Emotional Manipulation: How to Avoid Doing What You Don’t Want
Hello everyone! This is Stalilingus. Today, I’d like to continue our conversation about emotions.
In different situations, we experience a variety of feelings and emotions. These can be roughly divided into groups:
- Positive (joy, interest);
- Negative (fear, anxiety, anger, grief, melancholy);
- Neutral (surprise, boredom).
It’s impossible to feel only positive emotions all the time. In fact, it’s well known that negative feelings help people adapt to situations by trying to overcome them. Positive emotions, on the other hand, lead to relaxation and, paradoxically, to maladaptation.
Manipulators usually target emotions like joy, anxiety, guilt, and shame. Triggering these feelings can make a person do something they never intended, setting a certain pattern of behavior. Let’s take a closer look at these emotions.
1. Joy
We can identify several types of joy:
- True joy
- Pseudo-joy
- Magical joy
What are the differences between them?
True Joy
True joy is experienced as a result of one’s own, usually creative, activity. In other words, it’s the pleasure you get from creating, inventing, or accomplishing something. This joy doesn’t last long and is considered an energy-consuming emotion. Afterward, people often feel drained. When someone is experiencing joy, they are very vulnerable. Any criticism or negative comment will hurt twice as much, so it’s best not to say anything negative at that moment, even if it’s deserved.
It’s common to see someone make a big purchase, like a new TV, and share their happiness with friends, only to have them criticize the model or brand. This often comes from people who are especially envious. What happens to the person? Their emotional state quickly shifts from positive to negative, and the negative emotions feel even stronger.
Pseudo-Joy
Pseudo-joy isn’t necessarily a positive emotion. To explain this feeling, consider the following example: Imagine you’re on a business trip and had to buy new shoes. Your day is packed with meetings and events, but by lunchtime, you realize the shoes are painfully tight. You spend the rest of the day in discomfort, unable to do anything about it. Only in the evening, when you finally take off the shoes at your hotel, do you feel relief. That’s pseudo-joy. In other words, it’s the emotion that comes after removing an unpleasant factor. Some even say pseudo-joy is the joy of a neurotic: they create problems for themselves, solve them, and then enjoy the relief.
Another example: You can’t find your phone. You search everywhere, worry, and even wonder if it was stolen. You feel anxious and uneasy. Finally, you find it and feel happy. But this emotion isn’t real joy—it’s just a shadow of true joy you might feel from something else.
This emotion is often used in manipulation. The main difference from true joy is that there’s no creative process beforehand. To make someone feel pseudo-joy, it’s enough to cause them anxiety or discomfort and then remove it.
This often happens when new laws or projects are introduced that aren’t popular with the public. The pattern for creating pseudo-joy looks like this:
- The manipulator uses the “pendulum effect”;
- The target is pushed into a zone of negative emotions;
- Some of the negative emotions are removed;
- The remaining emotions are perceived as positive.
For example, in a large Russian city, the mayor was losing popularity before an election. Residents complained about rising public transport and utility prices. Instead of lowering rates, the mayor announced that another price hike might be unavoidable, and for a while, fares were even higher. A month later, the budget “found” money to return prices to their previous levels. People celebrated and thanked the mayor. In reality, nothing changed—the prices were still what everyone had originally complained about. But the official managed to create anxiety about things getting worse, then relieved it, allowing people to feel pseudo-joy.
Magical Joy
Magical joy is the emotion we feel from anticipating future achievements. Our brains are wired so that we can’t always distinguish reality from imagination. So, when we start fantasizing, we experience the same emotions as if we had actually achieved something.
A classic example is a couple who buys a lottery ticket and argues over who will drive the new car and what they’ll do with it. They haven’t won anything yet and may never win, but they still experience all the emotions, including magical joy. This is often used in manipulations involving visions of the future. For example, you might see ads saying, “Take our course, earn a million dollars, and buy a Mercedes.” What’s happening here? A beautiful picture is painted—you can buy your dream car, and all you have to do is take a course. You start imagining yourself behind the wheel, feeling real joy, and your brain treats these emotions as genuine. So, you sign up for the course without hesitation.
The “future vision” technique is very popular among marketers. Many ad campaigns are built on it. Consumers are shown how their lives could improve if they buy a certain product or service. This image stays in the subconscious, and people strive to buy what’s being pushed, without even considering if they really need it.
In other words, magical joy is a vision of the future. It’s the foundation of most financial pyramid schemes. Clients are told that if they invest $10, they’ll get $300 in a short time. They imagine a bright future, start believing in it, and actually hand over their money. Only after the effect wears off do they start thinking logically and realize they’ve been deceived. And as we know, any manipulation leaves the target feeling empty and disappointed.
How to Protect Yourself from Emotional Manipulation
As we can see, we’re often made to do things we don’t want to do. Manipulators try to trigger various emotions, including positive ones. But is a moment of pleasure really worth the energy you spend on it? Will you truly be happy buying something you don’t need at all? The ability to think critically and approach any information rationally will help you avoid becoming a victim of manipulation.
Stalilingus