Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context sociology English) Use of numerical data to inform social programs. 2 (context political science English) Use of propaganda by a government to sway perceptions and attitudes of its own citizenry. 3 (context computer security English) The practice of tricking a user into giving, or giving access to, sensitive information, thereby bypassing most or all protection.
Wikipedia
Social engineering may refer to:
- Social engineering (political science), influencing society on a large scale
- Social engineering (security), obtaining confidential information by manipulating and/or deceiving people
Social engineering, in the context of information security, refers to psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. A type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or system access, it differs from a traditional "con" in that it is often one of many steps in a more complex fraud scheme.
The term "social engineering" as an act of psychological manipulation is also associated with the social sciences, but its usage has caught on among computer and information security professionals.
Social engineering is a discipline in social science that refers to efforts to influence particular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments, media or private groups in order to produce desired characteristics in a target population. Social engineering can also be understood philosophically as a deterministic phenomenon where the intentions and goals of the architects of the new social construct are realized.
Social engineers use the scientific method to analyze and understand social systems in order to design the appropriate methods to achieve the desired results in the human subjects.
Decision-making can affect the safety and survival of literally billions of people. The scientific theory expressed by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in his study The Present Problems of Social Structure, proposes that society can no longer operate successfully using outmoded methods of social management. To achieve the best outcomes, all conclusions and decisions must use the most advanced techniques and include reliable statistical data, which can be applied to a social system. According to this, social engineering is a data-based scientific system used to develop a sustainable design so as to achieve the intelligent management of Earth’s resources and human capital with the highest levels of freedom, prosperity, and happiness within a population.
As a result of abuse by authoritarian regimes and other non-inclusive attempts at social engineering, the term has in cases been imbued with a negative connotation. In British and Canadian jurisprudence, changing public attitudes about a behaviour is accepted as one of the key functions of laws prohibiting the behaviour. Governments also influence behavior more subtly through incentives and disincentives built into economic policy and tax policy, for instance, and have done so for centuries.
R. D. Ingthorsson states that a human being is a biological creature from birth but is from then on shaped as a person through social influences (upbringing/socialisation) and is in that sense a social construction, a product of society.
Usage examples of "social engineering".
He had never forgottencould never forgetthe year of hell they had put Yalena through in kindergarten, followed with a deliberate and highly effective piece of social engineering, during her first-grade year.
Those measures were an affront to Chinese culture, which had always viewed children as a blessing, and now the social engineering was having an unexpected result.
In accordance with the social engineering policy of the Milieu, over half of the normal populace were high latents like Ian Macdonald, who carried genes for strong metafunction and might be expected to engender operant descendants in good time.
As you probably know a phone and a little social engineering go a long way.