The thin grey line between influencer and manipulator

“What do you want someone to think, feel or do?”
This is a simple question often asked when a communication or PR team are briefed about a campaign. It helps us make sure the campaign’s messaging gets us to the desired outcome. Think. Feel. Do.

However, the more I read about human beings, how our brains work, our ability to create false memories and how we can justify actions that might be illegal or messages that might be false, the more I think we must look at the thin line between influence and manipulation. Are we truly aware of our own behaviours and beliefs and how they are changed by PR? And are the public aware that every day they are being influenced by the press, social media, politicians or advertising?

The difference between influence and manipulation
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, these are the distinct definitions:

Influence: the power to have an effect on people or things, or a person or thing that is able to do this

Manipulation: controlling someone or something to your own advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly

The CIPR defines PR as: the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

There is a distinction. Control being the main one. I’d argue that influence on a mass scale through mass media has the same controlling impact. And some areas of PR are linked to gaining advantage. Where that thin grey line comes in is with the words “unfairly” and “dishonestly”.

Do we spend enough time exploring the impact of our actions? Are we asking the right questions? Are the right people in the room to make sure we have enough different perspectives to explore the impact we have on our publics? Are we doing too much, too quickly because those who are asking us to do this work don’t realise how it can easily flip over the line to manipulation?

Once upon a time
People remember stories 30% more than facts (Yarkoni et al, 2008). The importance of a strategic narrative for all stakeholders, and employees in particular, has been proven as a key driver of employee engagement.

But stories can be tricky. Films, TV series and books are all designed to create an emotional response – any response. The writers want you to be invested in the story, the characters and the outcome. In the corporate world we use these techniques of storytelling to evoke emotion. To influence people into thinking a certain way or buying a new product or service.

Is the story true? And by true, is it factual? How factual are we day-to-day? As humans we are persuading, sharing stories with each other all the time. We influence our friends around choices of brands, food or music, for example. It’s in our nature to do this, but if we are paid to tell stories are we manipulating people as we look to do so to create an advantage in the market?

Influencer or manipulator?
The rise of the influencer poses many questions about how easy it is to know when we are being sold to. I’ve seen celebrities claim they are not influencers yet to some degree we all are. We influence each other all the time. It’s just that now there is social media, people have wider reach as a result and can be paid to influence millions rather than just those around them.

In 2020 Netflix exclusively showed The Social Dilemma, which addressed the fears and concerns people have around the huge surge in the use of social networks. During the documentary, Randima (Randy) Fernando, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, comments on the challenges the pace of technology brings to the human race:

“From the 1960s to today, processing power has gone up about a trillion times. Nothing else that we have has improved at anything near that rate. Cars are roughly twice as fast and almost everything else is negligible. And perhaps most importantly, our human, our physiology, our brains, have evolved, not at all.”

So as our reach grows with technology, our brains do not. Influencing is part of human nature, but it’s part of human nature that is based on our need to build communities for survival with those around us. We personally influence our family, friends and collaborators. It makes us feel good. We aren’t intrinsically wired to influence a million people around the world we don’t know.

Online influence differs from personal influence. In his book Notes on a Nervous Planet, Matt Haig quotes Tristan Harris, a former Google employee: “A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.”

The issue lies at the point at which influence tips over into manipulation. Especially when we don’t disclose our motives of persuasion. Without body language, nuance, or personal knowledge of the people we are being influenced by, or immediate access to all the facts, it’s harder for us to see where that line is. There’s been many well-documented cases of celebrities caught out for flouting the advertising rules. But even if social media influencers, politicians, CEOs or celebrities aren’t aware of crossing the line into manipulation, PR professionals need to be.

When we craft messages, we must make sure we have a heightened awareness of the truth, the facts and the line between influence and manipulation. Yes, it’s hard to plan messaging when we don’t completely know how our many different audiences will interpret it, or exactly what the consequences might be, but we have a duty of care to each other, as human beings.

There are two great film quotes that are worth coming back to here. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm says the scientists were: “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should”.  And in Spiderman, his Uncle Ben tells him: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

It’s easy to forget these messages when you do this work every day for decades and you’re working at a fast pace, driven by deadlines. But in a world where language has the power to motivate millions through the reach of technology, we have to question which side of the influence/manipulation line we are on and bring our natural curiosity forward to make sure we are dealing with facts.