Three ways to avoid manipulation at work

Is your boss manipulating you? Probably – one in five employees say they hate their boss, and four in five say they have worked with a toxic colleague. Whether it’s your supplier squeezing you into paying higher prices, your boss guilt-tripping you into working overtime, or just your colleague Susan convincing you she didn’t eat your sandwich (I can see the wrapper in your bin, Susan), workplace manipulation happens everywhere, everyday.

There are tons of books on how to Win Friends and Influence People – how to Influence and Nudge in the workplace – but what if you don’t want to be influenced and nudged? How can you stand up to manipulation wherever you find it?

Fortunately, there’s a brand-new book about how to do that very thing. It’s called Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it, and it’s co-authored by your favourite behavioural scientist, me. Laura Dodsworth and I investigated the latest cutting-edge science about resisting persuasion, as well as classical post-war philosophy and psychoanalysis. We even infiltrated some cults, forums, and multi-level marketing schemes.

So what do the science and the secrets of the cults tell us about resisting manipulation at work? Here is a selection of three tips.

1. Get it in Writing

Images have pre-attentive effects – that means they impact your brain before you’re even consciously aware of what you’re seeing. Research on the picture superiority effect has demonstrated that images are more attention-grabbing, emotional, memorable and persuasive than words. It makes evolutionary sense: we’ve had eyes for much longer than we’ve had language. And where images are more persuasive than words, videos are like images on crack.

In a world of flashy PowerPoint presentations, TikTok marketing, and Zoom video calls, it has never been more important to get things in writing. When you read, your brain has more time to absorb the information and reflect on it critically; it’s a slow, meditative exercise that involves a ‘deep’ thinking style rather than a shallow one. If you have an important decision to make at work, try to get all the information in writing so you can digest it properly.

2. Take Time to HALT

Doing our hands-on research for the book, we found that cults love to make you tired. I spent the weekend at a retreat in the woods, where I was given nothing but nuts and dried fruit to eat, having been woken at 6am for a cold shower outside (in November). Elsewhere, we saw groups use complex language and labyrinthian rules to bamboozle recruits. The goal is to wear down critical thought in order to ‘overthrow the rulers of the mind’, as one scholar put it. Even Hitler preferred to give his speeches at night when people ‘succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will’.

Your boss may not (quite) be Hitler, but you will still have important decisions to make at work, with varying levels of energy and brainpower to make them. As psychological research into ego depletion has demonstrated, we are more persuadable, and more likely to make suboptimal choices, when we’re worn down. Alcoholics Anonymous have a handy acronym – Hungry, Anxious, Lonely, Tired (HALT). If you’re under any of these stressors, take a moment and move from a ‘hot state’ into a ‘cold’ one before making your decision.

3. Listen to Your Gut

There are some things so absurd, said George Orwell, that only an intellectual could believe them. Rational thought is fantastic (of course it is), but sometimes it can lead us astray. It allows us justify things that may not necessarily be ideal, or even true – and the smarter we are, the more likely we are to believe our beliefs are correct, and the better we are at justifying them. The rational mind rationalises. Businesses have talked themselves into monumentally stupid decisions, like Coca-Cola changing their beloved recipe to New Coke, Tropicana making its packaging unrecognisable to the tune of millions of dollars in lost sales, or Bud Light destroying its brand through a cackhanded choice of influencers. Their marketing teams all surely had brilliant explanations for their strategies.

The key is to pay more attention to your gut instinct at work. One study found that the best investors have the strongest emotional responses to potential investments and use more precise vocabulary to describe these feelings; another increased doctors’ diagnostic accuracy by up to 40% by having them jot down their gut instinct and consciously interpret it. Even meditation has been shown to reduce vulnerability to a particular cognitive bias by 34%.

So...

You can make yourself less vulnerable to manipulation at work by getting it in writing, taking a breather, and listening to your gut. There’s a lot more besides: like standing for something (or falling for anything) with a clear business mission and strategy lest you get blown about by the winds of whatever is trendy (remember NFTs?); or not giving your interlocuter an inch, since most persuasion starts with a small foot-in-the-door (the Enron scandal spiralled out of control starting with a few minor bad habits). There’s far more than can be put into a single LinkedIn article.

You really ought to just buy the whole book. And yes, that is a nudge.

Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it is published with HarperCollins. Order it here.