I sell things for a living. I only tell the truth, and I make sure to give all information that is relevant to health and safety, and I try to avoid any situation where someone could say after the fact that they didn’t realize there would be an additional charge. After that, it’s all fair game.

Body mirroring, nodding slightly when asking questions you want them to agree to, code-switching, listing my preferred choice last in a list of three things, these are the basic techniques.

Next level up is the perception-altering stuff: “we” have a problem but “I” have a solution; if I know they’re happy, saying “I’m so glad you liked my recommendation”; instead of “how is it?” asking “how are you enjoying it?”; taking personal credit for all good feelings they have during our interaction (gotta be subtle about this, but it’s very effective); acting like they’re doing me a favor (people like those they’ve done favors for more than those who do favors for them… it’s monkey-brain social status thing).

For me, this is just Tuesday.

The double-extra stuff comes out for job interviews. I will alter my speech patterns and hairstyle to give the impression that I’m a decade younger. I will tailor my anecdotes to sound like I’m either single or newly attached, with no kids, and vaguely imply that I’m homosexual if the vibe isn’t too conservative.

Every time I need to buy something at work, they ask me to research three options.

I already did the research. I can tell which option is the best one already. So the two alternatives are always more expensive, and I tell them that “the cheap one” will work well enough.

Sometimes I pretend that a joke is funny.

I have and will continue to make a small number of obvious omissions or minor misspellings in my work when I submit it to my bosses for review. Not in the majority of my work, but mostly when they may have some resistance or hesitation on a course of action or a part of the project.

If I can trick them into contributing to the project by fixing or improving it, they end up feeling ownership of it in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise. I do this on purpose, and turn a hesitater into a champion of the work. It’s our project now!

When I was at a small company that worked with radioactive material, we had to register and secure all radiation sources, even the extremely weak ones that anyone can order online with no restrictions. Before the state inspector came, we deliberately left one of those weak sources out where it wasn’t supposed to be so that the inspector would find something wrong, tell us to fix it, and leave feeling like she did her job. It would be the smallest possible violation and it wouldn’t actually get us in trouble. We did that because we figured that if there was nothing obviously wrong, the inspector would look for problems a lot more carefully.

(Nuclear physicists are rather more nonchalant about radiation than the average person is, for obvious reasons. By nuclear physicist standards, we didn’t actually have any dangerous sources at all. Thus we felt like we weren’t doing anything morally wrong, but I suppose that the average person might have disagreed.)

I talked two people out of suicide. I guess you could call that manipulative, but in a good way.

In person I am fanatically polite and helpful to almost everyone. But if you piss me off I will make you feel very bad about yourself.

Maybe not the most manipulative, but it’s the first thing to come to mind…

When I was 21 years old, I was dating a delightful lush who was 19 and it was a bummer that we couldn’t go out drinking together. So, I found a marriage certificate online, put our names on it and printed it out, then copied it. We also went to a department store and spent $20 on a convincing cubic zirconia ring. We pretended to be married because my state’s antiquated laws consider wives to be property of husbands in this regard, so voilà! We could now go out drinking together! And boy did we, haha.

Took me a while but I learned one of my managers is highly likely to shoot down any idea that isn’t his. So during planning sessions I started describing partial ideas and pretending I didn’t know how to solve the last leg of the problem so he could jump in and say, “Oh, what if we did…” Still kind of pisses me off I have to feign ignorance but since I started doing that things have gone way smoother.

Not the most manipulative but

Keep a log of the birthdays, hobbies and names of spouses and children of colleagues, managers, team members and customers.

I learnt this from a guy who did executive search. People remember you, when you remember what is important to them.

When I’ve lead teams it’s one of the first things I find out - note down when someone says “yeah Gary that’s my hubby, he’s super into gaming”

• Gary (husband.)
• likes gaming

When you’re a manager, your teams families, partners and friends know your name. Reciprocating that - learning who is important to them - is really important.

Not the most that I did, but I needed to help out a friend in college.

A friend wanted to get out of a group for a class because he was doing a lot of the work. I helped him come up with a strategy.

He was able to pull together a group of friends in non-responsive or disintegrated groups into his. He could then sell to the professor that he was being proactive in getting this group made as it would be easier for the professor than handling the fallout of these people not having groups. He could then leave his group while focusing on pulling together this group; that other group totally did enough work that they could go off by themselves.

He was able to get the professor to approve the change a day before a major due date.

Apparently, one of his group mates was able to figure out that I had to be involved because of how slick this went off.