Make decisions based only on intuition
“My intuition tells me that I shouldn’t vaccinate my child against measles and polio, because all the doctors receive kickbacks for the vaccinations they prescribe, but in fact they don’t help. And in general, a friend of a friend’s child fell ill with autism after being vaccinated against measles, although the doctor says that this is not so, but I can guess!” I am 99% sure that you have heard such a monologue at least once. Acting on instinct, at the call of nature, or as your sixth sense tells you, is the best way to look like an idiot in the eyes of others, if they are not devoid of basic logic.
Types of ways to influence the perception of the interlocutor
A person can be influenced by choosing one of the main strategies: aggressive or passive. An aggressive strategy requires the manipulator to be able to confidently and easily build logical chains and consciously replace facts with fiction. While conducting a discussion, an aggressive manipulator forces his opponent to constantly object, lose the flow of the conversation, and, ultimately, agree with the arguments presented. But this effect can only be achieved if the interlocutor has a desire to engage in a lengthy discussion. To do this, you need to provoke him, captivate him with the subject of conversation, and create a desire to argue. An unconvincing and insufficiently persistent manipulator simply will not be able to generate the required level of interest.
The passive form is suitable for closer communication with a person whom the manipulator knows well. The structure of the conversation should be trusting, persistent, but not active. You need to slowly lead your interlocutor to the desired conclusions, choosing analogies that are understandable to him, giving suitable examples from life. It is important to ensure that the arguments do not contradict each other, but work towards the same idea. The more the interlocutor trusts the manipulator, the faster he will agree with the arguments presented.
Start arguing without understanding the issue
The second reliable way to be considered an ignoramus in the eyes of a person prone to logical justification of any aspects of life. Surely among your friends there are such people: having picked up fashionable quotes, facts randomly gleaned from the Internet and snippets of TV programs, they are considered experts in a whole bunch of issues, without actually bothering to understand even one topic and work it through to the end. To our even greater regret, there are a lot of such people in the modern education system in the CIS countries (especially in the humanities).
Top 10 things that can piss you off
We are firmly convinced that all people with mental disabilities and fragile nervous systems are under the supervision of doctors. We are also confident that we ourselves are completely healthy and do not harm others. And this guy sitting at the next table is also relatively normal. However, not all so simple. Anyone can be upset by a small thing, and the consequences can be very different. PEOPLETALK decided to find out what things can enrage a healthy person and bring him to nervous hysteria. Surely you will find something that is close to you.
Sweatshirt
“I bought such a cool sweatshirt.” This harmless word can drive not only a Russian language teacher, but also your friend crazy.
Knocking your feet on a seat on public transport
Most often, children are partial to this technique. It is still difficult for them to understand what rhythmic knocking on a chair can do to an adult who is tired after work.
Audio messages
The fashion for recording audio on WhatsApp has become a convenient means of communication for some, and a reason for a nervous breakdown for others. After all, your voice is far from being a heavenly aria to listen to on record, and messages are still more convenient to read than to listen to.
Excessive emotionality
If, at the sight of a little kitten, you become speechless, start squealing and convulsing, make sure that there is no person next to you whose emotions are directly opposite to yours.
Deafening crunch
A colleague who sits down next to you with a bag of chips, without knowing it, may become a victim of your wild fantasies. After all, you are already ready to grab his hair or do something worse.
When people laugh at what they value
It really gets infuriating when someone in a company starts making fun of generally accepted norms, family values, or kindness. In this case, your irritability is completely justified. Therefore, feel free to give free rein to your emotions.
Tights tucked into socks
This style causes not only laughter, but also irritation. You just wonder how you can leave the house like that.
Slow Internet connection
This is the worst thing that can befall a representative of the 21st century. You stare at the phone screen and endlessly refresh the required page, which takes about three minutes to load. However, for you, the waiting time seems endless, and the irritation increases with every second. Sound familiar?
Rush hour in the metro
Finding yourself in a stuffy carriage, where one is breathing down your back, another is resting his elbows on your side, and a third is whispering in your ear, “Are you getting off at the next station?” you experience increasing irritation that turns you into a sociopath. It is not recommended to travel on the subway at such times without taking Novopassit.
When the number you most need is disconnected or busy
You can't reach the right person. When you succeed, you start yelling into the phone, unable to control your emotions. After all, it is extremely difficult to explain to yourself that a person could have reasons for this. We are sure this is very familiar to you.
How to defeat toxic people? One proven way
Share:
Toxic people are those who make you angry and clearly enjoy it. Those who take advantage of our weaknesses and drive us into stress. Those who provoke us to make wrong emotional decisions. They were called toxic because they, like poison, poison the lives of those around them with their behavior. How to defeat them? Especially if these are people from close circles - parents, spouses, business partners, boss, colleagues, friends. Let's look at one practice-tested method.
Adults don't change
Paradoxically, we cannot do anything with another person - it is impossible to change his habits, worldview, way of communicating with the world. It will not be possible to educate adults, much less re-educate them. Moreover, it is better not to touch toxic people, otherwise there may be an explosion. Like the concentration of toxic substances. So what to do? Are they invincible?
In order to defeat toxic people, you need to start with yourself and first of all change your reaction to your communication. In psychology it is called super-reward. When you stop giving a person the emotional reward that he is waiting for, which is usually included in the script of your communication, he will be confused, he will communicate with you completely differently or will not be able to communicate at all.
Different facets of us
Usually, when we communicate with another person, we connect in dialogue only with the side that suits this style of communication. We conduct dialogue with parents completely differently than with colleagues, and with children differently than with our boss. And even with different friends in the same company, we have different communication styles. Like puzzles - despite the fact that we may be different, it is with this person that we connect in communication only in a certain way, maintaining a specific script for the conversation and our interaction. And it is extremely difficult to get out of this clutch. But this is possible if you change your internal attitudes. Then the person will begin to respect internal boundaries, and will understand that it is no longer possible to communicate with you as before. Will be forced to look for another scenario or limit communication. A little about where super-reward comes from and how it determines our personal style.
Eh, ma!..
As children, our parents gave each of us different super-rewards, conscious or unconscious. “Oh, what a hooligan he is growing up,” my mother repeated every day, “What a fidget!” Thus, she gave attention to the child, and he perceived this as approval and began to consolidate and replicate this style of behavior.
“Don’t interfere until they ask,” “Keep quiet, don’t talk,” my mother said to another person. And he grew up completely different.
The worst thing for a child is the indifference of the adult on whom he depends. Without it, he is unable to survive. Therefore, children remember, reinforce and repeat behavior that causes at least some kind of reaction, no matter positive or negative. The pole of assessment is not important, it is important that the adult reacts. As a result, we all ended up with different scenarios of interaction with important people. Some received approval for being rude, others for being a victim. People have grown, but the scripts remain.
And we repeat the same way of interacting with people over and over again, essentially getting the same result.
Exit script
Have you probably noticed that with some “toxic” people their faces change and their conversation style becomes different? They are not asked tactless questions, are not publicly nagged, are not insulted, and are not treated with arrogance. And all just because no one behaved like that with them in childhood. They can cut off a dialogue that is unpleasant for them, be surprised if someone dares to make fun of them, and clearly define their boundaries. And even the most arrogant abuser is either at a loss with them, or chooses other words and a way of communication. That doesn't mean they're special, it means you can too. It’s enough to make a decision within yourself: this can’t happen to me! And no longer give the offender the reaction he expects.
How to proceed?
At first, confusion sets in: after all, we understand how not to, but we don’t know at all how we can and should behave. The important thing here is to start by changing the “-“ to “+”. For example, you were always upset, but now you laughed, you usually cried, and now you clearly discuss things point by point.
Let's look at an example: Nikolai has a toxic colleague, he regularly tries to humiliate him in dialogue. Every time our hero needs to contact him, everything shrinks inside him, and he puts off this conversation for as long as possible. During the dialogue, Nikolai is clamped and tense, looking at the floor or behind the interlocutor’s right shoulder. The colleague begins to make sarcastic jokes, Nikolai usually listens to them, changing his face. And he is just waiting for this. Usually Nikolai awkwardly tries to move the dialogue into a constructive direction, quickly resolves his issue and leaves.
Now he knows that he needs to change his behavior so that his colleague changes his approach to communication. Nikolay conducted self-coaching and realized that he communicates differently with other people. There are times when it is easy for him to communicate.
So, the first thing he does is get ready for the meeting, as if for a holiday, singing. When communicating, he looks straight into the eyes, straightens his shoulders and conducts the dialogue from a position of strength. When a colleague tries to make sarcastic jokes as before, Nikolai shows with one raised eyebrow that such jokes are inappropriate. And now the colleague is confused and doesn’t know how to behave further. And now he reacts confusingly to questions. Nikolai returns to his workplace as a winner. And a colleague is looking for another victim.
And so, the toxic gentleman is defeated. It remains to consolidate this style of behavior, because he will not calm down the first time.
This is how this method works. The real antidote to toxic people.
New in blogs
Dispersion Technique Milton Erickson considered his most significant contribution to the development of hypnosis to be his dispersion technique (also known as the inserted message technique). Indeed, it became widespread in the future, in the search for new methods of advertising, propaganda and other methods of influencing individual and mass consciousness. The historical prerequisite for its appearance was the passion of psychologists and psychiatrists in the thirties of our century for research into associative thinking. There was a technique of free association: a person was asked to think about his problem, and then tell him everything that came to his mind in connection with this (any memories, dreams; any side ideas that were not logically connected, it would seem, with this problem).
It turned out that in the resulting stream of seemingly incoherent thoughts, free associations, there are words that are significant for understanding a person’s problem, and the person necessarily designates these significant words in some way (pause, change of intonation, gestures). From the indicated words, you can put together a completely coherent story about what the problem really is. A good investigator knows that there is no need to interrupt or stop a person who is enthusiastically lying; let him continue to lie and he will tell you the whole truth.
Erickson's idea was to use this process in reverse: to compose the text of the suggestion, and then “dissolve” it in some story of neutral content, subsequently denoting in some way the significant words (which make up the text of the suggestion). He was interested in whether a person would subconsciously assimilate such disguised suggestions? During experimental testing, it turned out that the technique of inserted messages is the best trap for consciousness.
The first effective examples of the use of dispersion techniques in medical practice have become textbook ones. They are stated or at least mentioned in every book on Ericksonian hypnosis under the titles “the story of the tomato” and “the story of the stenographer.”
The Story of a Stenographer
So here it is, this famous story about the stenographer as told by Erickson. “...One of the department's new stenographers, who had a strong prejudice against hypnosis, suffered from severe migraine attacks... She was examined several times, but to no avail. She usually retired to the rest room to “sleep the headache away,” which took her at least three hours. But one day, during one of these attacks, the author did not allow her to go to the rest room and rather persistently suggested that she take dictation. Suppressing her indignation, she began to work, but fifteen minutes later she interrupted the author, reporting with amazement that the headache had passed. She attributed this to her anger at being forced to take dictation.
Another time, in the same state, she herself volunteered to work with some difficult material that all the other stenographers shied away from. The headache intensified, and she decided that her successful experience of working under the dictation of the author was only the result of a coincidence. When she began having another attack of severe migraine, the author again made her an insistent offer to work from dictation. This time the pain went away within ten minutes.
When the next attack occurred, she volunteered to take dictation from the author. And again it helped relieve the headache. Then, as an experiment, she decided to try to work with other doctors in the same way. For reasons unknown to her, the headaches only got worse. After one of these unsuccessful attempts, she came to the author and asked him to dictate. The author did not have suitable material at hand for dictation, and he used material that had not been dictated before. The headache was relieved in eight minutes.
Later, in response to her request for pain relief, a plain text was dictated to her. This had no effect. The next time she came without much hope, since she believed that she had “exhausted the healing power of dictation.” Again the text was dictated to her, and after nine minutes the pain disappeared. She was so delighted that she decided to keep a copy of the text so that, if necessary, she could ask someone to dictate this “successful dictation” to her, which relieved her headache. But, alas, it turned out that no one had such a “correct voice” as the author.
Neither she nor the others had any idea what really happened. The author then kept extensive records of the rambling utterances of a psychotic patient. He was assisted in this work by several different stenographers. The author used these texts, scattering therapeutic suggestions in a certain system in the patient’s speech production, intended for a stenographer suffering from migraines.
When a positive result was obtained, he tried to use the speech production of another psychotic patient in the same way. This experience also turned out to be successful. As a control series of this experiment, dictations of ordinary official texts and incoherent material “not seeded” with therapeutic suggestions were tested. No effect on headache was observed. The dictation of the “seeded” material performed by other people also did not produce results, since in order to achieve the effect it had to be read with expression, emphasizing the necessary places.”
The 25th frame phenomenon
One of the brightest pages in the history of scattering technology was the discovery in the sixties of a phenomenon called the “25th frame phenomenon.” It all started as part of an ordinary psychological experiment; Scientists studied human perception of ultra-short stimuli.
A film projector turned out to be a very convenient tool for research. . . We know that frames alternating in a film projector at a rate of 24 per second create the effect of movement, since at this playback speed a number of still frames “merge” into one moving image (there is no awareness of the gap between the frames).
What happens if the 25th frame contains information different from that contained in the previous twenty-four? In experiments, it turned out that a person is not aware of such information, but remembers it - that is, a person cannot explain where he got this information from and why he remembers it.
In an ordinary cinema hall there is an ordinary film. None of the viewers know that during the course of the film, two frames will flash on the screen several times for 1/25th of a second - a man suffering from thirst in the desert and an image of a certain drink. None of them will understand why after the film you so want to wet your throat with this particular drink. And the seller at the drinks kiosk will only be surprised that the demand for this drink will increase three times after the film!
In the early sixties, experiments with films seeded with advertising were very popular. But one of the UN commissions considered it necessary to ban this method of advertising as immoral, and the experiments stopped. . . In any case, publications in the open scientific press about such experiments have ceased
Methods of psychological influence on people in social advertising: examples
Commercial advertising differs from social advertising; its main goal is the slogan “Buy!” Social advertising has other goals:
- Awareness;
- Achieving target behavior;
- Formation of approved submissions;
- Assimilation of information;
- Recommendation of behavior models.
To have a psychological impact on people, social advertising must have such a concept as emotionality . That is, advertising should evoke emotions. These emotions can be both negative and positive. Positive emotions, for example, encourage a person to follow an example, to act one way and not another. Negative ones, on the contrary, lead a person to the realization that there is no need to do this.
Important: A person’s emotional memory is the strongest. Even if a person is not affected by advertising settings, he will still remember it if it is emotional. However, if the advertisement does not contain strong emotions, it will not attract the viewer's attention.
Social videos where the main characters are children, people with disabilities, and the elderly have a special emotional effect.
We offer an example of social advertising with a strong psychological impact in the video at the end of the article.
Now you know what techniques and methods of psychological influence on people are available. You can try to apply them in practice, it is much more interesting than reading theory.
The influence of "energy vampires"
Psychologists warn: communication with such people has a negative impact on both mental and physical health. You may get a headache, your blood pressure may rise (or fall), and even an old illness may worsen after communicating with this kind of person. There are known cases where conversations with toxic friends, relatives, and colleagues provoked miscarriages in pregnant women. Therefore, energy vampires should be excluded from your life. But first, you need to figure out who a toxic person is and how he can be isolated from the crowd.
I turned a pallet and stones into a table and two chairs: now there is a place to have lunch in the yard
The continuation of the phrase “The slower you go, the further you will go” completely changes its usual meaning
“The system needs to be brought to fruition”: online learning will be included in aspects of education
