Strategies of Persuasion, Manipulation and Propaganda: Psychological and Social Aspects

How can one influence the behavior of others? What is a good persuasion strategy? It is obviously of great importance to determine what information best to provide and also how to convey it. To delineate how and when manipulation of others can be successful, the first part of this chapter reviews basic findings of decision and game theory on models of strategic communication. But there is also a social aspect to manipulation, concerned with determining who we should address so as best to promote our opinion in a larger group or society as a whole. The second half of this chapter therefore looks at a novel extension of DeGroot’s [19] classical model of opinion dynamics that allows agents to strategically influence some agents more than others. This side-by-side investigation of psychological and social aspects enables us to reflect on the general question what a good manipulation strategy is. We submit that successful manipulation requires exploiting critical weaknesses, such as limited capability of strategic reasoning, limited awareness, susceptibility to cognitive biases or to potentially indirect social pressure