Smart People Fall for Their Own Biases: Manipulation, Meaning, NLP, & Why Disagreement ≠ Dysfunction

Even the most intelligent minds can fall prey to their own blind spots. In this episode of The Voyage Cast, Eddie explores a recent post by one of his former professors that accused a public memorial of using “covert influence tactics.”

What starts as a critique of manipulation opens up into a deeper conversation about bias, authority, and how easily psychology drifts into ideology when it loses touch with philosophy. Ed breaks down the difference between manipulation and meaning, examines the research behind NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), and explains why worship, ritual, and emotion are not inherently suspect.

Along the way, he asks a bigger question: What happens when disagreement itself gets pathologized? Why have we come to assume that if someone disagrees with us, something must be psychologically wrong with them?

This episode invites listeners to recover discernment without paranoia, to recognize when influence is healthy, when it’s toxic, and how to stay grounded in truth, love, and reason even when emotions run high.

In this episode:

• Why intelligence doesn’t protect us from bias
• How “influence” became a dirty word
• What happens when therapy pathologizes disagreement
• Why NLP isn’t the scientific brain-hack it claims to be
• The difference between emotional manipulation and sacred meaning
• How to hold your ground in a world that diagnoses dissent

Key takeaway:

“Influence isn’t the enemy. Losing our capacity to discern — that’s the real danger.”

If you’ve ever felt dismissed, misread, or accused of being “under influence” simply for disagreeing, this one’s for you.

Transcript

“Smart People Fall For Their Own Biases”

Ed (00:00):

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Voyagecast. Today’s episode is titled, Smart People Fall For Their Own Biases.

I came across a post from an old professor of mine — this is like in the last two weeks. Out of respect, I’m gonna keep her anonymous, not because I’m afraid to disagree, but because I still have a lot of respect for her.

She was always a very sharp and thoughtful person, and genuinely shaped the way I think about some of the psychology that I even use today — the way I’ve even considered integration of theology and psychology. And because of that, her words still do carry some weight with me.

Well, her post was about the Charlie Kirk Memorial, and I’m not trying to beat a dead horse here, but she argued that there was some kind of covert influence or some kind of covert tactic being used to mobilize grief and anger in the audience.

She wrote — I’m quoting here — “The goal seems to be to weaponize the grief and anger of white Christians and to use it to further divide us.”

She went on to describe how trauma and grief can “open individuals and groups to covert influences,” and she suggested that those who organized the memorial “callously use people’s pain to try and manipulate the audience.”

At first, I read it, shrugged it, and just kind of scrolled on. I’m not one to spend much time on Facebook, but it stuck with me. Something about this just didn’t feel right.

So part one of this episode of our podcast today is just going to review what she claimed and what didn’t sit right with me, to be honest with you.

Her post laid out a detailed list of what she saw as manipulation tactics.

Now, some of you may be wondering, why is this all important and why does this matter? This can be related to anything in our life — any kind of service we go to, any event, any relationship.

She said that the memorial followed the “standard protocols of Neuro-Linguistic Programming,” or NLP, that pre-memorial worship altered states of people’s minds, opening them up to influence.

That if anxiety or anger increased during the event, this was some kind of proof of manipulation. That organizers wanted people to associate Christianity with being hunted or unsafe.

And her conclusion was pretty sweeping — basically, any emotional response at all could be read as evidence of manipulation.

Mirroring the Tactics She Denounced

Well, she mirrored the tactics that she denounced. That’s the first thing that kind of hit me — how the post used emotionally charged language, phrases like weaponized grief and callously used pain.

Those are powerful words — and ironically, they use the very technique she’s warning against.

Psychologists call this the affect heuristic. Our emotions become shortcuts for judgment. When you call grief “weaponized,” you’re not just describing it — you’re steering the reader’s emotional response before they’ve even had a chance to think about it.

Now that doesn’t make her a hypocrite; it makes her human. But it’s worth noticing how quickly even thoughtful people can slip into the same kind of patterns they critique.

Speculation as Certainty

Another thing she did — the second issue here — was issuing some kind of motive. She didn’t just describe what happened; she claimed to know why it happened.

“They knew this.” “Their goal was division.”

That’s not really analysis — that’s an accusation.

In psychology, we know how common this mistake is. It’s called the fundamental attribution error — assuming you know someone’s intent based on your emotional reaction.

If you feel threatened by somebody, they must have meant to threaten you, or something like that.

I see this in marriage counseling all the time. One spouse will say something and the other attributes motive to it in some kind of way.

The problem isn’t asking hard questions about influence — we should ask hard questions about influence. The problem is assuming certainty about someone else’s heart, intent, or motive.

The Authority Shield

The third part here I want to pull back the layer on — this is maybe a little more tender, a little more delicate — is the way that her words can carry a lot of moral and professional weight.

She’s a trauma survivor and she has a PhD in psychology. And that combination gives her perspective some gravity.

But it also creates what I’d like to call an authority shield. It makes disagreeing with her feel dangerous — like if you question her reasoning, you’re not just challenging her argument, you’re invalidating her pain.

And by the way, I see this in couples counseling all the time. If you question somebody’s emotion, then you’re invalidating their emotion — versus trying to understand the presupposition of that emotion.

It’s the appeal to authority mixed with the appeal to emotion. When those two things overlap, real conversation becomes almost impossible.

When Disagreement Gets Pathologized

This is where disagreement can get pathologized.

Now, to be clear, she didn’t personally do this necessarily, but it’s a move that I see — the pathologizing of disagreement — in the academic world, in the news, and in therapeutic spaces sometimes.

It’s where you treat disagreement as evidence that something’s wrong with you.

The logic goes something like this: If you don’t agree with my framework, it’s because you’re traumatized, brainwashed, or in denial.

That’s not really a good argument — that’s more like subtle coercion.

It’s going to sound harsh, but it’s like a soft totalitarianism of the mind. You don’t go to jail for disagreeing — you just get labeled “unhealed” or “under some kind of influence.”

But disagreement isn’t a diagnosis. Sometimes it’s just a sign that human experience is bigger than your theory can hold.

If psychology can’t make space for that, it’s not psychology anymore — it’s ideology.

Pathologizing Normal Experiences

I do find that in the psychological world, there’s a lot of pathologizing of normal experiences.

She also described worship as “an altered state that can be used by people with bad intentions.”

If somebody had bad intentions, sure, they could use this kind of altered state to manipulate — but that’s not the whole truth.

Worship, music, ritual — they’re not automatically suspicious. They’re truly ancient experiences and deeply human ways of metabolizing grief, celebrating life, and holding meaning together.

Anthropologically, this is shown over and over through basically every culture — ritual, song, prayer, procession. These aren’t manipulative tricks. They’re how we remember who we are.

Psychology sometimes forgets that. It’s gotten into the habit of treating human emotion as if it’s a symptom.

Not every tear is a trauma response. Sometimes it’s just love doing what love does.

Overstating NLP

Her post also claimed that the memorial used Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a manipulation tactic.

That sounds impressive — like someone figured out how to crack the code of people’s brains.

But NLP has been studied for decades, and the research is overwhelmingly skeptical.

Multiple systematic reviews — Passmore and Rowson in 2019, and even a 2014 Canadian government report — found little to no empirical evidence that NLP actually works the way it’s advertised.

Could it work? Maybe. But those bold claims — instant influence, subconscious control, rapid cures — don’t hold up.

So describing the memorial as “following the standard NLP protocols” gives the whole thing a kind of pseudo-scientific authority it hasn’t earned.

That doesn’t mean influence isn’t real. It just means we should be precise about what’s influencing whom, and how.

In-Group vs. Out-Group Thinking

Finally, her post divided everyone into three camps: the manipulators, the manipulated, and the enlightened — those who “see through it all.”

That isn’t just unhelpful — it’s what logicians would call unfalsifiable — meaning there’s no way to prove it wrong.

Every possible outcome just reinforces the theory itself. If you feel sad, that’s proof you were manipulated. If you feel angry, that’s proof too. If you feel calm — well, maybe that’s the manipulation working perfectly.

It’s a framework that can’t be tested. It explains everything, which means it explains nothing.

And once a theory becomes unfalsifiable, it stops being science or logic. It becomes ideology.

This kind of thinking deepens what psychologists call in-group/out-group bias.

The critique implicitly tells readers, “If you agree with me, you’re enlightened. If you don’t, you’re brainwashed.”

That’s not analysis. That’s tribal boundary-making.

And the tragedy is that this framing shuts down dialogue before it starts. Once a group is labeled “manipulated,” their lived experience no longer counts as valid. They’ve already been dismissed — ironically, in the name of protecting people from manipulation.

Intelligence and Bias

The surprising part — what amazes me — is that such an intelligent woman, someone I genuinely learned from, could be so swayed by her own biases.

Her intellect didn’t free her from influence; it gave her sharper tools to defend it.

That’s the paradox: intelligence doesn’t always inoculate us from bias. Sometimes it just makes us better at rationalizing it.

Manipulation vs. Meaning

Influence itself isn’t bad. Every song, every sermon, every memorial, every conversation moves us somehow.

The question isn’t if influence is happening — it’s to what end.

Manipulation uses emotion to obscure truth and hijack agency.

Healthy influence uses emotion to illuminate truth and dignify agency.

You can’t just decide that because you dislike one group it’s manipulation, and because you like another, it’s healthy influence.

Ritual, music, shared grief — these are normal ways of humans being human.

So instead of asking, “Am I being influenced?” we should ask, “What kind of influence is this?”

Is it leading me toward truth, love, and healing — or toward fear, division, and control?

Philosophy gives us those categories. Psychology, when cut off from philosophy, loses them and starts treating all influence as manipulation.

Why This Matters

Many of you listening know what it’s like to be dismissed — not by a professor, but by your own family, friends, even your spouse or community.

You’ve said something from conviction, and the response you got was, “That’s just your trauma talking,” or “You’ve clearly been influenced.”

That framing doesn’t make room for honest difference. It doesn’t say, “I see it differently.” It says, “Something must be wrong with you.”

That’s devastating, because it turns disagreement into diagnosis.

Disagreement isn’t dysfunction.

Grief isn’t gullibility.

Worship isn’t weakness.

If we start treating every emotional or spiritual experience as proof of manipulation, we’ll lose the very things that make us human — our rituals, our communities, our capacity to love and be moved.

This isn’t just about one professor’s post. It’s about all of us — in marriages, friendships, and churches — learning how to recognize when influence is healthy, when it’s toxic, and how to hold our ground without assuming that disagreement makes someone broken.

Takeaway

I don’t dismiss my professor’s concerns. Influence is real. Grief can be exploited. Groups can be steered.

But what unsettled me was the way her critique blurred the lines between trauma and expertise, mixed valid insight with speculation, and pathologized ordinary human rituals like worship and mourning.

I don’t think it’s fair to single out one event as uniquely guilty. Every memorial uses emotion, ritual, and story to help people make sense of loss. That’s not manipulation — that’s humanity.

I still value her, and I’m grateful for what she taught me. But her post was a reminder: even the brightest minds aren’t immune to bias.

When philosophy and logic step out of the picture, even the smartest of us start mistaking our own reflections for the truth.

Ed (Closing):

So my encouragement is this: the next time something moves you — a sermon, a song, a story — don’t rush to ask, “Am I being manipulated?”

Ask instead, “What is this drawing me toward? Fear or love? Division or communion? Despair or hope?”

That’s the real test.

Because influence isn’t the enemy. Losing our capacity to discern — that’s the real danger.

Alright, that’s what I have for you today.

Thank you so much for joining me on another episode of the Voyagecast. If you like these episodes, please subscribe and give us five stars — the algorithm overlords need that to spread the good news and help more people grow psychologically and in a more human capacity.

Alright — take care, guys. Until next time, we’ll see you then.

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