How to Manipulate Anyone: Using Edward L. Bernays to Write Manipulative Characters

When I started writing Every Lie I Told, I knew my main character was a master manipulator. The stakes are high for Jackie Swift: She knows that her sister killed her former boss, and Jackie will do anything to keep her out of jail. She’s willing to boldly lie to the police, the media, old friends, and anyone else who crosses her path.

(How Telling the Truth Can Increase the Tension and Humor in a Novel.)

Jackie’s a shark, the kind of character who can suss out someone’s vulnerabilities a block away and spin a tale that hits their soft spots. For a writer like me, who sits alone at home spinning tales she hopes someone else will want to pick up, it was a daunting skill set to imagine. How could I convince anyone to believe Jackie’s lies?

And then I stumbled across Edward L. Bernays.

If you’ve never heard the name, don’t be surprised. Bernays was a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. He worked for the US government during World War I, and he described his work there as “psychological warfare.” Afterwards, he rebranded propaganda as public relations and went on to work as a gun for hire for major corporations. He was also the nephew of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, so he understood exactly what made people tick.

Bernays’ career and his writings show that propaganda is basically a toolkit for steering people’s opinions. You can actually alter what people think of as normal or good by reframing how they see things. Here’s what I learned from him.

If you thought influencers were new, think again! Bernays knew people hate it when someone tries to aggressively sell them something, whether that’s a vacuum cleaner or a candidate for office (Bernays worked for politicians, too, including President Coolidge). Instead, his workaround was to use trusted third parties to get the word out. Bernays targeted doctors, teachers, fashion leaders, and others so they would carry his message, making it feel like friendly advice instead of propaganda.

How did advice like this help my main character? Jackie Swift is clever enough to drop a hint or two to the NYPD about how crazy and violent the dead man’s ex-wife was… and then spread word to reporters she knows about their acrimonious divorce, so that it becomes intertwined with the coverage of the man’s death. Instant murder suspect!

Early propaganda was all about shouting slogans, but Bernays didn’t have much respect for that. He thought it was much more effective to make people believe that they arrived at a conclusion themselves. He believed people are driven more by emotions and instincts than by logic, so you have to speak to feelings, rather than giving out facts. He would actually plan entire environments—stories, images, experts, and events—so people would naturally arrive at the opinion he wanted. (You can probably already picture my main character manipulating people and situations to get her message across.)

One of Bernays’ favorite moves was to glue a product or cause to a bigger social ideal—freedom, equality, style, or modernity—so buying or supporting it felt morally or socially right. In his “Torches of Freedom” stunt, women smoking in public wasn’t just about cigarettes anymore. Instead, he framed smoking as a bold act of women’s liberation and independence. (This move came back to bite him, since his wife became a lifelong smoker. Bernays discovered that it was a lot easier to start people doing something than it was to stop them.)

Bernays didn’t just want to change opinions; he wanted to quietly rewire daily routines by tapping into feelings like pride, status, and belonging. He used psychological insights and testing to figure out what made people feel more modern, more caring, or more respectable, then shaped campaigns so products seemed to satisfy those emotional needs. He found that fear was a particularly strong motivator. In some campaigns, he emphasizing disease risk to push people toward disposable products and new “clean” habits. (This was how Dixie Cups were originally marketed, as a sanitary alternative to a regular glass that might have germs.) It’s a strategy Jackie borrows as she gets more desperate.

Bernays understood that people trust news more than ads, so he created events so eye‑catching that journalists had to cover them. He organized parades, breakfasts with celebrities, and public stunts crafted specifically to generate headlines and photos. Once those events hit the papers, his clients’ messages traveled under the banner of “news,” making them feel more credible and harder to dismiss as mere promotion. (Not to be too spoilery, but Jackie does this late in the book—and while the event almost kills her, it is effective in getting her message across!)

To me, the biggest eye-opener was that things we think of as modern—like influencers, or shaping the news with social media stunts—have been around for at least a century, thanks to Sigmund Freud’s nephew. It was definitely useful information to discover while writing Every Lie I Told, but it also made me a more suspicious consumer. The next time you scroll on TikTok and start to feel like your emotions are being toyed with, ask yourself if someone’s trying to manipulate you.

Then blame Edward L. Bernays!

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