Profile of a Manipulator

Before I start, I am going to operate under the premise that manipulation is a good thing, and everyone does it. I would also like to note that this is not a profile of me, these are my observations of other people and how they act.

I said in my last post that everyone manipulates people, and that is true to a certain extent. Everyone wants people to like them and give them raises and nice gifts. But there are other people who manipulate much more actively than that.
These people are often classified as jerks, or they're incredibly popular, depending on what they do and how much they care about what other people think. I've no doubt that you have met at least one person like this, even if you don't realize it.

These people, who I will call manipulators, are much better at getting people to do what they want than you are (unless you happen to be a manipulator, of course.) They always seem to know the right thing to say in a certain situation to make everything come out in their favor, however that may be. What I am speaking of would be perfect manipulators, of which there are very few, but there are many more manipulators of varying skill level who might not always have things turn out their way, but will have things go the way they want it much more than you do. These people will usually seem to care about you, but most of the time they really don't. They only want to be friends with you because of what you can provide for them, be it connections, money, experience, sex, whatever. Some would classify these people as socio or psychopaths. I wouldn't score them that high on the test, although socio and psychopaths are like this to an extreme degree.

In the proceeding posts I am going to outline a few tools that manipulators use, why they use them, and how you can use them to help your social interactions. The examples and suggestions are going to be through the filter of a guy, as I am of the male species.