Emotional Manipulation: A Masked Reality

Manipulation is everywhere. The social influence aimed at changing the behavior or belief of a person through emotional coercion. Emotional manipulation has always been prevalent in human interaction. It's in all of our relationships. Companies use it on us to make us buy certain products or feel a certain way, and even influencers use it to make sure they keep their followers. Pretty often, we're made to do things we don't want to do by people we hold in high esteem without realizing that we're being manipulated by them.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said, "Show people as one thing and only one thing over and over again, and that's what they become." This stereotyping is a form of gaslighting. It's intentionally accusing someone of being a negative stereotype, whatever that may be. A few years ago, Facebook worked in partnership with the University of California to perform an experiment. In this experiment, Facebook purposefully altered the feeds of around 689,000 users such that some only saw positive stories on their wall while others only saw negative stories.

After about a week of doing this, when these users posted their own updates, most of the time they had been influenced by the emotions that flooded their wall. People who were fed more negative posts in turn put out more negative posts, while those who received a swell of positive posts used more positive language when making their own posts. This rather controversial experiment just shows how easily our emotions can be manipulated, even in very subtle ways.

You know something I've noticed is that people on Twitter are so angry compared to the people on other platforms. Well, maybe this is because negative topics are more triggering, and so they spark more debate than positive topics. These debates then flood the entire platform with negativity, which only continues to influence people to add more fuel to the fire. It's a sad reality that we live in, in that before making a tweet you have to read through it once, twice, and then prepare your apology just in case.

We might not know it, but in a way, we're in an abusive relationship with these platforms. Oftentimes we can't express our views clearly, and we can easily be manipulated by the views of others. Gaslighting is one of the most popular techniques used by emotional manipulators. The term "gaslight" was first used in a 1938 play. In it, a husband manipulates his wife, convincing her that she has a mental illness and is hallucinating by dimming their gas-fueled lights.

Today, the term gaslighting more widely refers to a form of psychological abuse where the victim is made to seem crazy. The reality of the situation is turned on its head so that the victims start to doubt their own logic and reasoning. The term has been popularized thanks to the internet; however, still not many people understand the concept of gaslighting and how deeply it can affect someone. Children who grew up in unstable homes where things such as abuse, alcoholism, and other issues are rife often experience gaslighting at such a young age.

These kids go up to their parents to ask them what's going on after witnessing it with their own eyes, but the parents instead tell them that nothing of such is happening and it's all in their head. The parents might not be actively trying to gaslight their child; in fact, more often than not, they think they're protecting the child from the harsh realities that they're faced with. In truth, though, all that does is make the child question their own sanity and senses from such a young age.

And so they grow up not being able to trust their own judgment or even that of others, because, well, what if they didn't actually see what they said they saw? Gaslighting doesn't only work in interpersonal relationships; it also works in mass— a phenomenon that some experts call structural gaslighting. Convincing a large group of people that their realities are skewed or even flat out wrong. Things like racial and political gaslighting fall into this category.

Adolf Hitler is regarded as one of history's greatest emotional manipulators. After the loss of World War One, the la...