Looking for leverage, perception, and constraint management.
You reduce the probability of being dominated or exploited by increasing your ability to see.
Most people are not dominated because they are weak; they are dominated because they misread situations. They simply think that the world will give them back what they have put in in good faith, and that is not the same. This is simplistic thinking and doesn't bring the expected results. They project intentions, assume fairness, or fail to detect asymmetries.
The person who understands incentives, power structures, and hidden constraints is already harder to exploit. This is close to what Thomas Metzinger would call seeing through the model. You recognize that what appears as “a person acting” is often just a system executing pressures. When you see the system, you stop personalizing and start predicting.