Reflexive control
Reflexive control
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Reflexive control

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Reflexive control

Reflexive control is control someone has over their opponent's decisions by imposing on them assumptions that change the way they act.

Methods of reflexive control are widely used in a variety of fields: advertising, public relations, military art, etc. Examples of the strategy are card shark deliberately losing the first hands in the game or systematic diversionary attacks on an unimportant area of combat.

As defined by Soviet scholar Vladimir Lefebvre reflexive control is a process in which one adversary hands over to the other the basis for decision-making. In other words, there is a substitution of motivation factors of the enemy in order to encourage him to take disadvantageous decisions.

Professor G. Smolyan believes that the key point of reflexive control is implicitly forcing a subject to choose a desired result. As an aphoristic example of reflexive manipulation we can recall an episode from "Uncle Remus's Tales" in which Brother Rabbit eludes Brother Fox by asking:

Whatever you do don't throw me into the briar patch

— Br'er Rabbit

The oldest of those literary villains who specialized in reflexive control is considered to be the biblical serpent who provoked Eve to taste the forbidden fruit.

Individual techniques of reflexive control called "stratagems" have occupied an important place in the history of military art since ancient times. For example, Sun Tzu put in the title of the first chapter of one of his treatises the statement "War is the way of deception," thus defining the craft of warfare as the art of deception.

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