Adversarial Minds: Why We’re Still Getting Hacked by Words? a book about human vulnerabilities.

By Kai Aizen

I didn’t write “Adversarial Minds” because social engineering isn’t quantified. I wrote it because no one talks about the fact that humans are still the core vulnerability. In a world filled with AI, biometrics, encryption, MFA — we’re still getting hacked by words.

Years ago, a moment stuck with me. I was watching Mr. Robot. Elliot needed to get into a server room. He didn’t hack the lock, didn’t spoof anything. He just showed up in a reflective vest, mumbled something about the power company, looked a bit flustered. The security guard let him in.

That’s it. That’s the exploit. I couldn’t shake it.

That night, I started reading Kevin Mitnick: the Motorola job, the pretexts, the voice tone breakdowns. He was hacking humans.

Later, working in cybersecurity — red teaming, threat simulation, product — I started noticing something. We model so much: attack paths, kill chains, TTPs, CVSS scores…

But the thing that brings it all down?

One human. A moment of distraction. A click. A “yes.” A door held open.

I looked around and realized no one was really teaching that part. No one was saying: “Let’s study human behavior the same way we study lateral movement.”

So I wrote the book.

Not to complain. Not to hype. But to map it.

Here’s a taste of what’s inside, the table of content, and quick overview then later i will Share Chapter 3 (almost to it’s fullest).

The Security Paradox

“Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.” — Bruce Schneier

We fear flying, but text while driving. We install doorbell cameras, but click phishing links in the same breath.

This chapter breaks down:

• Why humans misread risk
• How emotional triggers override logic
• The availability heuristic and the affect bias
• Why the aftermath of 9/11 tragically killed more people on the road than in the planes

Deception Through the Ages

One of the longest — and most important — chapters.

We go from:

• The Trojan Horse (yes, really)
• Ancient Chinese psychological warfare
• Fake French ministers stealing millions with nothing but Zoom calls and confidence

And the scary part? It all works on the same human code.

“The tools change. The tricks don’t.”

Inside the Mind of the Attacker

We dive into the Dark Triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy. Why some attackers don’t just want to win; they want to own the person.

But we also meet the attackers who aren’t evil. Just curious. Lonely. Bored. Or high on the rush of bypassing human defenses.

“Some attack for money. Others for sport. But the best ones? They do it to prove they know you better than you know yourself.”

Inside the Mind of the Target

Shame. Overconfidence. Stress. Social pressure. Time fatigue. Empathy used against you.

There’s an entire breakdown of how your own brain is your worst defense system when overloaded.

“You can’t multi-task your way out of a con. Your brain trades speed for safety — and social engineers know it.”

AI, Deepfakes, and the Next Wave

This one hits hard.

• AI tools that can impersonate your CEO’s voice
• Deepfake videos used in real estate fraud
• LLMs that generate targeted phishing scripts based on your LinkedIn profile

It’s not theoretical anymore.

“The next phase of social engineering won’t just target humans — it’ll be run by machines that understand them better than they understand themselves.”

This isn’t a collection of anecdotes. It’s a map of the human layer — from psychology to threat modeling.

It’s not a manual for manipulation. It’s an X-ray of it.

And yeah — it’s not a framework yet. But it could be. Soon.

Why I Wrote “Adversarial Minds”

Because whether we’re talking about phishing, persuasion, AI manipulation, leadership, or war — the breach starts here: in the way people think. In how we feel, guess, assume, and decide under pressure.And we can’t patch that with an agent on an endpoint.

We need a new lens. This is it.

Ready to understand the true anatomy of social engineering and master the psychology of manipulation?

For Preorder or Hate Mail — hit me here: adversarialminds@gmail.com

here’s a preview from Chapter 3.

Chapter 3: The Psychology of Influence and Manipulation

Vignette: The Trojan Horse at the Gates of Troy

After a decade of siege, the Greeks seemed to retreat, leaving behind a massive wooden horse as an apparent offering. The triumphant Trojans pulled the mysterious gift inside their fortified city. That night, hidden Greek soldiers crept out from the horse’s belly, opened the city gates, and let their army in to destroy Troy. A simple ruse — exploiting trust and pride — had defeated an entire city where force had failed
(The History of Social Engineering, The History of Social Engineering).

Introduction: Why Humans Are Vulnerable to Manipulation

The fall of Troy illustrates a timeless lesson: human minds can be influenced and deceived by clever manipulation. From ancient stratagems like the Trojan Horse (often cited as the first great “social engineering” exploit
(The History of Social Engineering)). To modern cyber scams, our psychology underlies our susceptibility. We like to believe we are rational actors, yet psychological research by pioneers like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky reveals that our decisions are often clouded by cognitive biases and heuristics
(Daniel Kahneman — The Decision Lab, Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Legacy of Insight and Humility).
These mental shortcuts help us navigate complexity quickly, but they also make us predictably irrational in certain ways — fertile ground for manipulators.

In this chapter, we delve into why and how people are influenced and manipulated. We will explore the technical findings of behavioral psychology and economics on decision-making and biases, and see how those insights are weaponized in real-world social engineering: from hackers and spies to marketers, con artists, and propagandists. Through extensive case studies — historical and contemporary — we’ll examine fraud schemes, espionage operations, advertising tricks, political propaganda, and cybercrime exploits. An interdisciplinary lens, incorporating sociology, anthropology, and ethics, will show how deeply manipulation is woven into human society, and provoke reflection on the moral implications of these tactics in everyday life. By the end, you will recognize the “tricks of the trade” of influence — and perhaps become a bit less likely to be deceived by them.

The Human Mind: Fast, Biased, and Easily Swayed

At the core of influence is the human mind’s cognitive architecture. Psychologists describe our thinking as operating on two tracks: a fast, automatic, emotional mode and a slower, deliberate, analytical mode. Kahneman terms these System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow) thinking. System 1 jumps to conclusions using rules of thumb, while System 2 can apply logic and evidence — but is often lazy or late to the party. As Kahneman famously observed, “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance”
(Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Legacy of Insight and Humility).
In other words, we often feel confident in our judgments even when they’re based on flawed or missing information.

Cognitive Biases and Heuristics

Decades of studies have catalogued dozens of cognitive biases — systematic errors in how we think and decide. Kahneman and Tversky’s work in the 1970s demonstrated that human beings are not the purely rational decision-makers that classical economics assumed
(Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Legacy of Insight and Humility).
Instead, we rely on mental shortcuts (heuristics) that usually serve us well but can be exploited. For example:

• Availability heuristic: We estimate likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind. This is why vivid news (a plane crash, a shark attack) can make us overestimate rare dangers.
• Anchoring bias: Our judgments are influenced by the first information we encounter. (If a price starts high, we perceive subsequent prices as bargains
  (Chapter 6: Exploiting vulnerabilities in decision-making — Deceptive Patterns).)
• Confirmation bias: We readily accept information that confirms our beliefs and scrutinize or dismiss what contradicts them. Manipulators feed us what we want to hear to lower our guard.
• Framing effects: The way choices are presented (gain vs. loss, positive vs. negative wording) skews our decisions. We tend to avoid risk when an outcome is framed as a gain but seek risk to avoid a loss — a finding of Prospect Theory that people “weight losses more heavily than gains”
  (Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Legacy of Insight and Humility).

One powerful example of a bias is the default effect. People disproportionately stick with default options. Researchers Johnson and Goldstein famously found that countries where citizens are automatically opted in to organ donation have consent rates upwards of 85–99%, whereas countries requiring opt-in have donation rates in the single digits
(Chapter 6: Exploiting vulnerabilities in decision-making — Deceptive Patterns).
The huge gap (despite people’s stated values being similar) shows that inertia and implied recommendation of a default greatly sway behavior. Designers of forms and policies use this knowledge to nudge choices — or, in the hands of a manipulator, to trap people in a choice through a pre-checked box or fine-print default.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has documented countless ways our decision-making can be led astray. In one experiment, Ariely presented people with subscription offers for a magazine: a web-only option, a print-only option (at a higher price), and a combined web+print option for the same price as print-only. Almost no one wanted the print-only option — yet its mere presence dramatically increased uptake of the combo deal. This decoy effect worked because the print-only offer made the combo seem like a great value by comparison, “changing how we decide between two options” by adding a third irrelevant one
(Decoy Effect — The Decision Lab, Chapter 6: Exploiting vulnerabilities in decision-making).
The participants’ preference was manipulated without any outright lies — just by framing the choices. Such studies reinforce a key point: context and presentation can affect our choices as much as content.

Emotions vs. Logic: The Battle for Control

Human decisions are not all cold calculations. In fact, they are often driven by emotions, impulses, and social pressures. Neurological and psychological research shows that an emotional reaction can precede and overpower rational thought
(The Con of Propaganda | Psychology Today).
We are more likely to act on sentiment than deliberate analysis. As biologist E.O. Wilson quipped, “People would rather believe than know.” The propagandist or persuader who appeals to emotion thus has an edge: fear, desire, empathy, anger — these can short-circuit careful reasoning. For example, a scammer might craft a panicked story (“Your account will be closed today if you don’t act!”) to trigger fear and urgency, bypassing your logical filters.

Social psychology reveals we are highly sensitive to social cues and pressures as well. Classic experiments by Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated how people could be convinced to doubt the evidence of their own eyes to conform with a unanimous group. In Asch’s conformity experiments, participants were placed in a group of actors who all chose an obviously wrong answer to a simple line-length matching task. Shockingly, about 75% of people conformed at least once to the group’s wrong answer, and overall participants went along with the group about one-third of the time
(The Asch Conformity Experiments).
The desire to fit in with the group can override what we know to be true.

Likewise, Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in the 1960s showed how ordinary individuals could be compelled to perform extreme acts when following orders from an authority figure. Milgram had volunteers believe they were administering painful electric shocks to another person at the instruction of a scientist in a lab coat. A full 65% of participants went all the way to deliver what they thought were lethal 450-volt shocks, despite the victim’s (simulated) screams
(Milgram experiment — Wikipedia).
This disturbing result highlights the power of authority and context to induce compliance. Good people can do harmful things if the situation pressures them to and authority validates it.

The takeaway from these and many other studies is that human judgment is malleable. We have predictable blind spots and pressure points: our cognitive biases, our emotional drives, our social instincts to trust, follow, or obey. A skilled social engineer — whether a con artist, cult leader, marketer, or spy — can exploit these tendencies. The next sections will introduce key principles of influence and then show them in action through real-world cases.

Weapons of Influence: Principles of Persuasion

Not all influence is malicious — parents influence children, teachers influence students, and leaders inspire followers. The ethics may differ, but the psychological levers are often the same. Researcher Robert Cialdini spent years studying compliance and persuasion, identifying six universal principles of influence that are so reliable he dubbed them “weapons of influence”
(Chapter 6: Exploiting vulnerabilities in decision-making — Deceptive Patterns).
Understanding these principles is crucial, because social engineers routinely wield them to manipulate targets. The six classic principles (plus a newer seventh) are:

1. Reciprocity
   Humans tend to return favors and pay back debts. If someone gives us something — a gift, a compliment, a concession — we feel obliged to reciprocate. Manipulators exploit this by giving small freebies or doing fake favors to incur social debts. For example, Hare Krishna volunteers famously handed out “free” flowers in airports, making people more likely to give a donation out of reciprocation
   (Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence — Definition and examples — Conceptually).
   In marketing, free samples or gifts aren’t just kindness; they are strategic. Once you’ve received something, you’re more inclined to say yes to the next request or offer.
2. Commitment and Consistency
   We have a deep desire to be consistent with our past statements and actions. If we commit to something publicly or in writing, we are more likely to follow through. Small initial commitments can be leveraged into bigger compliance — the classic “foot-in-the-door” technique. Manipulators get a small agreement first, then escalate. Salespeople, for instance, might get you to answer “Yes” to innocuous questions or agree to a minor request, knowing you’ll feel psychological pressure to stay consistent by agreeing to more. Even something as simple as clicking “Maybe I’ll sign up later” (instead of “No”) on a pop-up uses consistency against you
   (Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence — Definition and examples — Conceptually).
3. Social Proof (Consensus)
   We look to others for cues on how to think and act, especially in uncertainty. “If other people like this, or are doing this, it must be good/right.” Manipulators create illusions of popularity or normalcy to herd us. Advertisers use lines like “America’s #1 choice” or display testimonials because seeing others approve convinces us. In one famous demonstration, researchers had confederates stop on a New York City sidewalk and look up at the sky; soon crowds of passersby joined, looking up for nothing, simply because others were
   (Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence — Definition and examples — Conceptually).
   In the digital age, fake reviews, inflated follower counts, and laugh tracks on TV shows all leverage social proof to make a product or idea seem widely endorsed.
4. Authority
   We are conditioned to obey and trust authority figures (or even just symbols of authority). Titles, uniforms, credentials, or just confidence can lend an air of credibility that bypasses skepticism. Cialdini notes that even the appearance of authority can compel compliance, as shown by Milgram’s experiment where a lab coat was enough to convince people to administer shocks
   (Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence — Definition and examples — Conceptually).
   Manipulators may impersonate authority or cite (real or fake) experts to push their agenda. Think of scam callers who claim to be IRS agents or IT support technicians — they adopt the authoritative role to make targets comply. In a corporate setting, an email that looks like it’s from the CEO carries extraordinary persuasive power (“boss said do it”). Our deference to authority can be hijacked unless we consciously question it.
5. Liking
   We say yes more often to people we know and like. Many scams begin with building rapport and likability. Similarity, compliments, attractiveness, and familiarity all increase liking. Manipulators often first make themselves likable or relatable to lower our guard. A classic example comes from Tupperware home parties: people bought tons of plastic containers not just because of the product, but because they liked the friend or neighbor hosting the party. We are inclined to go along with requests from someone who is friendly and similar to us
   (Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence — Definition and examples — Conceptually).
   Online, this might mean a scammer finds common ground (hobbies, background) or simply uses charm and flattery. Romance scams, for instance, are entirely about feigning love and friendship to exploit the victim’s trust.

Scarcity
We instinctively value things more when they are rare or fleeting. Limited time offers, exclusive deals, low-stock notices — all aim to trigger our fear of missing out. When something seems scarce, our desire for it increases. Manipulative tactics often manufacture a sense of scarcity to pressure quick action. Retailers use “Only 2 left in stock!” alerts or one-day sales to make you feel you’ll miss your chance
(Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Influence — Definition and examples — Conceptually).
High-demand frauds like ticket scams use this principle: “I have others interested; act now or lose this opportunity.” Scarcity bypasses deliberate thinking by injecting urgency. If we believe an opportunity is vanishing, we have no time to deliberate or seek second opinions, which is exactly what the manipulator wants.

(Cialdini later added a seventh principle, “Unity,” meaning we are influenced by those we consider part of our in-group or share an identity with. This is closely related to liking and social proof — e.g., a fraudster might stress a common hometown, alma mater, or religious affiliation to create a sense of “us.”)

These principles are like a checklist of vulnerabilities in human psychology. Ethical persuasion might use them transparently (e.g., a public health campaign leveraging authority of doctors and social proof of community members getting vaccinated). In contrast, social engineers and con artists use these weapons covertly or dishonestly — for example, pretending to have authority or to do you a favor, or creating fictitious social proof. As we explore real cases, watch how often these six principles show up. The contexts vary — from a hacker conning a password, to a dictator manipulating a nation — but the underlying triggers are the same.

About the Author

Kai Aizen (SnailSploit) is a cybersecurity researcher based in Israel. He specializes in adversarial AI, prompt‑injection attacks and social engineering. Kai created the Adversarial AI Threat Modeling Framework (AATMF) and the PROMPT methodology, and he is the author of the upcoming book Adversarial Minds. He shares tools and research on GitHub and publishes deep‑dive articles at SnailSploit.com and The Jailbreak Chef. Follow him on GitHub and LinkedIn for updates.