If you think of a person as fuelled by emotional energy, then just enough juice is going into the sock to make it happen and the real person is standing next door having entirely different feelings, hidden from view by the sock puppet.

scary but true.  When you finally meet the real person it's often enough to make you want to run a mile - it's not that you don't sense them there but you know, well at first you're charmed, and I can see how without realising it's even happening to you from the inside of it, you end up doing what they want not because you are charmed any more, more likely bothered, but because you don't want to upset them.