How do narcissists and people of the dark triad get so good at manipulation and trickery?

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I mean I was wondering how they manage to get so good at forming ideas on how to manipulate someone or trick someone into doing what they want.

I don’t get how they managed to learn this. I mean I personally cannot figure out how to manipulate or trick someone buy myself, somebody has to teach me.

In: Other

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not all are good at it, but generally they learn from experience and instinct. Even as a kid, you might realize that your parents will give you attention when you cry. So then you might start crying when you want attention. As others have mentioned, they also don’t have that pesky empathy that tells you it’s wrong to make people feel bad, even if you get what you want.

As someone who *can be very manipulative, I learned from experience and watching others around me. Having manipulative caregivers definitely plays a role as well.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Two really good and interesting books about this subject is Surrounded by Psychopaths, Thomas Erikson

Not quite on the same topic but in the same field is the book Surrounded by Idiots by the same author

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically you are playing a game the whole life. There aren’t any other people, just buttons to press on and, since you are doing it your whole life — you figure out what buttons do what. That’s pretty much it and there isn’t much else to be busy with anyway, so your processing and learning capacity is *a lot*.

Think of interacting with NPCs in a game. You have options of what to do or to say and there isn’t that many of then really, so you just try it all out, until you get what you want. You don’t have to understand how it works or to emphatize with anything that happens in the other’s mind, just observe reactions and adjust your behavior.

Then if something doesn’t fit the narrow set of pre-existing buttons or buttons don’t do what you want, you either move along (cause you don’t care that much) or get straight into rage and violence smashing the controller against the wall if you don’t have enough self-control.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They aren’t always good at it. But narcissists and psychopaths both try to play on people’s emotions.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are two main advantages that a dark personality has over someone with a healthy system of empathy:

1. They have a ton of experience at this. Fundamentally, getting good at ***anything*** is just a matter of doing it enough and getting practice, finding out what works and what doesn’t, and adapting the strategy accordingly. Some dark personalities don’t even value their relationships, so they can simply cut ties and move on if they’re exposed.
2. Sociopaths/psychopaths (i.e. those with antisocial personality disorder) can “shut off” their empathy at will, and instead use it as a way of rapidly learning what a person’s pressure points are and predicting how they’ll react when pressed on a specific topic. Individuals with proper empathy have this ability, too, but we use it to gain an intuitive understanding of what’s off-limits so that we can avoid those areas.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think they also know that some people have a hard time saying no or putting up boundaries, so they keep pushing and pushing and then acting like it’s your idea or your “fault”

Anonymous 0 Comments

Manipulation is sort of easy. Try to get the person to sympathize with you, and get to know them.

(No, I am not a psychopath)

Anonymous 0 Comments

It starts out as feeling like the victim of something.

Then every action taken is a step to achieve reparations for every hypothetical wrong done against you. Basically it becomes an easy way to justify any actions you take because you feel entitled to whatever you seek.

-Who was it?

-What do you think this is equal to?

-What is the best way for them to notice?

-What is the most defensible position?

Now don’t get me wrong, some people don’t actually even think like this, it’s almost a way of life and there’s zero awareness in it whatsoever, just getting swept away in the madness. Once you start thinking like this it becomes natural to just fall through the breeze trying to get what you want, and basically eventually everyone notices you’re a piece of shit

Source: me, but I’m doing better now and I just choose to stay away from people after seeing myself for what I am