Table of Contents
The book Manipulation and Dark Psychology written by Will Hawkins is a complete guide to excel in the art of persuasion, improving your social skills for leadership, influencing people, and increasing your emotional intelligence.
The book contains around 160 pages which are divided into 15 chapters.
The book underlines the importance of communication skills for improving your social and leadership skills, and it contains valuable information in the book.
Communication skill is important for success in any field. The book emphasises that you need to be a good communicator to apply various psychological theories.
It also underscores the importance of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which was developed in the 1970s at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Its primary founders are John Grinder, a linguist, and Richard Bandler, an information scientist and mathematician
NLP is a way of changing someone’s thoughts and behaviors to help achieve desired outcomes for their own advantage.
The book describes various persuasion and manipulation techniques in detail. While persuasion seems a positive and ethical concept, however, many people consider manipulation negatively.
Manipulation is a long process and not easy and many psychological theories come into play. Manipulator size you up first.
Manipulation is an important pillar of dark Psychology. Manipulators use various tricks even at the cost of another person. The selective and effective usage of lying, rotating truths, sarcastic jokes, aggression, threats, and emotional blackmail are used for manipulating the other person.
There are several books and literature on how to influence people. Here again, the concept of network is true net worth has been highlighted.
Your ability to influence another person ensures success in almost all fields. Our daily office work revolves around discussions, team meetings, brainstorming, and other forms of mutual dependency.
How to make friends and influence others
There is enough literature on influencing others. Usually, we like to communicate with others on the same level, therefore, you should try to match the level of other people to build rapport. Various factors like body posture and movements, voice tone, language, way of thinking, belief, and values, and personal experience including breathing affect rapport building. Tuning techniques, including partial and micro tuning, are used to build rapport. Tuning is basically imitating the other person in posture and voice to build rapport.
Adjustment to voice tone, pitch, and loudness play an important role.
In persuasion, in addition to body language, voice also plays an important role. Let the other party speak first so that you have an opportunity for a counter-argument. While speaking let the argument be of similar nature, take a cue from the other person’s dictionary. If he is arguing emotionally, weigh your argument emotionally before speaking. Moreover, speed of talking also matters. If the other person is likely to agree with you, then speak slowly so that he can understand your argument. If he is unlikely to agree with you, then you should speak fast so that he doesn’t have time to think and cut your argument. In the case of a neutral scenario, a middle approach may be adopted. These are a few of the important tips from the book.
Art of persuasion
Persuasion is a beautiful skill. Few people can persuade others naturally, others may have to learn the skill of persuasion. The tips used in persuasion are reciprocity, consistency, social validation, liking, scarcity, and authority.
Emotional Intelligence
It’s about understanding the emotions of self and people whom you would like to manipulate, in this context. Emotional intelligence can be used to persuade others and advantages of self by making the other person do as you want.
Emotionally intelligent people are self-aware, balanced, optimistic, empathetic, and inspirational. They are curious to learn new things and are not afraid of failure. Effective relationship management and the ability to influence others are one of the advantages of emotional intelligence. Emotionally intelligent people are good influencers.
Complete the sentence “I feel_____ “. If you are unable to name the feeling, try to categorise them into four feelings i.e. sad, angry, scared, and glad.
Manipulation techniques
In this chapter, the author talks about dark manipulation techniques which are used by the manipulators to influence the outcome. It talks about manipulation using emotions, guilt, playing victim, love bombing (in relationships), bribing, and playing with the feelings of another person.
Developing mind control
It involves using influence and persuasion to change the behaviour and belief of someone. The brainwashing technique is used for mind control. Brainwashing is a procedure where another person will be convinced through various techniques to abandon ideas and beliefs they had in the past in order to take new behaviour or ideas. You can understand that the terrorists are brainwashed to believe that what they are doing is only true, and their path is the only right path. It is an extreme example of understanding, however, in some way or the other, brainwashing is used in media, relationships, sales, writing, propaganda, advertising, politics, and religion to convince you.
Analysing people using dark Psychology
In any kind of persuasion tactic, analysing the people to understand their motives is essential. The techniques discussed are based on the usage of spoken words, body language, behaviour, vibes, and appearance.
Behaviour develops over time, and it tends to indicate deeper information about the person, that’s why you may have heard that a person can lie, but his body won’t lie. It basically emphasizes the role of body language and correct interpretation of body language is of great advantage for manipulation.
We have been told not to judge a book by its cover, however, the cover tells a lot more about the book. You may choose to judge a book, however, you may choose to judge a book by its cover, but it is important to test a few pages and description to make an assessment before deciding to buy it.
In the end, it discusses few more tactics of manipulation. It re-emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence to connect with people and understand their emotions.
The last chapter is on deception in which the author tells that the average person speaks several lies every day. Our mind is trained to speak lies to protect ourselves. However, people also tell lies to manipulate other people.
With a little effort and practice, you can easily detect lies by the other person from his voice and body language and few other techniques.
You may have to read the whole book “Manipulation and dark Psychology” to understand and appreciate the efforts made by Will Hawkins.
As per legal notice in the book, it is not permitted to quote or paraphrase any part, or content from the book. Therefore, only a review of the book is written, and to have more understanding and benefits of the book you may like to consider purchasing the book Manipulation and Dark Psychology.