Cult Psychology: The Science of Brainwashing and Manipulation

Written by: Mansha Kapoor (2nd Year) Department Of applied Psychology

“The same story makes the headlines again and again. An anguished family is trying to 'rescue' its child, who, the parents charge, has been 'stolen' by a cult, sometimes after only a single weekend of involvement. The parents describe the child as a humourless 'zombie'—where formerly he or she was self-possessed, intelligent, and completely 'normal.' And, as family members begin to consult the clergy, lawyers, and deprogrammers, they keep expressing confusion about exactly what has happened, and why.”  - Glenn Collins, The New York Times (March 1982)

When we think of the word ‘Cult’, certain vivid images conjure up in our minds, from irrational devotion to vicious rituals to innocent people fallen under the spells of charismatic leaders, willing to go to any bounds to make them happy. While this perception isn’t entirely inaccurate, it oversimplifies the psychological complexities behind cult formation and brainwashing. According to Dr. Stanley Cath, a psychoanalyst, a cult is defined as ‘a group of people joined together by a common and extreme ideological system fostered by a charismatic leader where the expectation is that they can transcend the imperfections and finitude of life.' Cults utilize underhanded tactics and techniques to gain power over their followers, thus cultivating dependency and obedience. Consequently, they may pretend to be happy wrapping themselves in the delusion that they work well and they are the only ones who are in possessing the ‘truth’ in life.

Often cults in media are displayed as a phenomenon whose foundations are unexplainable to the layman, as a mystical and mysterious entity that is beyond the scope of human behaviour. Some might even ridicule those trapped in cults, saying that how could they have not seen it coming. Thus, this article tries to break down these false notions and explain the psychological underlinings of cult formation. It aims to shed light on the psychological processes that can explain cult formation, recruitment, and practices, exhibiting how the common man is, in fact, not able to see it coming. 

 Categories of Cults  

Cults often have an objective or mission that they want to accomplish, which is the end goal. Therefore, they can be categorised based on the differences in their ideologies, beliefs, practices, and members. Certain broad categories of cults are racist cults, doomsday cults, and religious cults. 

• Racist Cults: These cults practice prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes against members of particularly marginalised races. For example, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), founded in 1865 and consisting of Caucasians, remains infamous for its racist ideology advocating the "purification" of America by targeting non-Aryan communities such as African Americans and Jews.

• Doomsday Cults: These groups anticipate or seek to precipitate apocalyptic events. For instance, The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, led by Shoko Ashara, began as a spiritual movement before evolving into a violent organization. The cult kept becoming more hysterical with several suspected assassinations, holding members against their will, and the murder of a member who tried to escape. All this led to them executing a chemical attack in Tokyo in 1995 across five subway trains that injured somewhere between 6,000-7,000 people. 

• Religious Cults: These are the most notorious type of cults, often centered around the worship of a person, deity, or concept. For example, The "Manson Family," led by Charles Manson, became notorious for its brutal murders in 1969, driven by Manson's vision of a race war he called "Helter Skelter."  

The Subtle Trap: How Cults Recruit Members 

Contrary to popular belief, people don’t join cults; they are recruited into them through undue influence. While ‘due influence’ involves informed consent, one’s personal choice, and the right to question authority, their ‘undue influence’, also known as mind control or thought reform, is deceptive and manipulative. It suppresses any questions raised and also makes you question your inner voice. It is this influence to which people fall victim and see themselves as part of a cult organization. Undue influence does not erase a person’s identity, rather it creates a new one that suppresses the old one. This is done in a carefully planned out manner through formal indoctrination sessions and also informally through other members or media. Behaviour modification techniques are also employed upon people in the form of reward-punishment, thought-stopping as well as environmental control that reinforces the new identity created. 

As talked about by Maslow and several other social psychologists, one basic need that drives humans is the ‘need to belong’ and this is also one of the key factors because of which cults initially seem appealing to people. Recruitment techniques often exploit psychological vulnerabilities, such as loneliness, grief, or major life transitions. According to Dr. John Clark of Harvard University, recruiters target these individuals in controlled settings, gradually introducing them to the cult's ideology. Tactics like sleep deprivation, obsessive praying, and constant preaching are used to weaken their mental defenses. At a critical point, an emotional crisis is manufactured, leaving the individual susceptible to the "solution" offered by the cult.  

If you show a newborn baby a snake, they may not show fear but if you raise them to be scared of snakes, constantly telling them how dangerous they are, the child will develop a fear. This is the same process through which cult members are made to ‘develop’ psychological processes that will aid their cult group. They exhibit behaviours that are seen as ‘contra-survival’, which is in opposition to survival. People who have contra-survival tendencies do not use their psychological mechanisms for survival. Dangers, injury, illness, or even death do not generate emotional responses in them that others would use to protect themselves but they behave in ways that hinder adaption. Thus, despite cults satisfying the basic psychological needs for survival, people use cults for a ‘pathological need’, which is an anomaly that separates cult members from other groups of people.

Psychology of Cults: Why People Fall In

Social psychologists Tajfel and Turner (2004) proposed that individuals in groups create a ‘group identity’ and when this identity is threatened, they use self-protective strategies to defend themselves and the group from outside harm and criticism. Individuals in a cult also use these kinds of protective strategies which can be explained by the ‘Conveyor Belt Theory’ consisting of firstly social identification, then social categorization and deindividualization.

Social Identity Theory

This theory posits that people derive a portion of their self-concept from their membership in social groups. It is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group memberships. A prime example of how the Social Identity Theory works in cults is within the name itself. If you were to tell a cult member that they are in a ‘cult,’ they would immediately deny that since it gives them a negative group concept. To keep a positive group concept, and thus maintain a positive self-concept, the member is likely to say: “This is not a cult, it is a religion or a school of thought”.

Social Categorization Theory  

This theory posits that self-categorizations are motivated by the need to reduce uncertainty. Cult members will seek to reduce their uncertainty by seeking assurance from other group members thereby feeling even more strongly towards their group and shunning those who don’t comply. Cults often claim to answer life’s big questions regarding love, death, and the afterlife and these answers arise from and reinforce the cult’s ideological systems. Anyone who doesn't abide by the same ideas will naturally become the ‘outgroup’ and the followers will become the ‘ingroup’.

Deindividuation  

Cults act as a collective entity. Individuality dissolves as members adopt collective identities. They have to learn and do as their superiors do, that is, there is a ‘bandwagon effect. This phenomenon is called ‘deindividualization’.According to Latane and Darley, the bigger the group is, the greater the facility to change mindsets and sway emotions.

The Cult Leader: The Master’s Playbook

A cult would not be what it is without the absolute power, persuasion, and totalism of a charismatic, fascist leader. At the heart of every cult is a charismatic leader whose authority shapes the group’s identity. Analysis of the leadership style of cult leaders can help gain insight as to why cult members choose to follow them and this can be best understood by the ‘Funnel Type Model of Cult Decision-Making’. The funnel includes the charismatic leader at the top, propaganda in the middle, and bounded rationality at the bottom. The charisma of the leader is a powerful tool that essentially acts as a glue for the cult and it uses propaganda to minimise the members’ decision space. No matter how corrupt and twisted the cult leader is, to the followers they are a deity, a role model, and a saint. This kind of leader gains power based on their personality rather than their knowledge or experience.

The Art of Psychological Manipulation

Robert Jay Lifton, in the Harvard Mental Health Letter (1981) wrote: “Two main concerns should inform our moral and psychological perspective on cults: the dangers of ideological totalism, or what I would also call fundamentalism; and the need to protect civil liberties.” Lifton identified several methods cult leaders use to exert control:  

•  MILIEU CONTROL  

This method involves controlling all communication within the cult including isolating members from external influences. Milieu control is maintained and expressed by continuous psychological pressure, isolation by geographical distance, or even physical restraint. The cult creates an increasingly intense sequence of events which makes leaving extremely difficult, both physically and psychologically. 

• PSYCHOLOGY OF THE PAWN

This process of creating a ‘pawn’ in the cult is managed such that it appears spontaneous and doesn’t look like manipulation to its victims. . Manipulation may take on a special intense quality in a cult for which a particular chosen human being, the ‘pawn’, is the only source of deliverance. The person of the leader may attract members to the cult, but can also be a source of disillusionment.

• PURITY AND CONFESSION

A cult of confession and a demand for purity are two other characteristics of such totalism. The call for purity is an exhortation to drastically separate good from evil in one's surroundings and within oneself. Purification is an ongoing process that is frequently institutionalized in the ‘cult of confession’, which uses shame and guilt induced by self-criticism in small groups and reciprocal criticism to impose obedience. Recruits are pressured into confessing sins, lack of enlightenment, or negativity and this is then used against them by the cult leader.

• SACRED SCIENCE

Sacred science is important because a claim of being scientific is often needed to gain plausibility in the modern age. The Unification Church, a cult movement started by Sun Myung Moon in Korea in the 1940s, is one example of a contemporary tendency to combine dogmatic religious principles with a claim to special scientific knowledge of human behaviour and psychology aiming to give it credibility. 

• LOADING OF THE LANGUAGE

The term ‘loading the language' refers to literalism and a tendency to deify words or images.  A simplified, commonplace-ridden language can ply enormous psychological force reducing every issue in a complicated life to a single set of taglines that are said to embody the verity as a summation. It enforces the use of thought-terminating clichés that only members understand or think they understand. 

• PRINCIPLE OF ‘DOCTRINE OVER PERSON’

The principle of doctrine over person takes action when cult members sense a conflict between what they are experiencing and what the cult dogma says they should experience. The internalized message of cults is essentially that one must negate that personal experience on behalf of the truth of the dogma. Contradictions in members become associated with guilt and doubt indicating one's own deficiency. 

• DISPENSING OF EXISTENCE

Those who have not ‘seen the light’ and ‘embraced the truth’ in cults are considered to be tainted and this is why a cult member threatened with being outcasted may experience a fear of extinction or collapse. The group or cult leader decides who has the right to exist and who does not – those outside are ‘going to hell’, ‘part of the negativity’, or ‘unenlightened’. For instance, cult leader Jim Jones oversaw the literal dispensing of existence in the People's Temple mass suicide-murder in Guyana by using a suicidal mystique that he had made a major part of the group's philosophy.

Psychological Trauma of Cult Involvement

Dr. John Clark, who has treated over 500 cult members since 1974, believes that the destructive effects of cult involvement have created a "new disease" in an age of psychological manipulation. Dr. Stanley Cath, who has worked with more than 60 former cult members, adds that many mental health professionals are unaware of this issue.

While some studies suggest that former cult members can integrate their experiences into their lives, many continue to suffer lasting effects, such as depression, fear, memory problems, and emotional detachment. Margaret Singer, a psychology professor at the University of California, emphasizes that cult involvement should not be automatically linked to mental illness. She argues that the issue is a complex social, psychological, spiritual, and economic problem, which may require more than psychiatric treatment.

Dr. Clark and Dr. Cath researching independently, made a surprising discovery that the experiences described by cult members often resemble personality changes regularly associated with ‘disorders of the temporal lobe of the brain’ such as -

1. Increased irritability

2. Loss of libido or altered sexual interest

3. Ritualism

4. Compulsive attention to detail

5. Mystical states

6. Humorlessness and sobriety

7. Heightened paranoia  

Dr. Clark theorizes that the intense physical and emotional strain of cult life, including long hours of work and repetitive chanting, may induce alterations in brain function, especially in the temporal lobe. This could lead to what he calls "Cult-Conversion Syndrome," where the brain becomes overwhelmed by excessive information processing.

Conclusion

“When laws are violated through fraud or specific harm to recruits, legal intervention is indicated. But what about situations in which behaviour is virtually automatized, language reduced to rote and cliche, yet the cult member expresses a certain satisfaction or even happiness?”

Through this article, the aim was to make readers understand that cults might be bizarre but psychology has the power to explain it with theories just like any other group behaviour. They are not an unexplainable and untouched phenomenon. Cults need to stop being looked upon through the lens of glorification but rather be analysed through a critical mind. A new level of sensitization needs to be created towards those who have been a victim of such groups amongst psychologists, no matter how big or small the harmful groups might’ve been. Although much research has been done on this phenomenon in the field of psychology, there’s still a long way to go when it comes to creating new techniques of help and treatment for former cult members unable to fit back into society.

References

Best, Jonica V. Carlton, "Cults: A Psychological Perspective" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 361. https://csuepress.columbusstate.edu/theses_dissertations/361

Collins, G. (1982). The Psychology Of The Cult Experience. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/15/style/the-psychology-of-the-cult-experience.html

Hassan, S.A. (2021).  Understanding Cults: The Basics. Psychology Today.  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-mind/202106/understanding-cults-the-basics

Lifton, R.J. (1981). Cult Formation. Cult Education Institute. 

https://culteducation.com/brainwashing1.html