Posted on 01/15/2022 4:34:05 PM PST by nickcarraway
Binging on TV shows like Squid Game and Love Island might leave you thinking humans are naturally duplicitous, but actually a little bit of social nous is a core part of human interaction.
Emotional manipulation has been referred to as the dark side of emotional intelligence by psychological scientist Prof Elizabeth Austin at the University of Edinburgh.
But what does that mean? Austin and her colleagues created the Emotional Manipulation Scale in 2007. According to the scale, people who are high on emotional manipulation say yes to behaving in ways that have obvious negative consequences such as ‘I know how to embarrass someone to stop them behaving in a particular way’, and ‘I know how to play two people off against each other’.
Less obviously negative behaviours can also result in a high score, including agreeing with statements like ‘I can pay someone compliments to get in their good books’, and ‘I am good at reassuring people so that they’re more likely to go along with what I say’. The researchers also found that the higher people scored on the Emotional Manipulation Scale the higher they scored on Machiavellianism, a trait that includes being callous, morally indifferent and manipulative.
Framing manipulation as an inherently bad thing that is only done by bad people is, however, incorrect. There are many reasons why people want to massage a social situation so that it works out well for themselves that don’t result in negative consequences for others. Self-interest can align with the interest of others and can lead to prosocial behaviour. For example, sometimes I do things to make other people feel good because I know it will make me feel good. It’s win-win.
This complexity is also what Austin and colleagues showcased when in 2013 they pivoted from their original scale and created the Managing the Emotions of Others Scale.
Moving from the term ‘manipulation’ to ‘managing’ encourages a different way of talking about this type of behaviour. The most recent short version of the Managing the Emotions of Others Scale was published in 2018 by Austin and colleagues. It breaks down the diversity of ways in which people try to emotionally manage people into five types. The first two are generally prosocial, the third and fourth are non-prosocial, and the fifth is considered neutral.
Enhancing: strategically offering help, reassurance, or showing understanding to improve someone’s mood. Diverting: being positive or using humour to improve someone’s mood. Worsening: using criticism or negative comments, undermining confidence, or being angry to gain something. Being inauthentic: flattering someone, sulking or guilt-tripping to get what you want. Concealing: hiding how you really feel, particularly hiding negative emotions. Using this concept of manipulation shows us that trying to influence how people around us feel is a core part of human interaction. Some of us are probably manipulating others on a daily basis.
Are some of us are better at manipulation than others? In 2020, Nguyen Ngoc and colleagues published a summary of research involving a total of 5,687 participants. They found that people higher on emotional intelligence scored higher on emotional manipulation.
This means that being able to read the room and spot what people need is an advantage for manipulation. The question is what people do with this advantage. Being good at emotional manipulation “can be used to either help or harm people, depending on the manipulator’s motivation,” they wrote.
By accepting that we are all manipulative, we can better identify when we are manipulating people and therefore keep our motivations in check.
Female human nature, yep
Anyone who know anything about Human Nature should support very limited government. People are not good. We have a sinful nature. It’s hard to manage your own life — why in the world would you allow someone a thousand miles away to be in charge of your major decisions? They aren’t going to make decisions that are good for you — they will make decisions that are good for them.
In short: Only dumb people who are ignorant of Human Nature are Liberals. But there are a lot of these people.
Only women and soy boys.
Ditto.
Manipulation from men is called gaslighting.
Nature is manipulative, by design- by whomever or whatever one might say is the architect. Unique to Nature though, is that Nature doesn’t judge, it doesn’t castigate... it just “is” (adaptive, adoptive, reactive.. and so on).
The question posed is a good one. Or, as a famous comedian now dead once said in a famous (and seriously funny rant)— “The Planet is doing fine, the People are f-—d”. “The Planet is doing fine, it isn’t going anywhere and not going away-—WE ARE!” “Pack your stuff folks we’re going away”. And, the Planet will not miss us.
Point of the presentation— the arrogance of humans.
Sorry, the politically correct term is now “prostrate people”.
No. It’s bad upbringing and bad morals.
Sheesh, now someone is trying to make manipulation look like a positive character trait.
No way.
Never will be.
It’s just an indicator of someone being a dyed in the wool control freak, IOW a democrat..
Manipulators call men telling the truth, gaslighters.
Agreed,
Sociopaths might be more
“Clinical.”
.
It all puts me as
A
Man
Going
His
Own
Way.
George Carlin?
Ding Ding— yep, teed off misanthropic late in life George Carlin. Remarkably prescient in re: what would eliminate human life on Earth, such as a virus. At the time he delivered this screed in shows he used HIV/AIDs related Complex in his fantasy humor “bit”, something that, being transmitted sexually, would incline people not to engage in procreation, and thus further reduce the human population—part of the intent of the “world” to get rid of the nuisance humans.
Conceptually, he did not attribute this “goal” of Nature to the Lord Our God, but to some “great electron” or some such. In some ways, without knowing it Carlin was emulating the famous Michael Crichton introduction to his own book Jurassic Park in which the arrogance of humans is put into perspective- that humans are not that important to.. the World.
Read on Rush Limbaugh by Charlton Heston— here:
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2007/03/02/charlton_heston_reads_crichton_on_our_arrogance/
I raised 3 kids and helping with 2 toddler grandkids now.
It’s all you’ve got the 1st years of your life. Humans are born master manipulators.
XLNT!
.
I’ll check That link,THX!
.
I’ve got “12 Monkeys” on the DVD, 5 Billion was the
Genocide figure in it.
.
God Help Us.
Another more “targeted” figure of how many the Left thought needed to be killed-— was cited by FBI informant/infiltrator agent Larry Grathwohl who reported the Weather Underground/SDS (under obamaumau’s pal and financier trust fund commie Bill Ayers and his crazy wife Bernadine Dohrn) at a big meeting of the leadership:
” I brought up the subject of what’s going to happen after we take over the government. You know, [once] we become responsible for administering, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people?
The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the “counter-revolution.” And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education in the [American] Southwest, where we would take all of the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.
I asked, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they’d have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say “eliminate,” I mean kill 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious.”
Testified in the US Senate.
Excellent article in American Spectator on Larry, RIP with more on the pals of obamaumao, who still puppeteers JoeBama:
https://spectator.org/55174_rip-larry-grathwohl-weather-underground-infiltrator/
The feminist group?
Only the naive would believe it would be limited to 25 million.
It’s more “Blew Grass.”
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