you're developing your exit strategy as fast as you can. So you want to definitely track your safety because people who are prepared to manipulate you are often prepared to raise the stakes if they start feeling like you're challenging them.

53:52That said, deep down,

53:55Dr. Rick Hanson: you know, stiffening your backbone, as you know, I'm not someone that people push around. And that's, I think, a good thing to develop over time too. Not in a way that's aggressive or obnoxious or arrogant, but just like, hmm, big pasture, real fences.

54:11Forrest Hanson: Another one I think is marking things in real time. So if somebody runs a play on you, if you get the whiff of one of the things they were talking about earlier in the episode, kind of internally marking it to yourself can be really helpful. I had to buy a car recently because my car was old and funky. And then I had another car that was like immediately totaled after I purchased it. It got hit by a drunk driver. It was parked on the side of the road. It was a whole thing. Anyways, I'm fine. Everybody's fine. Car dealerships use every single one of these manipulation tactics, essentially. They are trying to work you pretty much all the time.

54:50Forrest Hanson: And just having a little moment where I'm talking to a perfectly nice guy who is just a salesperson. He's not like trying to be a bad person. He's just trying to do his job, right? Just having a little moment where I go, oh, that's manufactured scarcity. Just inside of my head. Oh, that's like time pressure. Oh, that's trying to like move me to a yes oh okay just like that sort of thing in a totally un emotionally intense way i'm not getting heightened about it i'm not bothered by it i know what the score is here it's fine but i'm keeping a kind of clear eye on the whole thing had has been really

55:23Dr. Rick Hanson: helpful for me in a bunch of different situations i would think of you forrest as someone really hard to manipulate because i would like to think so you're skeptical you reserve judgment as we've You know, you're in touch with your body. You're integrated.

55:42Forrest Hanson: I think more over time and learning about a lot of this. Also privileged. Sure, yeah, have enough. Pretty good security. Like you're saying, vulnerable people are more exploitable. So I would like to think that I'm checking a lot of these boxes. And at the same time, there are certainly situations where I get sucked into the just three left or I get sucked into somebody really painting me a beautiful picture of the work that they're going to do for fill in the blank and you should really pay me to do that work. And then six months later, it's like, I don't know. I don't know how much we actually got out of that, even though they were painting a really beautiful picture at the time.

56:22Forrest Hanson: I can definitely get trapped by that. And I think that that just illustrates what we've been talking about, how you can check all these boxes, you can know about all this stuff, and you can still have some vulnerabilities.

56:33Dr. Rick Hanson: There's another piece of this to talk about too, which is how we are when power comes at us. Yeah, totally.

56:41Forrest Hanson: And yeah. And - I think that's the big one for me. That's the part where I can kind of get into a funky place with it. Really?

56:48Dr. Rick Hanson: Okay.

56:49Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

56:50Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, check me on this then. So I'm thinking of situations in which sometimes people who are in more subordinate positions feel like the only card in their hand is manipulation. Because if they were direct about it and not deceptive, that running theme, if they revealed what they really want and they came at it in a heartfelt way, they would not be received or not responded too well. Or even if they were just angry, you know, if they were straightforwardly angry about what they haven't, you know, received and therefore want to get what they're fairly due, oh, there'd be bad reactions. So paradoxically, if we help people realize around us, they can be really powerful and direct and even, for example, forceful or fiery about something, then they're going to be less likely to feel like they have to resort to manipulating us to get what they want.

57:43Dr. Rick Hanson: What do you think about that?

57:44Forrest Hanson: I think you're right in general. And I think that that feeling of power coming at you is a really tricky one for most people. And it's one that I've had to get a lot more used to over time, even in a context where I'm protected in a lot of ways. Now I'm socially protected. I run my own job, run my own business. So my experiences of that kind of power coming at me in a place where I'm really compelled by it are quite uncommon relative to most people. And even so, I find it really difficult even when like a friend is coming at me with sort of a take about me or something I did or whatever with a certain amount of like top spin and intensity and they might be totally right.

58:26Forrest Hanson: or there could be more context or whatever, that's a really tough moment. And it's really easy to just kind of wilt in the face of it or respond in some other way that you look back on a little while later and go like, man, I wish I had another swing at that particular pitch. And that's why I think the slow it down part of this is so important because that's what really helps a person stay grounded in their sense of like who they are as opposed to getting their self getting kind of dominated by the other person's wants or desires or whatever they're going for.

58:56Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, it's really cool what you're saying there for us. And it raises something that I've thought about quite a bit about justice and doing things for the sake of the greater good that have to do with justice of standing up to bullying. And manipulation is a form of bullying. So I think sometimes it can stiffen our own backbone and it can help us feel more centered when we're dealing with someone who's a manipulator to not allow them to succeed in that, partly to create a consequence for them. So maybe they'll think twice about doing that with other people. So you're doing it for other people.

59:39Dr. Rick Hanson: Even if you're not going to get satisfaction, let's say, from the manipulator coming at you, maybe there are third parties who are watching and the demonstration of you standing up or doing something that's, you know, unpleasant for the manipulator, will, you know, be good for the greater good. And it's not that you're wearing some kind of saintly halo and getting all grandiose about it. It's just that I think there's a place for doing things for the sake of justice that will really not benefit you directly, but potentially could ripple out and be of benefit to others.

1:00:14Forrest Hanson: Well, that's great. It's very consistent with your overall kind of pro-social stance dad. So I love that for you, Mr. Global Compassion Coalition and all of that. And I totally agree. I think that sometimes there are opportunities here either to support other people or to work toward creating a kind of shared culture that we can then all benefit from in different ways. We're both kind of collectively oriented people, I would say, as a baseline. And there's no doubt that manipulation is a pretty individually profitable behavior. It typically profits a person or a group to the expense of others.

1:00:48Forrest Hanson: And that's not how our personal values are oriented.

1:00:52Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And one last little caution I'm thinking of here, people having listened to this episode and now armed, I think we have to be also really careful about accusations of manipulation. And just because that other person is being intense or strong or persuasive - Or they disagree with you. Yeah, or maybe they're like threatening a consequence if you don't go along with them in some way. That doesn't necessarily mean that being manipulative. That's why I think that element of deception is so important. And we also have to be very careful about attributing intentions to others because, you know, manipulation has to do with the deliberate intent to deceive.

1:01:32Dr. Rick Hanson: And we have that word intent there, right? And how do we know what their true intentions are? So being a little careful about that accusation, you know, is a good thing. Right on.

1:01:41Forrest Hanson: Totally agree with you. Fun.

1:01:43Dr. Rick Hanson: Thanks for talking about this.

1:01:44Forrest Hanson: I always love talking with you, Dad, and I appreciate you taking the time.

1:01:47Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, I can say for the record, I don't believe you've ever manipulated me or tried to.

1:01:53Forrest Hanson: Oh, well, I think that maybe as a six-year-old, I manipulated you to get a little more candy or another hour of video games or whatever it is. But I will say my intentions were very pure. Cajoling, beseeching. They were never to harm you. So maybe that's part of the dynamic here as well. No, anyways. Beseeching is not manipulating. That's another thing. I agree. Good example. Oh, totally true. Beseeching, not manipulation. Like in families.

1:02:21Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, my parents grew up authoritarian background and things would happen and they'd say, oh, she's manipulating you. No, she's three years old or he's three years old. They just want what they want. It's not a manipulation. And that's very important sometimes. I think adults will undermine the legitimacy of the wants of a child. You know, they may not be satisfiable. They may not be appropriate, but they're not a manipulation because the kid is, you know, really, really trying to get what they want.

1:02:51Forrest Hanson: I think there's a big power dynamic that you're bringing in here too, Dad. The kid is pretty, pretty dependent, pretty out of fact, you know, all of that kind of stuff. You can still manipulate as a lower power person, but man, the stakes get higher if you're trying to, if you're being manipulated by somebody with a lot more power than you. I had a great time talking about this with you today. I hope that it was helpful for people. I hope that some of the psychoeducation that we're doing here puts people in a position to be able to respond to this kind of thing more effectively. Or maybe even just look at their past experience and go, wow, I didn't really realize that this was in the mix for me.

1:03:24Forrest Hanson: But as you run through this list, I can just keep on checking down the line and go, okay, I now see that experience in a different kind of light.

1:03:37Forrest Hanson: I really appreciated Rick joining me for this conversation on becoming more manipulation resistant. And we started the episode by talking about what manipulation is distinct from other forms of influence. It is very normal in all of our relationships for us to influence each other. I might want to go to a particular restaurant or have a particular way that I like to communicate with other people, or I might even have something that I think this other person should consider doing. And hey, maybe I try to kind of nudge them in that direction, right? That's normal. That's not really manipulation.

1:04:09Forrest Hanson: Manipulation is when we're trying to conceal something, or when somebody is trying to talk you into believing that something is good for you, when it really would be good for them. Four quick tests to separate influence from manipulation. First, transparency. Would the influence still work if you could see exactly what was going on? Second, whose interests are being served here? Is it yours or theirs? Third, do you have a safe exit? Can you say no without being punished for it? And then fourth, is there a kind of symmetry here? Do we both get to apply power to each other? And the ideas that we talked about today could be applied to a wide range of circumstances.

1:04:46Forrest Hanson: Your father-in-law putting pressure on you is not the same thing as dealing with a phone scammer, but they might use some tactics that kind of overlap. We then talked a bit about who is manipulatable, and this gets to a really interesting point that, for me, was probably the most novel thing that I learned about when I was doing preparation for this episode, and that's that believing that you're immune to manipulation is itself a risk factor, and particularly, cynicism does not seem to protect people from manipulation. Credulity, that's being excessively trusting, and mistrust, that's hello, not being very trusting, are actually positively correlated with each other.

1:05:23Forrest Hanson: This means that if somebody is mistrusting, they're a little bit more likely to also believe people too easily. And you might ask yourself, very understandably, wait, how is that possible? And it's because most of the time those people are not applying those standards equally. They're really mistrusting some people and being really excessively credulous toward other people. And that's because credulity, believing too much, and mistrust are two forms of the same underlying problem. The person's ability to discern good versus bad information is messed up for some reason. And then we talked a lot during the episode about why that might be.

1:05:56Forrest Hanson: Maybe they're under a lot of pressure or stress. Maybe they come from a family background where authority figures were highly punishing toward them, and so they learn to just distrust authority figures, that kind of thing. So adverse childhood experiences, insecure attachment, and low ability to mentalize. This is the ability to think about the thoughts and feelings that other people are having, and also to view thoughts as just thoughts and feelings as just feelings. All of those factors are associated with both credulity and mistrust. I want to be really clear here. If somebody is manipulated by somebody else, it's not on them.

1:06:30Forrest Hanson: It's not their fault. It's always the fault of the manipulator. These are just things that we're flagging so that people can be aware of them inside of ourselves and therefore maybe do some things about them. This then took us to the core of the episode where we talked about how manipulation works and the manipulator's playbook. The first idea here is that manipulation needs a handle. This is something that the manipulator is using to, hey, manipulate you. This could include anything from your desire to be seen to feelings of loneliness, fear of conflict. I talked about that a lot about me. I tend to shy away from conflict.

1:07:04Forrest Hanson: That can be a tool that somebody uses to manipulate you. Being under financial pressure, we talked a lot about scarcity throughout the episode. All of these things are things that somebody could potentially use to take advantage of you. And in general, the most usable handles are the ones that you're not fully aware of. If we know that we have a certain kind of tendency, it's easier to see when somebody else tries to take advantage of it. The second really important idea here is that state beats trait. Susceptibility to manipulation is more about your current psycho-emotional state than it is about any of your traits, how educated you are, the insecure attachment stuff that I was talking about earlier.

1:07:40Forrest Hanson: All of that matters, but it turns out that if we're stressed, if we're hungry, if we're afraid, if we're lonely, if we feel sad, if we're insecure about something in that moment, that's really going to make it a lot easier for somebody to take advantage of us. We then talked about specific tactics, which we sorted into three categories. First, reality distortion. This is any time when somebody is trying to loosen your grip on what's true or make you feel like you're not in touch with whatever's actually happening. Second, emotional manipulation. And then third, situational engineering. This is influencing your psychology, how you're thinking and you're feeling by controlling different kinds of situational variables.

1:08:18Forrest Hanson: We went through a pretty long list of tactics there, things like gaslighting, Darvo, baiting the other person, playing the victim. The situational stuff is the stuff that I would really probably emphasize for people. First, urgency and scarcity, which I've already talked about. This is the number one manipulation tool. And then something called reactants hijacking. This is, you know, they're all out to get you or big pharma doesn't want you to know this, that kind of thing. And of course, sometimes big powerful organization X really is doing stuff that is sketchy at best, if not totally amoral at worst.

1:08:55Forrest Hanson: And this then gets back to what we were talking about at the beginning about discerning information on a case-by-case basis and being able to take each individual proposition that you're seeing from a group of people and evaluating them kind of one at a time and not just falling into the trap of saying, oh, okay, this information is coming from this organization or this person and I'm just going to extend that like blanket trust. Even though cynicism or skepticism or education don't seem to protect people very much from manipulation, it turns out that manipulation-resistant people do have some things in common.

1:09:28Forrest Hanson: First, calibrated trust. This is what I was just talking about. You're evaluating information based on both the source and the evidence, and then calibrating your trust as evidence comes in. Then self-knowledge, particularly awareness of your unique handles that can really help you out. A clear self-model, understanding what you want and what you care about, having a strong sense of I am me over here and you're you over there, and these things are different and separate. And just because you want something doesn't mean I need to want it too. That can really help out. Then we talked a lot toward the end about developing a kind of tolerance for other people's disappointment or discomfort.

1:10:07Forrest Hanson: Most manipulation that's relational runs on the threat that somebody else will be displeased with you. This means that by learning how to, we talked a bit about like bearing the insult or bearing the feeling, bearing the other person's disappointment. When we're able to do that, it's harder to manipulate us. We then closed by talking about dealing with in-the-moment manipulation. So being aware of your current level of emotional activation or intensity. The more intense your emotions are, the easier it's going to be to move you around. Then another thing I didn't really talk about, but I do want to name here at the end, exiting the channel.

1:10:40Forrest Hanson: so you never want to verify information through the same channel that you initially received that information through. That's a little bit of a tongue twister but basically if you're on the phone with somebody and they're saying, hey, you gotta do A, B, or C don't ask the clarifying question to them. Go to a different channel, call your bank see if you can verify the information in some other kind of way. And this can be particularly important when you're looking at social movements or political candidates or that kind of thing. I hope you found all of this really helpful. And if you've made it this far, but you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, we'd really appreciate it if you took a moment to subscribe when you can.

1:11:17Forrest Hanson: It really helps us out. Maybe that's on Apple. Maybe it's on Spotify. Maybe it's on some other podcast platform that I know absolutely nothing about. Maybe you're watching on YouTube. You can hit the subscribe button over there as well. You can leave a comment, a rating, a positive review. It really helps us out. Best thing you can do is tell another friend about the show. You can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return. Until next time, thanks so much for listening, and we will talk to you soon.

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