The influence of age, gender and creativity of profession on manipulation behavior of young people

Abstract

The people with manipulative attitude are a pressing problem that threatens information-psychological security of people and impedes the growth and development of a psychologically stable personality. The present paper studies how individual (age-sex) and personal factors affect the propensity of young people for manipulative behavior. The results of an empirical study of 113 young people aged 17 to 25 years are presented. The research involved such psychodiagnostic method as the scale of Bant for assessing the level of manipulativeness of a person. The study shows that according to the scale of Bant 75.2% of the surveyed people have average levels of manipulativeness with a tendency towards high level. The results obtained during the survey allow forecasting more pronounced tendency towards manipulative behavior among young people aged 17-20 compared to 21-25-year-old people. The research has not revealed any correlation between a gender and manipulative behavior. Also according to the present study, there is no statistically significant correlation between the level of creativity of a person’s occupation and their propensity to manipulate people in personal communication. However, the tendency for prevalence of higher level of manipulative behavior has been detected among young people who define their profession as creative.