Interpersonal Persuasion Techniques
Techniques used in face-to-face interactions, relationships, and personal communication. These leverage rapport, body language, and conversational dynamics.
32 techniques in this category
DARVO
Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender — a reaction pattern used by those accused of wrongdoing to deflect accountability.
Stonewalling
Refusing to engage in communication or negotiation, shutting down dialogue entirely.
Isolation Tactics
Systematically cutting someone off from their support network to increase dependence and control.
Financial Control
Using money and economic resources as a tool to dominate, restrict, or punish another person.
Coercive Control
A sustained pattern of domination through monitoring, intimidation, and restriction of autonomy.
Intermittent Reinforcement
Alternating unpredictably between reward and punishment to create intense emotional attachment.
Double Bind
Creating a situation where someone is punished no matter which option they choose.
Emotional Blackmail
Using fear, obligation, and guilt (FOG) to control another person's behavior.
Parentification
Forcing a child or subordinate into an inappropriate caretaking role, reversing the natural hierarchy of care.
Projection
Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to someone else.
Playing the Victim
Falsely positioning oneself as the aggrieved party to gain sympathy and deflect accountability.
Boundary Violation Testing
Gradually pushing past someone's stated limits to see how much they will tolerate.
Hot Cold Cycling
Alternating between intense warmth and sudden coldness to keep someone emotionally destabilized.
Information Withholding
Deliberately keeping someone in the dark to maintain a power advantage.
Weaponized Incompetence
Deliberately performing tasks poorly so that others stop asking you to do them.
Passive Aggression
Expressing hostility indirectly through subtle actions, backhanded compliments, or deliberate inefficiency.
Trauma Bonding
Forming a powerful emotional attachment to an abuser through cycles of abuse and intermittent kindness.
Smear Campaigns
Systematically spreading false or misleading information about someone to damage their reputation and isolate them.
Flying Monkeys
Recruiting third parties to do your bidding in pressuring, monitoring, or harassing a target.
Future Faking
Making elaborate promises about the future with no intention or ability to follow through.
Undue Influence
A legal and forensic concept: excessive persuasion that overcomes a person's free will and produces an inequitable result, typically exercised by someone in a position of trust over someone who is dependent, isolated, or impaired. Courts use it to set aside wills, gifts, and contracts; Hassan and others use it as the umbrella term for high-control tactics generally.
Elder Financial Exploitation
The illegal or improper use of an older adult's money, property, or assets by a person in a position of trust — a relative, caregiver, friend, fiduciary, or adviser — through deception, intimidation, undue influence, or theft, typically from someone whose dependency or cognitive change makes resistance and detection difficult.
High-Pressure Sales Closing
A family of sales-training “closes” designed to extract a purchase decision before the buyer has time to think, compare, or leave — assumptive, alternative-choice, urgency, takeaway, and “what would it take” closes — usually stacked in a single session engineered so that saying no feels rude, costly, or impossible.
Grooming
The gradual preparation of a person — most often a child, but also adults in dependent or hierarchical relationships — and of the people and institutions around them, so that abuse can occur, continue, and go unreported. Craven, Brown and Gilchrist define it as a process aimed at gaining access, securing compliance, and maintaining secrecy.
Digital Coercive Control
The use of digital technology by a current or former partner to monitor, isolate, threaten, humiliate, and control — location tracking, message surveillance, account takeover, spyware, image-based abuse, and constant contact — extending coercive control past the walls of the home and past the end of the relationship.
Monitoring and Surveillance Control
A component of coercive control in which one person keeps another under continuous or unpredictable observation — checking phones, timing errands, demanding an account of every hour, interrogating contacts, using children or friends as informants, appearing unannounced — so that the target behaves as if watched even when not.
Reproductive Coercion
Behavior by a partner that controls a person's reproductive choices — pressure or threats to become pregnant or to end or continue a pregnancy, sabotage of contraception, and non-consensual condom removal — recognized since Miller and colleagues' 2010 study as a distinct form of intimate-partner abuse.
Minimization
Systematically shrinking the significance of harm one has caused or benefits from — “it was only once,” “I barely touched you,” “you are overreacting” — so that the harmed person doubts whether it counts. A core technique of abusers and, at scale, of institutions covering for them.
Hoovering
A pop term from abuse-recovery communities, named for the vacuum brand, for the burst of attention, apology, promises, crisis, or threat with which a controlling partner or family member tries to pull a person back after they have left or begun to detach. The term is informal; the mechanisms it names are documented.
Negging
A pop term from the pickup-artist community for a backhanded compliment or mild insult delivered to lower a target's confidence and raise the speaker's apparent status, so that the target seeks the speaker's approval. Coined in that community and popularized by Neil Strauss's 2005 memoir The Game; not a research term.
Breadcrumbing
A pop term for keeping someone interested with sporadic, non-committal signals — a like, a late-night message, a vague plan — without any intention of a relationship, so that the person stays available and hopeful. Informal in origin; the mechanism is intermittent reinforcement.
Word Salad
In psychiatry, word salad (schizophasia) is a symptom of severe thought disorder, not a tactic. In pop psychology the same phrase names deliberate incoherence in an argument — circular, topic-shifting, contradiction-laden talk used to exhaust or confuse the other person. This entry concerns the second use; the label is descriptive, not diagnostic.