The Manipulators

Personality and Politics in Multiple Perspectives

Allan W. Lerner

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429582165
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

Originally published in 1990, this volume had two purposes. One was to shed some light on the impact that manipulativeness has on modern institutional processes. The other was to illustrate the importance of attempting militantly interdisciplinary work on themes that run through a variety of social sciences and related disciplines, as a way of breaking down excessively stifling disciplinary barriers.

Manipulativeness is a connotation-laden notion with shifting meanings across the variety of action contexts, levels of analysis, and disciplinary orientations. It absorbs the idea of strategic-mindedness, rule exploitation, situational advantage seeking, tampering with structure and context, and control of the action climate. In a way, it is a very contemporary interpretation of the theme of power, melding images of control with the experience of pervasive social ambiguity.

1

The Problem and Its Many Approaches: Horizontal Divisions Among Disciplinary Approaches

This is a book about the urge to be manipulative in our dealings with other people. Modern Western societies—and many other societies past and present—show great ambivalence toward the manipulative posture in dealing with others. We respect people who are “shrewd,” who “weren’t born yesterday.” No one wants to be “naive,” “vulnerable,” or “a willing victim.” At the same time we value honesty and openness, people whose word is their bond, and with whom we can safely be frank and “upfront.” When given a choice in abstract terms, we seem to esteem the tactful more than the tactical, but we also esteem winning and surviving, and we know that situations imposing this crasser test are very common in life.

Tact and tactic can peacefully coexist in the idealized persona of the well-adjusted modern person so long as the idealization is not scrutinized. All that is required is a modest rationale, one that serves best when it is implicitly elevated to a vague maxim for living (an act of casual conceptual inflation that unfortunately occurs all the time).

The modest rationale is that people should be treated in the manner they present. Openness for openness, warmth for warmth; unguardedness for naivete. So it follows also: cleverness should be met with cleverness, scheming with still better schemes, and force with force, to be sure.

This maxim to mirror a counterpart’s behavior, to live by “tit for tat,” to reciprocate cooperation and hostility each in kind, has taken various homiletic forms and it has the limitations of all homilies. It will not survive close inspection. There are too many necessary ifs and buts for which it gives no guidance. It is a frequent experience that others simply break the rules and take advantage by not reciprocating cooperation. Often others present nothing cooperative to reciprocate. Reciprocating hostility can begin a mutually destructive cycle. Initiating cooperation in the hope of reciprocal tion can get one killed or worse. Actions and messages can mix several relationship levels simultaneously and it is hard to signal a response on one level without intruding on another. Actions and messages are often unclear and inconsistent. Interpretations by actor and counterpart can differ. People often misunderstand their own interest. When the effects of actions run contrary to the intentions behind them to which does one respond?

The simultaneous attraction to and discomfort with the manipulative orientation toward others cannot be balanced with a simple rule. It is a point of departure for this book to see these dual values as an ambivalence that is inherent in the modern condition. It is a dilemma both felt and reflected in personality and society, and its presence on each dimension perpetuates its display in the other.

Scholarship has struggled to grasp various facets of this phenomenon. Some probe it by first casting it as a drive for domination, aggression, or power, depending on the favored nuance. Some focus on the Realpolitik demands of a harsh world and argue survival as the first value for which the art and science of manipulation is an obvious necessity, and which may in any event be channeled to serve humanistic purposes. Others focus on the reconstruction of social form, or with an institutional emphasis, societal structure, to obviate the necessity for manipulation as a way of life. Others focus on understanding the social dimension of species evolution and see it as a process that will include the extinction of the manipulative orientation that is rooted in primitiveness. Many such theoretical strands of the subject have been raised within disciplines and with various interdisciplinary orientations. The subject of manipulativeness is as broad as it is vital.

The thrust of the approach to be taken in this book is informed by an interpretation of what has been done so far within a cluster of disciplines. We now turn to an assessment of some of those efforts that will be most relevant as orientations out of which has been formed the approach taken here.

GAME THEORY, RATIONAL CHOICE, AND THE REQUIREMENTS FOR A PARADIGM OF MANIPULATIVENESS

Consider “game theorists” and their close social science cousins from the school of “interactive rational choice” (populated by economists and political scientists). As with all academic “movements” considerable variety can be found within their collective efforts. In the main, however, they chart the “game strategies” people employ against one another in playing for predetermined game rewards. This generally involves establishing the successfulness of various sequences of moves in response to counterpart moves and in light of game properties, or game rules. A major interest over the years has been to understand how people may find their way to cooperative play for joint benefit, when playing games set up so that each player would be vulnerable to aggressive, exploitive play by the other as a tempting alternative to cooperative play. Axelrod’s (1984) work represents a high point of the genre, consolidating and elaborating its consistent findings. In briefest overview, the work succeeds in providing a demonstration and within its paradigm framework a verification, of the basic homiletic guide for reconciling manipulative and cooperative postures just noted, namely that others should be treated as they present. In the case of the game-theory genre, the limitations of homily do not glare to those immersed in the gaming paradigm because the technique is based on assumptions that exclude the subtler and more troubling concerns for which the homiletic position is inadequate. Axelrod described the superiority of the game strategy “tit for tat,” wherein an opponent’s aggressive act is met with a retaliatory act, and his cooperative act gains a cooperative response. This is deemed the best road to cooperation over the long term. It is in a sense, the way to harmony and the suppression of tendencies to mutual harm or one party’s exploitation.

The problem is that although the game theorist describes such a tit-for-tat precept as a “strategy,” in complex social action it is really only a circumscribed tactic. To Axelrod and the school his work epitomizes, relationships are conducted or in subdiscipline vernacular, games are played, according to mutually understood rules that are given, which is to say set beforehand by a vague “others.” The rules are communicated by an experimenter serving as a passive agent describing the game form, an experimenter who says in effect “the rules are …” rather than “I have decided the rules will be…” With the clear and simple rules of popular rational choice games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma or the game of the Acme trucks—two games having each been the format for more than 100 empirical studies (Rubin & Brown, 1975)—what is left to players to “strategize” about is simply the choice of tactics within fixed and narrow game rules that cannot be tampered with. The freedom to strategize or at least simply communicate about what their relationship will be, how they will present, resolve, clarify, or leave ambiguous their preferences for its form, its significance, its inclusiveness, its purpose—its relation to almost an infinity of creative and destructive social possibilities — is taken away from the actors. The meanings the encounter will have for each are pretended to have been decided by an implicit paradigm rule to ignore such issues.

This approach is consistent with a tradition of laboratory research on bargaining and negotiation that has frequently preferred for the sake of manageability, to exclude verbal communication in its laboratory replicas of “negotiation.” All that people are left to “strategize” about, is really only an essentially predetermined and limited range of tactics. Axelrod’s work is an excellent statement of a now classic approach. However, its inherent paradigm limitations must be taken into account in assessing its relevance for understanding the dynamics of manipulative behavior. The paradigm tends to divert attention from, and it may indeed formally foreclose, an understanding of sophisticated manipulativeness as exploitation of relationship structure—of gamer properties, in the course of preoccupation with game properties. What I have alluded to as strategy, in contrast to mere tactics, may be suppressed by positing a fixed elementary game structure encapsulating an uncreative, strategically barren problem, compared to what life away from the game board can produce. The game can often be quite elegant as the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” is in a way, but it is an elegance based on the distillation down to a fundamental choice that is the game’s essence.

In some respects, this is still a process of severe constraint. These games are often elegant in the sense that the distillation of a problem to “do or die” is elegant, but it is the elegance of a minimalist aesthetic, parsimony at too heavy a price. What is excluded in the rational choice a la Prisoner’s Dilemma, are the richer contextual elements that are often employed to create manipulative possibilities: structural vagueness, ambiguous mutual understandings, moves toward a counterpart that may appear concessionary as well as serving a partisan interest, a driving emotionality, and symbolism.

Hacking (1984), in a review of Axelrod’s recent book makes two wry observations that speak to these concerns. Dealing with male-female difference in style when playing a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Hacking drew on a vignette from a recent work by Gilligan (1983):

In part the girls collaborate by trying to change the rules of the game to suit the human beings caught up in it. One of Gilligan’s examples is this: the girl said “Let’s play next-door neighbors.” “I want to play pirates,” the boy replied. “O.K.,” said the girl, “Then you can be the pirate who lives next door.” We certainly need to change games more often than we need optimum strategies…. perhaps some ten-yearold girl can help us out of the game. I have done my small bit. At least I have changed the name of the game. It has hitherto been known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. I have been calling it the Prisoners’ Dilemma. The two prisoners are in it together, (pp. 26–28)

In Hacking’s and Gilligan’s context, the point is well taken that genuine cooperation may require substantial creativity in reshaping “the game” itself, and the development of a broader common vision that can reconcile now expanded interests. But from our perspective, the passage just cited underscores other important points as well. Sophisticatedly manipulative strategies aimed at counterparts frequently work through distortion of the rules. The “human beings caught up” may remain one’s adversaries if not one’s enemies. Games expanded for cooperation may also be expanded for advantage. Clarity of rules is often one of the first casualties, and here nuance figures heavily in achieving manipulative strategies masked as invitations to joint meta-awareness. Consider the pirates versus next-door neighbors dilemma and its resolution. From our perspective, an interesting question is whether the would-be pirate will find himself indeed hoisting the Jolly Roger with his mate at his side, or singing a lullaby to an imaginary pirate baby while waiting for the Maytag man, albeit with a plastic cutlass under his apron. Such is the dimension of issue that the Prisoner’s Dilemma leaves behind and even the Prisoners’ Dilemma may underestimate.

Interactive rational choice a la Prisoner’s Dilemma exploration offers suggestive insight into the effect of basic situation features on tactical possibilities, and allows for a cooperative assessment of tactical postures under given sets of basic rules. The awareness of possibilities for game linkage and game expansion a la Hacking, aids appreciation of how game properties may be changed regarding the values likely to be associated with them. These may be values held individually or in common by the participants. However, a fuller understanding of manipulativeness, including insight into its relationships with situational properties and possibilities must go further. It must embrace rather than resist, a psychologizing of some aspects of its subject matter. It must include inquiry into the interplay between situational elements and personality proclivities, talents and motives for deviousness, emotionality, and emotional maturity.

On this dimension it is useful to keep in mind, that meta-awareness may facilitate scheming in service of ignoble values every bit as much as noble values. Progress in the understanding of manipulativeness thus requires a still richer framework.

Of course there are many ways to psychologize. Consider the efforts that have recently come to be called psychohistory.

THE PROMISE AND LIMITS OF PSYCHOHISTORY

Like many newer academic enterprises, the difficulty in establishing a consensus on what psychohistory is seems matched only by the intensity of an apparently felt necessity to do so, on the part of many of its practitioners. In a 1978 symposium in the Journal of Psychohistory aptly titled “The Joys and Terrors of Psychohistory,” Lawton (1978) surveyed “roughly 110 individuals worldwide, on how they define psychohistory …” (p. 325). Understandably, there seemed to be almost 110 answers to this question.

As one reads the literature of this genre it seems that in the main, psychohistory at its current best is psychohistory at its narrowest: psychobiography. The biography explores the inner life of a historically/politically prominent individual or an individual taken as representative (i.e., phenotypic, or a historically significant group of persons). The object of inquiry is to link the external actions of such actors to the dynamics of their inner lives. Thus, one probes a presidents psyche to better understand the origins of his administration’s foreign and domestic policies (Kearns, 1976).

It seems fair to say that so far as this sense of psychohistory is concerned (that is, as biography of prominent psyches) the problem is not with its internal methodology or assumptions (although debates and debatable assumptions are not in short supply). Clearly, people matter in the shaping of historical events and so do psyches, the constellation of individual motives, conscious and unconscious. Prominent people and also key small, relatively homogeneous classes of people representable in a phenotypic exemplar, can be crucial to events. Psychobiographies of such persons can offer valuable insights into such events, even if they do not constitute exhaustive explanations of the events. In this obvious sense psychobiography makes a useful contribution to sociopolitical analysis. This is a rather obvious point; it would be condescending to even state it as if it needed defense—were it not that two cautions follow closely.

The first is that there is a major difference between a useful contribution and a substitution. Psychohistory, as psychobiography based on clinical concepts relaxed for subclinical purposes, cannot explain, obviously cannot supply a comprehensive conceptualization of, the action dimension of institutional-level relationships pondered by the social sciences. Few psychohistorians (but still not all) would disagree with this point as stated. However, ranks break completely and dissent is widespread once one attempts to mark off the domain of the social sciences still further. Thus, much of the psychohistory community seriously disputes the inappropriateness of the psychohistory approach to the study of collectivities—and to put it sharply, very large collectivities —say, the interwar Germans. For such broad categories, there are those who trace action to motive and motive to psyche, reading history thus as a psychohistory of a society (Kohut, 1985). When psychohistorical techniques have their origins in historically clinical tools, the limitations of psychohistory are terribly clear. The traditional psychobiography is limited in the sense that its usefulness is demarcated at the boundary of individual experience. When psychohistory is extended to collective level action in inter-institutional context, there is always a risk of epistemological chaos. When the method does go awry, all is firstly and ultimately psyche-driven.

When this happens, the clinical emphasis on empathy runs a danger of being reduced to a process of willing one’s self into the past and experiencing it for truth mining purposes in the present. Explanation then comes from unverifiable “insight,” and is confirmed by post-insight exhaustion. Intensity can replace argument. Consider a passage from Binion’s symposium contribution on the definition of psychohistory:

Twice now I have cited Hitler’s unconscious rapport with his public … I thought and felt myself back into his audiences in the Munich area before the Putsch and across Germany in the late 1920s. After long months of straining my mind’s ear I could all at once hear, and shrilly where his call for eastward expansion resonated with a traumatic national experience. This was the 1918 defeat, for which Germans were the less prepared since LudendorfPs subjugation of Soviet Russia had seemed to render them invulnerable. That trauma did not, then, just pop up behind Hitler’s expansionist project and introduce itself. It erupted convulsively, a pent-up panic so overpowering when released that I blocked it out again and again before I could admit it to consciousness sufficiently even to identify it. With it, disparate elements of Weimar Germany’s troubled and confusing politics rushed to mind, connected up, fell into place. These included a missing link in my evidence that I then had to hunt down: the transition from Hitler’s two early repertory pieces to his project for a new eastern conquest. This project was now intelligible as an invitation to a traumatic reliving—one designed ostensibly to undo the 1918 defeat, actually to outdo it. A year or more passed before I realized that I was taking that transition for granted. Then I scouted for documentation. I found it for May 31, 1921, when Hitler delivered those two repertory speeches combined, both for the last time. In vindicating Brest-Litovsk on that occasion he blurted out that the big German loss from the defeat in the west had been the land conquered from the Soviets. And he grounded the point in the very arguments that he later advanced to urge a reconquest.

That documentary find confirmed for me my intuition of the German trauma. True, my final proof of it lay with Hitler registering it and reacting. But the insight had been won through self-projection into his national public. This opened mass phenomena to direct psychohistorical inquiry. (Binion, 1978, pp. 320–321)

The contribution of psychohistory as psychobiography is clear when it stops at the edge of collective/institutional level issues. Indeed, Stalinism is not derivable from probing baby Djugashvili, as Binion noted in an earlier passage. But psychohistory as psychobiography can indeed offer a piece of the puzzle. One may wonder whether it is not in the long run a more useful if modest piece than what can be derived by a “self-projection” into a national public, which claims to open mass phenomenon to “direct” psychohistorical inquiry. Thus, Monaco’s (1978) comments on Binion included the observation “Binion emphasizes an approach to causal explanation that is reductionist, with a vengeance. It is a necessary corrective to the last half-century’s rampant pluralism dominating the social sciences, and in turn historiography, in search of a multiplicity of casual [sic] explanations. Binion’s emphasis on ‘empathy,’ however, i...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Problem and Its Many Avenues: Horizontal Differences Among Disciplinary Approaches
• Chapter 2 Levels of Analysis and Strategies for Understanding: Vertical Divisions in Problem Approach
• Chapter 3 The Manipulators: Perspectives from Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis
• Chapter 4 The Manipulator in Profile: A Psychological Test Description
• Chapter 5 The Manipulative Profile and Group Context
• Chapter 6 The Manipulative Personality and the Organizational System
• Chapter 7 The Manipulative Society
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index