Social Engineering Applied in Daily Life: Part 1

We humans are social animals and as such we are manipulative in various ways whether we know about it or not. Every day we influence our surroundings and the people around us somehow at random.

Why not do it deliberately with some skill?

Women are the ultimate social engineers. Your mom is being unknowingly manipulative when she wants you to stay home after you finish high school despite you wanting to move out.

Why do we do it?

Because our emotional parts of the brain distorts the rational parts and make it seem as though it was the rational part’s idea to do something, when in truth most of it stems from our genetic programming or primitive desires. We often mistake the cause for the effect, and think that we are way more rational than we are.

Or maybe I am completely wrong about this, and simply using this as an excuse to justify deliberately manipulative behavior.

You decide.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is the ability of making other people do what you want them to do in order to aid your goals.

There are many methods, more and less complicated, for employing social engineering in different situations. In this post I will only go into the more common and practically applicable ways that people should use more often, thus I am not going to go into advanced schemes of identity theft or fraud etc. Besides I don’t have any experience of doing that, so it would be poor advice.

When we hear a word like social engineering we tend to imagine some mastermind planning his next strategic moves from the confines of his secret lair; or a CEO controlling his entire work force from his office by means of some secret method.

The typical geek perceives it as some magic pill that can be used to his advantage –a secret weapon for making everyone else to do his bidding. But he is deluded because it doesn’t work like that.  We can be more skilled communicators and more efficient at handling other people, but we can’t ever “manipulate” everyone into following our orders like a puppet master.  It simply does not work like that.

Social engineering should be considered a practical skill that more people need to use. It’s really about the basics of understanding human social psychology.

Who uses Social Engineering?
Spies, hackers, criminals.

For obvious reasons these types use social engineering as a way of getting access to classified company information or other information that can be of benefit to their criminal goals. Identity theft or getting hold of financial information comes to mind.

I used to watch Burn Notice a couple of years ago. Michael Westen, the spy in the featured post picture, is something of a genius at social engineering. I got plenty of cool ideas from watching that show that I experimented with.

Women

Women, being physically weaker than men, learn from an early age to use various means to get other people – especially men – to do things for them. Paradoxically they really dislike when it works out well. Women hate men who ‘fall for their tricks’.

Gold-digging women in night clubs can compared to playing poker:  if you cannot spot the sucker at the table, you’re the sucker.

Headhunters

A headhunter wanting to employ people from another company is not going to be handed the list of employees and their information without having to use some trickery. Employees are usually the most valuable asset of a company and when employing someone you think of it as a long-term asset, you don’t want to offer expensive training for someone you know is going to leave you after a year. Headhunters are shunted for the same reason, companies do not like headhunters messing with their employees.

Headhunters need to get around this and be a bit socially resourceful. For example they can call up a company office pretending to be part of another division and ask for the initial information they need. Then they call up another office with this new piece of information providing further credibility of their identity. Within a few calls they may be given access to the list of employees that they wanted to get hold of and can then proceed to contact the individual people.

How can Regular People use Social Engineering?

Here are a few examples of how you can use social engineering to benefit you in normal situations of life that you will definitely encounter.

Be Enthusiastic

By being enthusiastic you increase your odds of getting people to respond to you socially whether that be over the phone or in real life. People like to be part of any type of positive vibe; be a bringer of good news. And vice versa, people instinctively shy away from negative or boring people.

Business as Usual

The business-as-usual approach is useful and sometimes necessary when it comes to pulling of things that you need a high status to do, things such as:

Walking into restricted areas where you really have no business being (sneaking into VIP). You must be able to act as-if, otherwise it will not work. It’s like your level of persuasion or charisma in an RPG game.
Bluffing about things to get past gatekeepers.

The business as usual approach is boosted by…

Pushing through

This one I use a lot.

Walk straight through queues, parties, VIP sections, or similar type things.

Just walk straight ahead and do not look to the sides. Be calm and act casually. Usually nothing happens, but if someone asks you what you’re doing just say something like:

I live here.
I’m on my way to see Carl.

Provide a “valid” (arbitrary) reason and it will usually work so long as you say it in a normal manner without stopping.

Focus on One Person

Whenever you are in an interaction make sure you don’t disperse your attention to too many people. Focus on one or two people, making it harder for them to say no.

Provide a “Valid” Reason for what you are Doing

You might be thinking “but a cool guy never needs to explain himself, only weak people do that!”, but that is a bit of an inflexible perspective.  I’ll show you what I mean – the end can justify the means. It depends on whether you care more about looking good or about getting something done.

It has been proven in several studies (commonly mentioned in sales books like Influence by Robert Cialdini) that by providing a reason you are much more likely to get the other person to do something for you, or to accept the thing you are currently doing given that they pose resistance.

Most people care little (less than you think) about what you do. You can get away with doing a ton of weird things in social situations given that you are cool about it (act like it’s normal for you) and provide a reason for what you are doing.

For example if you need to speak privately to a girl in a club it’s very easy to just take her by the hand (business as usual or enthusiastically) and start walking. If she asks what you’re doing (doesn’t happen that often) you need to provide some reason. But it doesn’t matter what the reason is, the words are not important. You simply need to defuse the situation and override the logic – “because” is the magic word.

On the other hand, if you are asking for a favor over the phone and cannot use emotions as efficiently, then the reason becomes much more important and you will need to have a valid reason. In part two I’ll go into this much more and provide three recent examples of how I used social engineering. One of those examples is that of using some of the tools in this post to negotiate my way into a phone subscription for less than half the price of what I previously paid.

Click here to read part 2.

Question: have you used any of these strategies lately?  If you have a personal example please share it in the comment section.

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