Bending others to one’s will: Dimensions of persuasive, manipulative, and coercive influence techniques in interpersonal dialogue

We investigate the dimensions of persuasive, manipulative, and coercive influence techniques in interpersonal dialogue. We propose a novel taxonomy of seven influence strategies, consisting of Rapport and Liking, Negotiating, Appeals to Emotion, Appeals to Logic, Appeals to Authority, Social Proof, and Pressure, and 42 nested influence techniques, which provides a universal framework for characterizing influence techniques across various conversational settings. We then collected perceptions of each technique from 164 UK participants, revealing that persuasive techniques are characterised by perceptions of low harm and high covertness, whereas manipulative-coercive techniques are characterised by high harm and low covertness. However, some techniques could not be classified, suggesting conceptual definitions of social influence as applied to interpersonal dialogue should take account of individual variation in perceptions. Importantly, our results imply that even seemingly harmless techniques like friendliness or humour can be covert in their intent, potentially bypassing a receiver’s defences. This exploratory study underscores the need to understand receiver perceptions, especially in the context of interactions with large language models (LLMs), which can employ social influence techniques during conversations.