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Welcome into the podcast Revise and Resubmit, this is Weekend Book Review 🎙️📚.
Tonight we crack open Manipulation: Its Nature, Mechanisms, and Moral Status by Robert Noggle, a sharp new hardcover from Oxford University Press.
Published on 27 March 2025, this is a book review with teeth and tenderness, ready to test the stories told about influence.
Gaslighting, flattery, misdirection, nagging, emotional blackmail, charm offensives, and playing on emotions swagger through these pages like suspects in a lineup, and the book asks what unites them.
Noggle’s answer is the Mistake Account, the claim that manipulation is the kind of influence that works by introducing a mistake into a target’s mental states or processes.
It pulls levers in our minds, from cognitive and decision biases to the lure of the lesser good that sits within easy reach while the greater good waits a little farther away 🧠🔍.
Morally, manipulation is presumptively wrong, though in extreme cases the book allows that justification can appear, and the worst cases corrode well-being and autonomy.
By the end, the Mistake Account is applied to priming, conditioning, nudges, advertising, sales, and the online currents that tug at attention every day ✨.
Robert Noggle is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University, and his work circles the ethics of influence, moral theory, and questions about children and autonomy.
Across his career he has probed persuasion and manipulation with an eye for where reasoning falters and where responsibility should step in.
This volume joins the New Topics in Applied Philosophy series and reads like a seminar that moves from clear definitions to lived dilemmas, from sharpened concepts to everyday choices.
Thanks to Robert Noggle for the scholarship and to Oxford University Press for the publication 🚀🙏.
Subscribe on Spotify and on the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher, and find this show on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast so the next review lands right where listening happens 🎧✨.
If manipulation so often feels like clarity while sowing a small, decisive mistake, what habit of mind should be practiced this weekend to catch the next subtle nudge before it catches us ❓
Reference
Noggle, R. (2025). Manipulation: Its Nature, Mechanisms, and Moral Status. Oxford University Press.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/manipulation-9780198924890
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