Have you ever made decisions without realizing why you actually did them? Do other people influence them, or are you sure it was your free will? This is called manipulation. It continues daily without you realizing it, and it is really subtle. Manipulation can be found in many areas, including romantic relationships, advertisements, social media, and everyday interactions with others. It’s a form of everyday life that you might not even realize. The most common thing we say about manipulation is that it’s a way that we can influence a person’s choice instead of the person making their own decisions freely, but what does it truly mean beyond surface level? Manipulation is seen in everyday life, including how manipulation is seen through general relationships, without many people realizing they could be influenced by others and relationships. This subtly connects to autonomy, which interferes with people's ability to make their own decisions.
First of all, manipulation can be found in daily life. The most common ways you can see manipulation are when people try to guilt-trip you or gaslight you. Through guilt-tripping, people tend to make you feel like you are a person who caused all the trouble, or just criticize you. When it comes to signs in finding out if someone is trying to guilt-trip you, they “blame, criticize, remind of past favors, emotional pressure, play the martyr, and give you the silent treatment (Childers). In the text, “ Recognize guilt-tripping and taking back your power,” it states, “If someone makes you feel selfish or uncaring for saying no…They may act overly disappointed or take advantage of your emotions to try to change your mind”. This is one of the most important ways that manipulators try to play you. They just don’t tend to care about how you feel or how others feel, they care about themselves and would they can get out of you.
Guilt-tripping comes in many ways, like from parents, relationships, co-workers, and even yourself, without you even realizing it. When it comes to yourself, it’s internal. For example, if you're a student and you have homework you have to do during the week, but you don’t do it, you start to feel “inner guilt-trip”, which makes you think that you don’t deserve any type of free time. According to Childers, when people try to guilt-trip you, it’s because they feel insecure about themselves or they are just scared of being rejected by society. This happens to many people, like bullies, who have a fear of never getting noticed or just feel rejected by the people around them. The author Childers talks about how guilt-tripping relieves them from those fears and gives them a sense of validation or reassurance. She also states how it could come from past trauma as they were growing up, so they just adapted that form of manipulation.
This is mostly seen in relationships, either romantically or generally. In forceful manipulation, they start with flattery first by acting like they really care about you, and “they would do anything in the world for you. The article “How to Spot Manipulation Tactics” talks about how they look very caring, but are so subtle as to just try to get things out of you. Then they try to influence your decisions to isolate you, especially when they want you to distance yourself from your loved ones because they want to get in your head about them not loving you (Volge). After that, they begin to gaslight and make you not feel valued enough, by this manipulators would want you to feel confused or be influenced in a way that you start to doubt the people around you and even yourself. Finally, according to Volge, the final stage is to make you fear them, and they begin to be violent by threatening you, like they say they are going to leave you, or they would kill themselves because you wouldn’t want to stay with that person anymore.
What is autonomy? According to “The Ethics of Manipulation”, it is “the capacity of having independence.”It’s a form in which people are influenced by other people’s choices easily, without them realizing that their choice is free-willed. But the difference is that there is moral autonomy as well, which is when it involves acting according to your own principle, though it may involve considering societal values (Roberts); somewhat similar but not entirely the same thing.
Manipulation gets in the way of many people’s decisions. Manipulation can be considered bad in all sorts of ways its the “idea that manipulation is wrong because it undermines autonomous choice is implicit in discussions of manipulation as a potential invalidation of consent” (Roberts). It basically just undermines independent decisions that people don’t realize they are making those decisions. Sometimes the influences of other people can be bad, but not all the time. It’s based on whether you choose to follow these influences, but other times they are just forced upon you, and there isn’t much you can do about it.
What most people don’t realize about what manipulation is is that when a person is trying to manipulate you forcefully, they stop thinking about you as a person, but rather more as an easy object or tool that can’t reject others' opinions. There are many types of manipulation, like negging, which “is a type of emotional manipulation often used as ‘playful insults’ to undermine someone’s self-confidence” (Roberts). This can be mostly seen as something really subtle, because many people always think that manipulation is out in the open, which it is, but it’s a way of gaslighting to make people think that it’s all their choice; it’s really not. According to “The Ethics of Manipulation”, it states that “the manipulator has a combination of intent and recklessness: the aim of getting the other person to do what one wants, together with recklessness in the way that one goes about reaching that goal”. This highlights that a manipulator has a goal in mind to get others to do what they want.
Although it’s subtle, there are signs that you can tell that you are being manipulated. The smallest details are usually what give the most signs (Syumar). As stated in the article “The Unspoken Truth: Reading the Signs Beyond the Words”, it says, “When people do unnatural movements, it’s a sign that the body does it to discharge that nervous system”. This shows that as people tend to lie and don’t have ways to hide it, they slowly start showing signs. Most of the time, when someone tries to lie about a story, it’s usually surface-level and generally NOT a fully detailed story (Syumar). In the article about “Unspoken truths”, it is stated that “When made-up stories come into play, the most common thing people end up doing is constructing a 'surface layer of the life only focused on what they saw or heard.” The surface-layer lies are what usually falls apart first if you ask really detailed questions because they don’t see it coming, it’s very unexpected for them. For example, there are times when a killer tries to do a made-up story of what happened, but as detectives push further questions there stories stop connecting and they don't make sense.
In addition, “When under pressure, adrenaline builds up and makes your heart beat faster, which confines energy “leaking out subconsciously” (Syumar). This is when the fight or flight kicks in because when the manipulator feels that they are being suspected of something (Syumar), they start to really get nervous and can’t come up with things to say, so they start to speak randomly. The way into finding out that you are being manipulated into doing something isn’t really things that people always say, like avoiding eye contact, it’s more like noticing the difference in their normal behaviour and what they do to lie. In “The Unspoken Truth: Reading the Signs Beyond the Words,” state that establishing a baseline and “significant shifts from normal behaviour can help you see through things better. What is considered a baseline? A baseline is normally a person’s typical normal behaviour, like if someone talks calmly, but the changes that you see, like trying to speak faster or slower, are what you call “deviations from a person’s behaviour” (Syumar).
Even though trying to find out if you're being manipulated, there are common misconceptions about it. The most common myth is “avoiding eye contact because it’s natural for human bodies to do when we try to remember something” (Saymur). So it’s also important to consider what societal opinions say.
In conclusion, manipulation is seen everywhere, whether it’s on social media, in ads, in relationships, with friends, or even with family. It’s really an impactful thing where people don’t have full independence of their own decision-making because most of the time they are subtle strategies, or others are just in denial that the person they are close to would never do something so cruel and reckless. Although it seems really bad, it happens to many people, but overall, manipulation could also be positive, like trying to convince someone to make healthier choices or make important points that influence positive autonomy.
Works Cited
Childers, Linda. “Recognizing Guilt-Tripping and Taking Back Your Power.” Rula, 2025, www.rula.com/blog/guilt-tripping/.
Noggle, Robert. “The Ethics of Manipulation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu, 30 Mar. 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/.
Syumar, Leo. “The Unspoken Truth: Reading the Signs beyond the Words.” Mentalzon, 16 Apr. 2025, mentalzon.com/en/post/4830/the-unspoken-truth-reading-the-signs-beyond-the-words. Accessed 30 Jan. 2026.
Vogel, Kaitlin. “How to Spot Manipulation Tactics.” Psych Central, Psych Central, 22 May 2019, psychcentral.com/health/tactics-manipulators-use-to-win-and-confuse-you#stages-of-manipulation.
What inspired me to write about this topic is that I have always been intrigued by how people have so much influence on others, without people realizing how their opinions weren't fully their own. Another thing that had intrigued me about this topic is documentaries about how people lie straight to detectives. Parts that I had enjoyed from this research were how I got to learn many things that I didn't know. I liked this part because there were just so many common misconceptions about this topic, but researching it to get the facts right makes it fun. One thing that was most challenging for me was questioning everything, which made the research longer and a little harder. I think this because as you learn more about this topic, you start to question certain things that make you wanna know more and research. In addition, looking for articles was also something difficult because most of the articles were more surface-level than looking further into what we already know. One thing I learned was how there are many types of manipulation without many people really realizing it, because it's so subtle. Not many people know how their decisions are influenced so easily, which makes this topic fun. You could just be manipulated by anyone, like your family, friends, and relationships.