Why does brainwashing work

My sisters fall into that category. They sincerely promoted the cause of the Peoples Temple — no matter how misguided it was under the leadership of Jim Jones — because of their deep commitment to its ideals. This commitment arose from their conversion experiences and their gradual, conditioned acceptance of ethical misbehavior. I do not consider them brainwashed, however.

They made decisions and choices more or less freely. They knew what they were doing. The same is true for members of the Branch Davidians : They accepted and believed the word of God as interpreted by David Koresh. If brainwashing actually existed, we would expect to see many more dangerous people running around, planning to carry out reprehensible schemes.

Instead, we find that people frequently abandon their beliefs as soon as they leave coercive environments. Should we consider situational hurdles and peer pressure forms of brainwashing? If that were the case, then everything — and nothing — would constitute mind control. We have studies that illuminate processes of conversion and conditioning. We have historical examples that demonstrate what people do under compulsion.

This creation of deployable followers is the fifth characteristic of such groups. She neglected her two children all while witnessing money laundering, fraud and other families being pulled apart. Every day in the media we can see the destructive power of this coercive psychological control put in place by pathological leaders.

In fact, any attempt to do so only creates more fear, causing further disorganised bonding to the group to attempt to ease the stress. But there are ways out. One way is to find a trusted other as in my case to help you take a good, hard look at reality. Time away from the group, where thinking can be reintegrated, is another way out.

And a person might also leave if the leadership makes demands that are simply too extreme, and for which the follower has not been adequately prepared. Marina Ortiz was finally able to leave the Newman Tendency when the leadership told her to put her child into foster care.

Some simply live in totalitarian states. Many survivors are now speaking out about their experiences. Recently, escapees from North Korea have started recounting the reality of that regime.

In a time of rapid change, huge movements of people and a general sense of instability, people are naturally going to seek security and stability. Cults and totalist regimes thrive in these conditions. Given the right circumstances, almost anyone is vulnerable to the psychological and situational pressures I have discussed. The respected scholars in my field have repeated over and over again that the way to protect ourselves is through knowledge.

This knowledge must be specific: how this process of control works, and how leaders deploy the brainwashing methods of isolation, engulfment and fear.

Seventy years of post-war scholarship about this already exists, along with much new research. We must use these valuable resources, along with the voices of the survivors, to resist. Space exploration.

Instead of treating Mars and the Moon as sites of conquest and settlement, we need a radical new ethics of space exploration. Ramin Skibba. They are spreading like branching plants across the globe. Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic potential? Josh Berson. Thinkers and theories. Some see Plato as a pure rationalist, others as a fantastical mythmaker. His deft use of stories tells a more complex tale. Tae-Yeoun Keum.

Stories and literature. The appeal was denied and Hearst returned to prison. Patty Hearst's kidnapping — After Hearst served nearly two years in prison, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in early Patty Hearst's kidnapping — Hearst holds up the executive grant of clemency as she leaves prison on February 1, With her is her fiance and former bodyguard, Bernard Shaw.

Patty Hearst's kidnapping — Hearst is walked down the aisle by her father, Randolph Hearst, at the Navy chapel at her wedding to Bernard Shaw in April Stein was 26 when she joined a political cult in Minneapolis -- the O, it was called -- though she didn't really realize it was a cult at first.

The organization controlled her life throughout the s, isolating her from her from friends and keeping her sleep-deprived with multiple jobs, including one as a computer programmer and one at a bakery. While a member of a Minneapolis-based cult, Alexandra Stein worked a number of jobs assigned by the cult, including one in a machine shop.

I thought that every cult was like Heaven's Gate," she said, referring to another cult in which people who believed they would join a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet took their lives in a mass suicide in the late '90s. Stein, who had just left a relationship when she joined the cult in Minneapolis, remembers feeling lost and confused, like they could offer answers she didn't have. It broke her down, she said. Patty Hearst kidnapping: Where are they now? Richardson believes that some people are more susceptible to being recruited by groups like cults and new religious movements.

Someone who is emotionally vulnerable, who suffered abuse or neglect as a child or whose relationship with their family is strained may be more easily converted, some scholars have argued.

But Stein said that "the vulnerabilities are situational, not dispositional. Cults don't want people who are "disturbed" or unstable, because they can be more difficult to control, Hassan argued. He said groups often target productive, smart people who can work and donate money to the cause.

Alexandra Stein lived in a house with members of a political cult during the s. Richardson doesn't deny that manipulation and coercion can occur -- he describes what happened in Nazi Germany as "indoctrination," for example -- but he believes that ex-cult members weren't as passive in joining groups as the term "brainwashing" might suggest.

He rejects his old belief system and pledges allegiance to the new one that is going to make his life better. At this final stage, there are often rituals or ceremonies to induct the converted target into his new community. This stage has been described by some brainwashing victims as a feeling of "rebirth" [source: Singer ]. A brainwashing process like the one discussed above has not been tested in a modern laboratory setting, because it's damaging to the target and would therefore be an unethical scientific experiment.

Lifton created this description from firsthand accounts of the techniques used by captors in the Korean War and other instances of "brainwashing" around the same time. Since Lifton and other psychologists have identified variations on what appears to be a distinct set of steps leading to a profound state of suggestibility, an interesting question is why some people end up brainwashed and others don't.

Certain personality traits of the brainwashing targets can determine the effectiveness of the process. People who commonly experience great self doubt, have a weak sense of identity, and show a tendency toward guilt and absolutism black-and-white thinking are more likely to be successfully brainwashed, while a strong sense of identity and self-confidence can make a target more resistant to brainwashing.

Some accounts show that faith in a higher power can assist a target in mentally detaching from the process. People who've suffered abuse in childhood, have been exposed to eccentric family patterns and who have substance abuse issues are also more likely to be influenced [source: Curtis ]. Mental detachment is one of the POW-survival techniques now taught to soldiers as part of their training. It involves the target psychologically removing himself from his actual surroundings through visualization, the constant repetition of a mantra and various other meditative techniques.

The military also teaches soldiers about the methods used in brainwashing, because a target's knowledge of the process tends to make it less effective [source: Webb ]. While the U. Scholars have traced the roots of systematic thought reform to the prison camps of communist Russia in the early s, when political prisoners were routinely "re-educated" to the communist view of the world.

But it was when the practice spread to China and the writings of Chairman Mao Tse-tung "The Little Red Book" that the world started to take notice [source: Boissoneault ]. In , Mao Zedong , who would later lead the Chinese Communist Party, used the phrase ssu-hsiang tou-cheng translated as "thought struggle" to describe a process of brainwashing. Political prisoners in China and Korea were reportedly subjected to communist-conversion techniques as a matter of course.

The modern concept and the term "brainwashing" was first used by journalist Edward Hunter in to describe what had happened to American POWs during the Korean War. Hunter introduced the concept at a time when Americans were already afraid: It was the Cold War, and America panicked at the idea of mass communist indoctrination through "brainwashing" — they might be converted and not even know it!

In the wake of the Korean War revelations, the U. In one study, the CIA supposedly gave subjects including the famed Timothy Leary LSD in order to study the effects of mind-altering drugs and gauge the effectiveness of psychedelics at inducing a brainwashing-friendly state of mind.

The results were not that encouraging, and subjects were supposedly harmed by the experiments. Drug experimentation by the CIA was officially cancelled by Congress in the s, although some claim it still happens under the radar. Public interest in brainwashing briefly subsided after the Cold War but resurfaced in the s and s with the emergence of countless non-mainstream political and religious movements during that era. Parents who were horrified by their children's new beliefs and activities were sure they'd been brainwashed by a " cult.

One supposed victim of brainwashing at that time was Patty Hearst, heiress to the Hearst publishing fortune, who would later use a brainwashing defense when she was on trial for bank robbery.

Hearst became famous in the early s after she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army the SLA, which some deem a "political cult" and ended up joining the group. Hearst reports that she was locked in a dark closet for several days after her kidnapping and was kept hungry, tired, brutalized and afraid for her life while SLA members bombarded her with their anti-capitalist political ideology. Within two months of her kidnapping, Patty had changed her name, issued a statement in which she referred to her family as the "pig-Hearsts" and appeared on a security tape robbing a bank with her kidnappers.

Patty Hearst stood trial for bank robbery in , defended by the famous F. Lee Bailey. The defense claimed that Hearst was brainwashed by the SLA and would not have committed the crime otherwise.

In her mental state, she could not tell right from wrong. Hearst was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. She only served two — in , President Carter commuted her sentence [source: Wilson ]. Kelly was found guilty of sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, racketeering and sex trafficking involving five victims according to NPR. Parents of two young women as well as some of Kelly's inner circle said the singer brainwashed women and kept them in a cult where he controlled everything they did, according to BuzzFeed News.

There had been nearly 30 years of allegations of Kelly exploiting women, but in any case, "brainwashing" wasn't part of the list of things that he was charged with. Modern literature and film use the brainwashing scenario pretty liberally. It gets to the very nature of humanity: Are we all ultimately reducible to puppets?

The protagonist in George Orwell's " " undergoes a classic case of brainwashing that ends with the famous concession to his tormentors: "two plus two equals five. Another "insanity by brainwashing" defense hit the courtroom in , when Lee Boyd Malvo stood trial for his role in the sniper attacks in and around Washington, D.

The year-old Malvo and year-old John Allen Muhammad shot 10 people and wounded three in a killing spree. The defense claimed that the teenaged Malvo was brainwashed by Muhammad into committing the crimes, which he would not have committed if he weren't under Muhammad's control.

As Carlin Flora wrote in Psychology Today back in The argument was that Malvo was brainwashed, and because he was brainwashed he could not tell right from wrong, to the point that he laughed when describing the crimes. Insanity defenses in general are rarely asserted and almost never prevail" [source: Flora ]. Malvo was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole in