The Mind Control Myth

In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, an American POW, conditioned by his Chinese communist captors to respond to suggestion when he sees the queen of diamonds, returns to the United States, is instructed to play a game of solitaire, and then assassinates a political candidate.

It's only a movie, right? The ultimate Cold War paranoid fantasy. Yet the year before it was released, two studies lent credibility to the idea of brainwashing. Robert Jay Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and Edgar Schein's Coercive Persuasion explained how mind control, or brainwashing, is achieved by extracting confessions and by controlling a prisoner's environment.

In the intervening years, brainwashing has been invoked to explain any number of disturbing incidents, from the mass suicide by poisoned Kool-Aid at Jonestown to the eerie deaths of 39 Heaven's Gate members, who packed overnight bags and donned new Nikes before swallowing phenobarbital-laced pudding and tying plastic bags over their heads. And brainwashing has been used in less sensational instances—to explain, for example, why children of the middle class routinely renounce family, friends, and often fortune after becoming Moonies or Scientologists.

But can brainwashing really explain the behavior of individuals who join cults or “new religious movements,” which is now the preferred term? That question has polarized scholars in a bitter academic debate, writes Charlotte Allen in Lingua Franca (Dec.-Jan. 1999). The debate, which has raged in academic journals and even in the courts, revolves around this question: In the absence of weapons or torture, can people be manipulated against their will?

Most psychologists and sociologists who study cults say no. They tend to see the matter from the point of view of individual group members and argue that the public is prejudiced against groups that dissent from the norm. Some “cult apologists,” as Allen calls them, contend that people who join cults are predisposed to joining them: They were maladjusted from the start. “Cult bashers,” on the other hand, see cults as destructive threats to individual freedom and traditional values.

The recent furor in the academy was sparked by Rutgers University sociology professor Benjamin Zablocki's defense of brainwashing published in Nova Religio (Oct. 1997-April 1998). Zablocki drew on the Lifton and Schein brainwashing studies to explain the behavior of cult members he had observed. He argued that there were signs that some groups used psychological coercion to maintain total control over members, similar to the control suggested by Lifton and Schein. There is no way to prove brainwashing empirically, Zablocki conceded, yet many of his subjects had reported undergoing rituals that were reminiscent of a prison camp. They were deprived of sleep; they were asked to write confessions; they were told their confessions were not adequate.