Fifteen Eighty Four

People will always do what they want to do.

Right?

Well, not exactly. We can easily think about situations in which we tried to change someone else’s mind: begging parents for a toy, asking a reluctant friend to come to a dinner party, or making a case for your boss to grant you a few more paid days off. In other cases, we might be talking to a person who is ‘on the fence’ about something we are passionate about, and our goal is that they make up their mind in our favour. Sales pitches, funding applications, and even presidential debates fall into this category. Buy our product, vote for our candidate, fly with our airline – all of these messages, and the talk supporting them, are examples of linguistic persuasion.

Academic articles often define persuasion as an attempt or intention to change someone’s behaviour or viewpoint by communicative means. This definition was suggested by Robin Lakoff, a pioneering scholar of linguistic pragmatics – the study of how language is used in real-life interactions between people in specific contexts and settings. Linguists have a long-standing interest in persuasion because, short of using displays of physical force, our main tool to change someone’s view is language. We use it to convince, persuade, cajole, nudge, or coax others into specific behaviours or mindsets. Words possess the power to shape and influence opinions and attitudes, and this process is not always noticed by the people participating in an interaction.

Take a look at the text below. It’s a short fragment from a so-called field report, a kind of detailed blogpost about going out on a date with a woman, written on a public online forum to elicit praise and, perhaps, critical feedback. The author of this blogpost belongs to a group of men who learn and share seduction techniques – Pick-Up Artists (PUAs), a subgroup of the manosphere conglomerate of misogynist online communities. Because this group is built around influential ‘gurus’ who are supposed to be so good at seducing women that their followers pay thousands of dollars for a chance to join their seminars and bootcamps, field reports by PUA gurus can at the same time be a sales pitch and a showcase for seduction ‘skills’.

This is an old story but I wanted to post it for instructional value.

The key lesson here is: Allowing a girl’s hormones to force her to want to kiss/fuck you, rather than pushing in a situation that might risk losing the girl.

She came over, we sat down on the couch and talked for about 30 minutes, I ran some kino on her, and then tried to go in for the kiss, but she stopped me, told me that she likes me a lot but she has a boyfriend […].

I suspect this is where many guys won’t know what to do. So here’s what I did. I pulled out an old technique of mine to get her craving me. I don’t have a good name for it yet, I just call it “The Killer Hug”.

[…]

A few VERY IMPORTANT points:

1. This is a kino based technique, so if you’re not an experienced “toucher” then it will take a bit of practice to do it right.
2. This will only work if the girl is genuinely attracted to you, so you have to be able to read her properly because if she’s not, it might come off as a little weird.
3. If you do this right and she enjoys it, she will reciprocate. It would just be weird if you kept feeling her up while she just stands there doing nothing.

[…]

If you have ever leafed through a glossy magazine or swiped away a pop-up in your browser (Twelve Surefire Ways To Get That Date; I Tried This Line And You Won’t Believe The Results!), you will immediately recognise some persuasion formats this pick-up artist uses to draw in the reader: the forum post includes listicles, clickbait-like enticing statements promising exciting reveals, and all-caps headlines. You might also notice how the writer subtly presents himself as an expert imparting wisdom on an eager audience: he uses specialised-sounding terminology (kino), implying that seduction is not an everyday activity but a science to be studied, and he’s a respected scholar in this field indeed; he structures his post in such a way as to anticipate and answer his readers’ questions, as an experienced professional would; and he even uses expressions like lesson and instructional value that automatically set him up as a teacher figure in the reader’s mind.

Even in this short stretch of persuasive writing, we can find many other things that are interesting, problematic, or plainly outrageous. A philosopher might question the ethics of the whole enterprise: is it okay to disclose such intimate details about the girl’s behaviour on a public online forum, to say nothing about the tone of the post which treats a romantic encounter like a malfunction to be fixed? A linguist might be interested in the special terms such as kino: what does it mean exactly, what is its etymology and grammatical forms, and how does it work to persuade? A psychologist might try to find a way to measure how effective the author’s persuasive tricks were, and whether men might be more liable to such washing manual-style instructions for dating than women.

Because persuasion is such a multifaceted activity that is found everywhere in our lives, it makes sense to study it by using insights from different fields of science. The edited volume “Manipulation, Influence and Deception: The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language” published by Cambridge University Press in 2025 takes exactly this stance. We, the editors, bring together scholars who use linguistics, but also insights from social psychology, media studies, sociology, and political science to analyse examples of influence, manipulation, and deception that appear in telesales, online newspapers, social media, Wikipedia, Reddit and Yelp, and even face-to-face encounters between people and robots! Studying word frequencies, breathing patterns, emojis and punctuation marks, ways of describing the speaker and listeners, and many other fascinating aspects of persuasion, the authors find out, for example, that even such a small choice as saying when or if in a request has an effect on getting the desired answer, or that context can make all the difference in tipping a forum post into criminal incitement territory. These add up to a full and complex picture of persuasion, good and bad.

Even though convincing other people of our points of view is such a big part of everyday life (for example, convincing a blogpost reader to buy a book about persuasion), humanities and social sciences do not work together on this topic often enough. With this edited volume, we hope to start a conversation among researchers in different disciplines that would help us better understand how we persuade, why we do it, what makes a person get their way in an argument or fail, and how one actually decides whether persuasion was successful.