Q&A OF THE YEAR
ARE WE ALL MANIPULATIVE?
TV PHENOMENON SQUID GAMES HAD US WONDERING WHETHER PEOPLE ARE THAT MANIPULATIVE IN REAL LIFE
BY DR JULIA SHAW
ILLUSTRATIONS: DANIEL BRIGHT
Emotional manipulation has been referred to as the dark side of emotional intelligence by psychological scientist Prof Elizabeth Austin at the University of Edinburgh. But what does that mean? Austin and her colleagues created the Emotional Manipulation Scale in 2007.
According to the scale, people who are high on emotional manipulation say yes to behaving in ways that have obvious negative consequences such as ‘I know how to embarrass someone to stop them behaving in a particular way’, and ‘I know how to play two people off against each other’.