Manipulation Strategies in Interpersonal Relationships and Their Psychological Impact

Abstract

Manipulation is a purposeful, conscious, organized psychological influence with the aim of using the personality of another person as a means of achieving one's own goals. The purpose of the article is to characterize the main strategies of manipulation in interpersonal relationships. A set of theoretical research methods was used: the conceptual and terminological analysis was used to determine the essence of the main concepts of the study, comparative and contrastive, which made it possible to analyze the periodicals and scientific-methodical publications on psychology, classification. The results identify the major components of the process of manipulative interaction and the main signs of manipulation in interpersonal relationships. The results showed that manipulators control their victims through positive reinforcement (praise, excessive apologies, gifts, attention), negative reinforcement (getting rid of the problem), unstable or partial reinforcement (fear, doubt), punishment (reproaches, shouting). The conclusions indicate that the psychological mechanisms of manipulative action ensure the effectiveness of the manipulator's psychological influence on the object of manipulation. The conclusions also summarize that the main manipulative techniques are organizational and procedural, logical and psychological, and personal. The prospect of further scientific research is an empirical study of the features of manipulative tendencies in interpersonal relations.