In business, psychological manipulation can go both ways. When used ethically, it can enhance the customer experience and nudge clients toward positive outcomes. However, its misuse can lead to exploitation, distrust, and be overwhelmingly immoral. Put simply, psychological manipulation is influencing people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

What Is Psychological Manipulation in Business?

Often spun with a positive notion, such as ‘tips and tricks’ of marketing, selling, and negotiations, are nothing more than persuasion tactics. These are conscious efforts by one party to elevate the playing field over a less-knowing trustee. This is why it’s important for the manipulator to remain ethical, similar to a certified fiduciary in finance.

Some manipulation tactics are commonly known, such as scarcity and maybe even color psychology. However, the list is ever-growing, mirroring, social proof, scent marketing, bait-and-switch, foot-in-the-door, reciprocity, all the way to good old lying.

A simple and agreed-upon idea is that if it’s in the best interest of the individual, psychological manipulation is okay.

Ethical vs. Unethical Manipulation Examples

Ethical:

• Default Options: companies automatically enrolling employees into a 401k.
• Nudging: placing healthy food options at eye level.
• Transparency: labeling ads, sponsored content, and terms and conditions.
• User Design: simple navigation or disability compliance.

Unethical:

• Default Options: pre-checked boxes such as email marketing opt-in or cookie settings.
• Nudging: induced scarcity or misleading testimonials.
• Transparency: collecting and selling user data without consent.
• User Design: hiding subscription cancellation options.

It’s important to showcase the versatility of psychological manipulation and the complexity of ethics. However, this begs the question: what is ethical vs. unethical?

Obviously, some of these are unequivocally bad. However, a company has used scarcity to its benefit. Is it bad for the company to look after its own survival? It’s ethical to think of the customer when performing manipulation. Or perhaps it’s unethical to assume they don’t know better.

How Intent Decides If Manipulation Is Ethical

On the surface level, people commonly believe intent is the deciding factor if manipulation is acceptable. However, some would argue that any manipulation is outright unethical. Pushing this conversation further typically leads to educating the individual fully. This allows the customer to weigh the entire good vs. bad (since some manipulation utilizes omission). When you continue pulling towards the root of this conversation, the deciding factor is much harder to pinpoint.

A collectively agreed-upon “no” quickly becomes grey when you apply the logic elsewhere: personalized algorithms, behavioral nudging, and other topics such as animal testing.

Now it’s becoming a choose-your-own-adventure story or, more bitterly, pick your poison. It comes down to philosophy, more specifically, morality. Is this good or bad?

Broadening this to a global scope, morality is often debated and conflicting depending on culture, upbringing, and religion. Perhaps there is a time when it’s okay to not be tolerant of everyone or everything. When is being too accepting an issue? Where is the line drawn?

For businesses, intent is commonly used as the deciding factor for determining a company’s ethics. It’s easy to assess, given a full and truthful understanding of the situation, and leaves room for interpretation based on individuals’ and companies’ own values. It is important to note that any difference in agreement on morality will ultimately lead to disagreements on intent.

Psychological manipulation will not be going away. To stay ahead of any public scrutiny, a strong question to answer would be the following: If my customer saw exactly what I was doing and why, would they understand my decision?