How do you assess other people?

I'm interested in how narcissists assess other people. How do you decide who is useful to you? What buttons to push? What is your approach to understanding a person's innate personality? Observation, or a more exacting method? Do you have any advice for picking up on manipulatable traits?

well, you can look for manipulable traits (which are just any need the person has)

everyone varies in the strength of their needs (need for love, need for companionship, need for praise, etc)

and I guess it's just finding the strongest need and exploiting it.

and you can do this by talking about what they like. you can also infer it from things like relationship history.

like people with few LONG relationships have a strong need for security usually, because we all know fun relationships never last that long...

so that's some information you can put in your back pocket.

you can also create needs which is a little more advanced...

like the need to feel special. if you love-bomb someone who hasn't felt special ever and doesn't have a conscious need to really than you can create this need in them through love-bombing.

and then after a mouth or so you pull away and use it to manipulate them.

they will do whatever to experience again. and you give it out in bits thereafter when they do what you want, or to excuse your behaviour toward them that they find objectionable.

so it's like establishing your control over them in the relationship early on.