When maliciously convincing a person of a point, a huge fraction of the effort in every sentence goes into convincing the mark to listen to the next sentence. Individuals certainly can walk away at any point, but populations do and don't respond to tricks in this direction, and any engagement tricks that work generalize to any point of contention. Lots of avenues to this, from scientology's fortune telling to timeshare's trapped presentations. RL on engagement was the first billion dollar use of deep reinforcement learning!

Would you like to hear more examples of humans using these techniques?