How to Analyze People:
13 Laws About the Manipulation of the Human
Mind, 7 Strategies to Quickly Figure Out Body
Language, Dive into Dark Psychology and
Persuasion for Making People Do What You Want
By
Daniel Spade
Would you believe that at every waking moment of your life, your mind is
being manipulated or controlled in one way or another? Not necessarily
always by someone you know either. Social media, online news content, the
things you see and hear in traditional media, advertisements, conversations
we see and hear at work or in our personal lives. They’re all some form of
manipulation or mind control, and most of the time, it’s happening without
you even realizing it. Even what you’re about to read throughout the next
chapters in this book could be a form of “manipulation” that influences your
thoughts to a certain extent.
Why though, is the human mind so susceptible to manipulation? Could it be
that our mind is full of what is known as “loopholes”? Let’s take a look at the
Solomon Asch experiment which was conducted in 1957. This experiment on
conformity was carried out by Asch in a series of psychological tests to
reveal the degree to which an individual’s opinions could be influenced by
that of a group of people. The results, Asch discovered, were that with the
right amount of peer pressure, people were willing to ignore the facts or
reality that was in front of them and resort to giving a false or incorrect
response just to conform to the rest of the group.
Before that, here’s a quick question....
Do you see yourself as someone who is a non-conformist? Or a conformist?
Most people believe that they can be just the right amount of non-conformist
to stand up against others when they know they are right about something. A
conformist, however, would prefer to blend in with the group. While most
tend to believe they’re non-conformist, research would suggest otherwise,
and that people might be more prone to conformity than they initially think.
Here’s a quick test. Imagine you’re now part of a psychology experiment
with a group of several other people.
Everyone is taking the same test where
you’re shown a series of oddly shapes images and asked what you can see
when you look at the image. On some occasions, some participants
unanimously declare they can see the exact same image, but when you look at
the picture, you’re seeing something entirely different. You’re the only one
who’s seeing it too. Every other participant in the room has the same unified
answer. What would you do? Do you stand by what you can see? Or do you
go ahead and declare the same answer the other participants are giving?
That’s precisely what the Asch conformity experiments aimed to discover.
Conformity, which is a person’s tendency to go along with the unspoken
behavior or rules of a social group that they are a part of. Asch set out to
discover with his experiments if people could be pressured into conforming,
even if they knew that everyone else in the group was wrong. Asch main
purpose of his experiment was to demonstrate just how powerful conformity
could be in a group.
When Asch carried out his experiment, there were participants who were
“in” on what was going on and pretending to be like all the other
participants, along with those who were really unaware of what was taking
place. Those who knew what was going on would behave in certain ways,
and the aim was to see if their behavior was going to have any influence on
the other participants. In each experiment that was carried out, there would
be one naive participant who was placed with a group of the “aware”
participants. There were 50 participants in the group, and everyone was told
they would be taking part in some sort of “vision test”.
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