On Social engineering

While browsing through the internet looking for material about social engineering i could read few examples on possible social engineering tecniques and i've found out how many similarities those techniques have to the psychological technologies used in fields such as NLP.
NLP is a controversial "side" of psychotherapy that started in the late 60s and is being developed and used by many professionals, politicians and communicators all around the world. Its tecniques, extremely powerful when used for creating suggestions into somebody's mind, are subject of ethical discussions since long time.
Derren Brown uses many of those tecniques during his tv shows on Bbc4.
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I believe that such techniques, applied to online environment, represent the basics of social engineering.
My personal opinion on how social engineering could be diminuished is to create information about it, alert people about the risks that exist in the online (and offline) world and to try to change their treshold of trust towards other people asking for personal relevant information.