Point scoring (psychology)

Point scoring is a psychological technique where an individual will attempt to 'score points' with their target audience in order to gain influence and thus control.

May be done in conjunction with a false mirroring attack, appeals to popular items (popular meme attack, false consensus), or popular topics or ideas as part of a subversion attack.

May also be used in conjunction with a repetition consensus association attack to further extort influence.

Usage
Individuals may generally produce topics or articles that 'score points' by sharing consensus with the overall or most popular group, thus earning the popular group's preferences, and thus earning their influence.

For example, a pro-war audience would likely be won over with military references, or computer programmers with programming terminologies, articles, examples etc.

Counteraction
Exposing 'point scoring' as suck-up or manipulative behaviour can be difficult as the target individual is often in the favour of the group (although it's a good idea to expose such manipulations before they establish a foothold),

Usually, the most effective way is to point out the hypocrisy of their behaviour using a sub-referencing attack by quoting or supplying examples where they have done stuff contradictorily to their popular action (for example, an individual who (falsely) claims to support conspiracy theory could be exposed by quoting an example where they supported government work or berated conspiracy theorists). In a sense, the effort should be to expose their two-headed manipulative nature with evidence and reason.

Bi-logic traps are also ideal in that you can expose contradictory behaviour with a series of questions, however, it can be seen as harassment, especially if the individual plays one of the many victim cards, so counter-assertions should be on hand to disprove false accusations (you're only exposing malice and manipulation).

The individual may overplay their hand and perform an overly specific denial. They may also run into 'their subconscious disagrees with them', and in their denying, might trip a 'but you said' from one of their (possibly former) supporters.