Social Engineering is when you manage to convince someone to do what you want them to, when they normally wouldn't want to. This also includes when you convince someone you are someone you are not.
These tropes are well used by Social Experts (its super trope The Face), High School Hustlers, Guile Heroes, and Manipulative Bastards. It's also often the modus operandi of a Con Man. Also frequently used by real-life hackers (from where the term originated). Those posts on social media saying your Drag Queen name is your childhood pet plus the street you grew up on? Those are password recovery questions. Hackers use the information provided in questions like that to gain access to people's online accounts all the time, but Hollywood would have you believe it was pure techno-wizardry.
Here are some tropes that involve Social Engineering:
- Bad Review Threat: Threatening to give a business an excessively negative review if said business doesn't bow to your every whim.
- Bavarian Fire Drill
- Checkpoint Bluff
- Clipboard of Authority
- Correction Bait
- Gaslighting: Manipulating people into believing that they are insane and that what they know actually happened they either hallucinated or remembered incorrectly.
- Impersonating an Officer
- Insidious Rumor Mill: Convince members of your social circle to turn against someone else within the same social circle by lying or manipulating them
- It's for a Book
- Kansas City Shuffle
- Mischief for Punishment
- Politeness Judo
- Reverse Psychology: Getting a person to do something by pretending you want them to do the opposite.
- Briar Patching: Tricking a person into doing something by pretending the outcome is detrimental on your part.
- Duck Season, Rabbit Season: Winning an argument by tricking the other participant into switching sides so that they'll unknowingly start defending your side of the disagreement.
- Fence Painting
- Forbidden Fruit
- Reverse Psychology Backfire: Reverse psychology fails because the person it's tried on instead does exactly as they're told.
- Schmuck Bait: A person inexplicably gets deceived by a trap that couldn't have been more obvious.
- Safety in Muggles
- Sarcastic Confession
- Stone Soup
- Tricked into Another Jurisdiction
- Verbal Judo
- The Window or the Stairs
