Manipulation - when we are naive or too trusting

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At some stage in life, everyone suffers from being naive - it goes with the territory of growing up and as you gain more experience (usually gained the hard way) you know better, you do better. It is often said that people on the spectrum are more inclined to suffer from their naivete, and there may be some truth in this; when I was a young adult I tended to take people at face value and that was in some instances a very naive thing to do. I wasn't skilled at paying more attention to what they did than what they said; I was a fairly honest sincere young person and I projected that on to others. Do you relate to that? Here is a link which briefly summarises just about every aspect of being manipulated, which I'm posting to increase awareness of manipulation in all its common forms. None of us are totally immune, however experienced and old we become...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation

good read, thanks; think the same thing also happens online from time to time, not only face-to-face

I was very naive when young so subconsciously to cope I became so cynical people were always telling me I was too negative. Now that I know that it happened and why I am trying to find a happy medium. But there are plenty of times you see that cynicism and sometimes naivete reflected in my posts.

Reading your post APOM, it occurred to me that in the first 20 years of my life, in the middle of the 20th century, the only time I heard the word manipulation used (if I heard it at all) was in the sense of the alternative meaning of being skilled and agile with your hands. I wonder what your experience was? Did you grow up aware of the word's other use and meaning? Or not?

If we don't hear something named as children, are we less likely to notice it when we see or experience it? Or when we do see it, are we more likely to misinterpret it? I wonder..

Now, 50 years later, I seem to have built an internal manipulation radar that goes "Ping" the moment someone begins manipulating a situation, thread, event, commercial transaction or whatever; the " Ping" alerts me to figure out what has set off the radar, sometimes it's obvious, (like when someone is projecting their stuff onto you) though other times it's more obscure. For the obscure times I am going to use the Wikipedia link as a ready reference in future..

In my younger life I think turning point was in my 20s, when I read Eric Berne's book "Games People Play" and even though it was cloaked in jargon, it was a real eye-opener, particularly the manipulator's game called "I'm Only Trying To Help You" [only doing my very best to undermine you while I pretend to be helping] as it finally put a name to the behaviour of someone in my childhood and explained why being around her was such a confusing and painful experience.

I have context blindness and mentalization problems and therefore people are unpredictable for me.
I have been told many times that I am too naive, I really cannot tell if people are of good will or not.

I think I'm quite the opposite.

Me too. I don't know if I have AS but I can read people better than they can read me.

I grew up in the wake of the JFK assassination with The Vietnam War and then Watergate in a marketing/advertising culture. There were a lot of conspiracy theories about those events. A lot of reasons to be cynical. The elections were/are often covered like a sporting event who was ahead, what strategy was working. Our generation grew up and created the American politics you fortunately look at from far away.

My naivete was/is more in person to person situations not broader societal ones

It's not that I'm good at reading people. I just take everything with a grain of salt.