Trick Someone

Tricking someone is often necessary in work, negotiation, and simple interactions. Concealing and then revealing truth to someone can be fun and highly beneficial in a number of contexts, like psychological and preference research, business, and practical jokes. Deception can be fun and simple. Tricking someone to make them do something you want, as a prank, or for the joy of seeming clever in front of others can be accomplished in a few conceptually simple steps, but remember that you are playing with people’s feelings and trust.

Steps

Picking your Target

1. Decide what your desired outcome is. You should set some pretty clear goals as to what you want from someone else and what you want to gain from tricking them. This will help you plan the actual trick, establish when you should give up on the trick, and select your mark.
2. Pick your mark. Your target should have what you want to gain, be it money or cheap laughs, and should view you as credible. You will want to approach the person openly and without any apparent guile, so it should be someone you have no issues being friendly with. They will also need a sense of humor if your trick is to go over without hurting their feelings significantly. You will want to survey the target's behavior and hobbies, depending on how much you plan on developing the relationship for the trick.
   • Identify potential secondary targets for manipulation. These will be your confederates (people who help you perform the trick) and possibly your patsies (those you can blame the trick on or enlist as dupes) if your trick is mean enough to require someone else to pawn the blame off on. You can enlist them into your trick using either simple honesty (getting them in on the joke) or through tricking them. Confederates are liable to want a cut of whatever you stand to gain, since they are potentially taking risk and are key players in your potential trick. It is important to keep them happy.
   • Keep your true objective to an inner circle. Lying is detectable through verbal and nonverbal language. Increasing confederates who also use deception will increase your odds of detection. Pick who you trust with your objective carefully, depending on your deception.
3. Develop the identity you will use on this person. Tricking someone will require, to some extent, modifying your behavior to communicate falsity as truth. If you don’t know the person you’re tricking very well initially, developing a false identity can be useful, as long as the details remain consistent and you avoid compromising the secondary identity.
   • Choose an identity that the mark will respond well to. Offering expertise and a similar basis of identification (if they are a gamer, you should identify to them as one as well) will make you much more appealing and put you in a much better position to trick this person. It should not diverge from your real life identity unless you plan on cutting off contact with the person after you perform the trick.

Developing Trust

1. Provide incentives. You will need a reason for your confederate to trust you enough for you to trick them later, and you can accomplish this with an identity that they find valuable (an expert in the field they want) or through encouraging a relationship of reciprocity and honesty.
   • Encourage buy-in through exchanging favors, and offering gratitude when things are done through you. People are more likely to offer trust and favors to people who they already have helped. You should approach them with a reasonable request for a favor that they would be inclined to perform. If they are tired or exhausted they are more likely to acquiesce to your request.
2. Establish your credibility and reputation as honest. You can use your confederates here, offering either false reports or reports that will distort your mark’s perception of you. Returning favors and respecting reciprocity in the early stages of your relationship will help with this. You will want to make sure that your mark believes you are who you say you are, and that your intentions are not dishonest. Your mark should have a false sense of knowledge about you and you behaviors.
3. Simulate empathy through mirroring and positive behavior. Your mark’s vanity can be appealed to through mirroring, using their name repeatedly, nodding, use of positive words, repeating their statements and not criticizing their statements. Mirroring a person’s behavior and attitudes will make them more empathetic and receptive to your behavior and attitudes. Avoid being a bobble-headed sycophant hear, as people do not respond to excessive flattery or obvious, conscious mirroring. The affectation should be subtle, and something you've practiced.

Pulling a Fast One

1. Make sure anyone or anything you need to run your trick is in place. Your confederates should know when to enter, what to say, and what to do. Your patsy should already be implicated, if you are putting the blame on someone else. You should be certain that you can execute the trick quickly and effectively before you initiate it, as you only really have one chance.
2. Execute your trick. You can use your trust at this point to execute any number of short or long cons, simple tricks or pranks, depending on what you want from who you’re tricking. Small tricks will work the most effectively and not jeopardize your relationship with your mark. You can use the basic structure of the tricks below to affect the deception, though it is important to modulate how cruel the trick is to how much you like the person and how much you desire to continue the relationship.
   • Abuse semantics in prop bets. You can use old tricks like “I bet I can get a quarter from under a napkin without lifting up the napkin,” or similar things, to trick the person into lifting the napkin for you and getting the quarter.
   • Betray their confidence to embarrass them. If you’d like to simply shame or humiliate the person, you can use the trust in the relationship you’ve built up against them. Obtaining and then disseminating any sensitive information they might’ve given you in public or to some party they don’t want to know will allow you to shame the person and hopefully take pleasure in their pain.
   • Prank them. You could lead them, a la Carrie, into a situation where they believe they are to receive a reward or some innocuous thing and instead cause some injury or harm to their appearance, like how in Carrie they covered her in blood at the dance.
3. Mask or reveal your entertainment. Assuming you are intent on hiding your role as the originator of the trick, you will want to feign sympathy, ignorance, and innocence to hide your role in the trick. How you react to the trick’s immediate consequences on the victim will alter your relationship with the tricked. If the trick went over well, feel free to identify yourself as the originator the conspiracy.

Getting Away With It

1. Avoid playing extremely mean or performing harmful deceptions. This will help you at the very least in future attempts to trick others, and keep your actual reputation high. Reports of deception will make people more suspicious of you, even of true statements you might make. It will also be a lot easier to place the blame on someone else for something that is not particularly offensive or reputation endangering.
2. Avoid feeling guilt. If your prank was harmless this should be simple, but if it was not, you will want to focus on minimizing feelings of guilt. Lies to cover transgressions are especially visible, and one should try to avoid perceiving the trick as a transgression, even if it is one. You will likely have to lie to yourself about the consequences of your trick so the ethical considerations can be treated more trivially.
3. Walk away from the trick. When you’ve finished the initial prank, unless you’ve done a very good job hiding yourself, your mark will likely be more suspicious and more likely to call statements or propositions dishonest. Your ability to remain undetected is key to pulling off a trick again, maintaining a reputation as an honest person (which is ironically key to being successfully dishonest). If your trick fails, you should be willing to give it up.
4. Have a patsy. Running a secondary trick on someone using these techniques to establish one person as guilty will be key to evading guilt. You will want this person to be a confederate your other confederates know to turn on, or an absent, uncredible, or disliked person, to minimize the chance that they expose your secondary trick. It can be difficult to place the blame on someone else, but if the prank is public and well-received, your patsy would be more inclined to take the "credit".

Tips

• Control both your nonverbal and verbal language. Lies typically have less detail, are more self-aggrandizing, and less effective as stories to the party being deceived.
• Lie detection without any special training, while effective, is only effective approximately half the time. You can fool a lot of people a lot of the time.

Warnings

• Being deceitful and playing practical jokes has diminishing returns in effectiveness and satisfaction, as liars who are discovered are more likely to be disbelieved even when being honest.
• Lies that conceal facts and not feelings are less discernible from regular, non-deceptive communication.

Related Articles

• Prank Someone with Money
• Be Cunning
• Not Be Gullible

Sources and Citations

See also

• Play a Prank
• Make Fake Vomit
• Pie Someone in the Face
• Moon Someone
• Make a Beginner Boobie Trap
• Make Fake Diarrhea
• Play Office April Fool's Day Pranks
• Make a Fake Cast
• Prank Your Mom
• Rick Roll Someone

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What links here

• Be a Player
• Be Cunning
• Cosplay As Sebastian Michaelis on Kuroshitsuji
• Get on a Reality TV Show
• Not Be Gullible