Best products from r/SocialEngineering

As you realize becoming great at social skills is just like training any other skill. Realizing you can train it will allow you to build the skill stronger than others who stumble into it. So many will say you can't get better or amazing by reading in a chair. They're right. Read a little, apply a lot, take notes, then review what you did right and what you did wrong, repeat. Get a mentor or training buddy if you can, it accelerates learning, because we can't see ourselves the same as those outside us can. Make a regimen to go out, greet and meet people every day. Or at least three times a week minimum, make it a habit.

I can tell you that I've been in customer service and sales jobs, they taught me nothing because my skills were garbage and sub-par. So I didn't have a paddle for my raft in the world of social interaction. All I got was "people get irritated if I cold approach or try to sell them. Or worse I have to dump mountains of information to make them feel safe." So after studying for the better part of a decade, here's some points that got me to the basics and more advanced subjects. With the basics under your belt, then a job or daily practice will get you understanding and results.

First, learn how to steady yourself mentally, breathing exercise here. Breathing is important as we seem to be learning your heart rate and beat pattern determine more about our emotions than we'd like to admit.

Second, Accept and love yourself, (both those terms may be undefined or wishy-washy to you at the moment, defining them is part of the journey.) Because you can only accept and love others the way you apply it to yourself first.

Third, pick up and read the charisma myth. It has habits/meditations that will be a practice you use every day. I'd say a basic understanding will happen after applying them over three months. Never stop practicing these basics, they are your fundamentals. They determine your body language. The difference between a romantic gaze and a creepy stare is context of the meeting and body language, especially in the eyes.

Sales or cold approach networking will do the same for practice. If you do sales or meeting new people, it is a negotiation. You're trying to trade "value" (safety + an emotion). So if you figure out how to make yourself feel emotion, then inspire emotion in others, mutual agreements happen. Start with Why is a good reference. Here is a summary video. Chris Voss will help you find out that you don't tap into people rationally, you tap people emotionally, big think summary video. Or the full book treatment, Never Split the Difference. The supporting book for Chris Voss' position can be helped by reading Start With No

For training habits and understanding how we execute behaviors, Thinking, Fast and Slow

For dealing with hard arguments and heavy topics both Nonviolent Communication and Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Learning what listening is, instead of "hearing" people. Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone is a good book for that. This is touched on in Never Split the Difference and in the Charisma Myth because true listening, making the person you are speaking with feel "listened to and understood" is most of what makes a charismatic person work.

A couple that might be useful for you are:

• It's not all about me
  
  
• The Charisma Myth
  
  To reframe your self-accessed predicament, being shy is on your side here. Learning to shut up and listen to the other person talk is one of the best things you can do. When people talk about themselves and someone is listening (I mean really listening, not pretending to), they get a good feeling. That feeling they get becomes attached to being with you. That is, they think you're great and sociable when in fact you haven't even said anything!
  
  People love to talk about themselves - we are always seeking to be accepted among our fellow human beings - we are a society after all. We need to feel loved, wanted, respected etc, and the best way you can give this to another person is to just let them talk about themselves and be genuinely interested. Faking interest will not go un-noticed and it will work against, rather than for you. Ask questions about why they do the things they do and make them feel as if you want to know the answers. In this context they are the interesting people, not you. Then sit back and see how this moulds their perception of you - they will love you.
  
  Splash some knowledge of body language into the mix and you will understand more about how you are being perceived and also be able to control your own non-verbals to give messages to others.
  
  The key you seek is in understanding how other people work, not yourself!

Free To Be Human - Intellectual Self Defence In An Age Of Illusions by David Edwards

“This is a book about freedom, and above all about the idea that there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been fully attained. While in the West few individuals today suffer physical restraint by the state, we are still constrained by powerful psychological chains, which are in many ways far more effective, if only because they are so difficult to perceive. Influential writers such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have shown that the corporately controlled mass media of Western democracies serve as a giant filter system favouring powerful state and business interests: what we receive as 'objective news' about domestic politics, human rights and environmental issues, is in fact an extremely partial and biased view of the world. Free to be Human shows how the same filter system distorts our understanding of many personal, ethical and spiritual issues, ensuring that we remain passive, conformist, confused and uninformed; and willing to accept the irrational values of corporate consumerism. David Edwards argues that, in order to counter this continual process of disinformation and disempowerment, we need to master the arts of 'intellectual self-defence' and so become able to challenge the deceptions of a system that subordinates people and planet to the drive for profit.”

I'm honestly surprised you've risen to the point of almost being a VP level and you still avoid office politics the way you are doing. I suspect you have a slanted view of it, similar to how I did when I was younger. What changed my opinion of it was reading this book which I stumbled across while waiting to pay for some copies at Kinkos. It's a very short book but full of good information.

I used to have an extremely negative view of office politics (both because of things that had happened to me and to my father), but after reading the section about office politics in that book I realized my negative view of it was because I had been taught not to partake, and then I was getting upset when I got none of the benefits. To use an analogy, it was like I was standing on a corner watching people play craps and then when the game was over and everyone left I was upset because I didn't win anything. Well yeah, that's gonna happen if you don't play the game. What I had to learn was that there are things to be gained from office politics. Not just financial resources and friendships, but resources your team needs. Sometimes you have to hustle a little bit to get your team the resources they need to blossom and grow. You have to focus on the positive.

If this person feels threatened by you she's not going to go away because you want to be friendly or avoid her. That doesn't mean you have to go all gung ho and get nasty, but the reality of upper office politics is learning how to stand your ground and do it while smiling in their face (and it's not being fake if behind the smile you're being totally sincere about defending yourself).

As others here have said, the two key points are to (a) make a note of what qualities of yours she's trying to put down and capitalize on opportunities to show they're excellent qualities, and (b) make a note of her weaknesses and capitalize on opportunities to tease her for them. If you can do either (or both) in ways that get other people to crack a smile - or even better, laugh - then you will be doing just fine for yourself.

I have a 10 year old brother who is learning to play piano and his teacher knows that it is more about what the kid wants vs what the teacher wants. The guy played a bunch of songs from classical, anime themes to reggeaton... it looks like my brother likes reggeaton so they are playing those kind of songs. Also another thing it could be that kids nowadays are more used to instant gratification (procrastination) rather than something that pays off in the long run... give him something that pays off every 10 minutes so he can feel like he is making a progress. In the same way you need to create the habit in him of playing the guitar... as in gym/fitness you dont go a cold turkey to exercise for 2 hours straight... you go first 20 minutes a day, the next day 30, next week the full hour and so on, it will happen with time...

This is a video that talks about procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA&t
This is a book that will help you to deal with the mom and other people/clients/anyone in life:
https://www.amazon.com/Like-Switch-Influencing-Attracting-Winning/dp/1476754489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500678768&sr=8-1&keywords=like+switch+book

A book that was given to me, and read by some of the smartest people around, that isn't too difficult to find, but you'll miss out on the science of persuasion if you don't read it, is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by the renowned Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Robert Cialdini. This book, written when big hair and leg warmers were in, Influence contains the timeless secrets of getting people to say yes with just a few simple methods. You too can learn to defend yourself from the Influence of others and at the same time, get others to say yes. You won't want to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to learn something new and wonderful.

Mitnick's books are indeed mostly anecdotal, but The Art of Deception spends quite some time to explain WHY the attack worked and how it could have been mitigated. If you are to read one of Mitnick's books, this is definitely the one closer to what you want to do

As /u/demonbrew suggested, Cialdini's Influence is an iconic book on how you can use psychology to manipulate others. There are other schools, and you can read more about it in this thesis (as you can see Social Engineering was really popular at my university). My focus was Cialdini's work, my colleagues focused on comparing different psychological frameworks used in Social Engineering.

Carnegie's book is indeed focused in socializing, but the TL;DR of the book is: "How do i make people like me?". If you combine this, with one of the Cialdini principles - "Liking" - you can see how it can help you improve your Social Engineering skills

I would suggest a few great books that have helped me along in this fun little journey of mine. I dont believe these where mentioned in the links, if they were my apologies.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061438294/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01

Along the same lines as the first but a more fun read if you enjoy poker.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061198595/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

Also this one is Fantastic!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0151012792/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00

First example is what the author says about do's and don'ts in the (TV) studio (which could just as easily apply to a job interview).

>- Choose a stable, upright chair.
>- Lean forward a little, square on to the camera if possible. Never slouch no matter how comfortable the chair.
>- Always look at the interviewer or whoever is talking; do not look at the camera.
>- Do not allow your eyes to wander to the left or the right or you will appear shifty.

This is something said about answering questions in public.

> Take the heat out of an antagonistic question by appearing to agree. If your company has investments in South Africa, for instance, you can say, 'You are absolutely right to ask this question. We all abhor apartheid. But the way forward is to ...'.

Specifically on electioneering.

>I am constantly amazed at how things like dress, hairstyle, perceived attention span (looking over the shoulder of the person to whom you are meant to be talking to spot more important people in the room is a sure vote loser - we can all admit to do doing this sometimes) and other presentational matters which can be rectified seldom are. As in so many areas, such little niceties win out over policies again and again.

Edit: - Source UK, or US version.

Newp. Amazon referral links always have "-20" somewhere in the link. The entire string will be something like "tag=repulsor-20" but scanning for the "-20" is easy.

Here's an Amazon tip for linkers, too. Everything after the long strong of numbers is fluff. So the OP's link, which starts as:

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Science-Practice-5th-Edition/dp/0205609996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377360710&sr=8-1&keywords=influence+science+and+practice

Also works as:

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Science-Practice-5th-Edition/dp/0205609996

or even:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0205609996

But you don't really have to go that far.

This may also help avoid confusion regarding referrals.

Link to the other book suggested in the comments, Non-violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. It's good stuff, the narration style leaves things to ask for an engineer like myself but the contents is excellent. Read it! Oh, and it's available on Spotify, at least in Sweden. No more excuses not to read it! ;)

This series which is the basis for an upcoming talk of mine at BSides Philly in December.

Fallacies and biases.

How to Win Friends/Influence people (TL:DR)

Blair's One sentence persuasion.

48 Laws of Power

Cialdini's Influence (haven't read new pre-suasion yet)

How to google effectively using search operators (adv - "dorking)".

Ex:

books site:reddit.com/r/socialengineering

Should get you going.

You're correct. And they do a great podcast, as well as Chris' book: http://www.amazon.com/Social-Engineering-The-Human-Hacking/dp/0470639539

chris hadnagy has a good book http://www.amazon.com/Social-Engineering-The-Human-Hacking/dp/0470639539/

kevin mitnick also has one "the art of deception"

hopefully my book will come out soon too :-)

i would be very surprised if that worked. people all have a sense of someones status in their heads. if someone tries to cheat and change their statuts without approval of the group they will penalize that. They will bully, gossip, hate, and that's not what you want either.

Here is a good (awesome!) social psychology lecture that explains how group status works: link.

The high status people in your group want to keep their high status. If you want to change your status you have to do it very slowly and carefully.
For example:

• behave like a cool person
  
• use reciprocity and ben frenklin effect to increase the groups liking for you (reciprocity increases liking if you don't claim your trade-off favor). cialdini
  
• slowly show more of a leader personality

I liked this one on body language and this one on persuasion.

Chris Hadnagy's Art of Hunam Hacking is a good read. Its on audible too.

Social-Engineer.org and the book are good starting points.

Where Ghost in the Wires is more a story book filled with great tales of hacking and phreaking, Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking is more a HowTo book for SE.

It's like on the cover of this book

http://amzn.com/0470639539

This Book is written from the perspective of a psychology professor who keeps getting tricked, and talks about simple mindset changes to help you disarm some of the tactics (mostly sales) people use.

Yes that book, I have that book, and also grab the art of deception by kevin mitnick here. If you want to learn pickpocketing, or removing wristwatches, etc..here is a book on that.

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Link: Social Engineering

• UK: amazon.co.uk
  
• Spain: amazon.es
  
• France: amazon.fr
  
• Germany: amazon.de
  
• Japan: amazon.co.jp
  
• Canada: amazon.ca
  
• Italy: amazon.it
  
  
  This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting).

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Engineering-Art-Human-Hacking/dp/0470639539

Aye. Also:

1.) Influence by Robert Cialdini

2.) Secrets of power negotiating by Roger Dawson

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick is what first got me looking into the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/076454280X

Not a pdf but.... http://www.amazon.com/Social-Engineering-The-Human-Hacking/dp/0470639539

Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking

they're referring to the book by Robert Cialdini

Why not Social Engineering by Chris Hadnagy? This book has a lot of really interesting and dangerous insights into manipulative psychological techniques.

Just read chapters on elicitation, pretexting, psychology and related stuff, side away technical information.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

>Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes"—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.