Brainwashing ...

Brainwashing (also known as thought reform or reeducation) consists of any effort aimed at instilling certain attitudes and beliefs in a person — beliefs sometimes unwelcome or in conflict with the person's prior beliefs and knowledge, in order to affect that individual's value system subsequent thought-patterns and behaviors. In 1987, the Anerican Psychological (APA) Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology (BSERP) provisionally declined to endorse one particular approach to brainwashing as "lack[ing] the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur". The debate amongst APA members on this subject continues.

Mindwiping is a thorough form of brainwashing often found in science fiction.

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The English words "re-educate" and "re-education", which the Oxford attests in general senses from 1808, began in the 1940s to express specifically political connotations. George Orwell mentioned in Animal Farm(1945) "the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee (the object of this was to tame the rats and rabbits)"; and Arthur Koestler in The Age of Longing (1951) wrote of "revolutionary vigilance,.. and discipline, and re-education camps".

The term "brainwashing" first came into use in the English language in the 1950s. The OED records its earliest known English-language usage of "brain-washing" by E. Hunter in New Leader on 7 October 1950. John D. marks claimed that Edward Hunter was "later revealed" to have worked undercover for the Central Intelligance Agency (CIA).

Earlier forms of coercive persuasion occurred for example during the Inquisition and in the course of show trials against " enemies of the state" in the Soviet Union; but no specific term emerged until the methodologies of these earlier movements became systematized during the early decades of the People's Republic of China for use in struggles against internal class enemies and foreign invaders. Until that time, presentations of the phenomenon described only concrete specific techniques.

The Chinese term 洗腦 (xǐ năo, literally "wash brain") originally referred to methodologies of coercive persuasion used in the 改造 (gǎi zào, reconstruction, change, alter) of the so-called feudal (封建 fēng jiàn) thought-patterns of Chinese citizens raised under pre-revolutionary régimes; the term punned on the Taoist custom of "cleansing/washing the heart" (洗心 xǐ xīn) prior to conducting certain ceremonies or entering certain holy places, and in Chinese, the word "心" xīn also refers to the soul or the mind, contrasting with the brain. The term first came into general use in the United states in the 1950s during the Korean War (1950–1953) to describe those same methods as applied by the Chinese communists to attempt deep and permanent behavioral changes in foreign prisoners, and especially during the Koean War to disrupt the ability of captured United Nations troops to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment.

The word brainwashing consequently came into use in the United states to explain why, unlike in earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs to the enemy side after becoming prisoners-of-war in Korea. Later analysis determined that some of the primary methodologies employed on them during their imprisonment included Sleep-deprivation and other intense psychological manipulations designed to break down the autonomy of individuals. American alarm at the new phenomenon of substantial numbers of U.S. troops switching their allegiance to support foreign Communists lessened after the repatriation of prisoners, when it emerged that few of them retained allegiance to the Marxist and "anti-American" doctrines inculcated during their incarcerations. When rigid control of information ceased and the former prisoners' "natural" cultural methods of reality-testing could resume functioning, the superimposed values and judgments rapidly .

Although the use of brainwashing on United Nations prisoners during the Korean War produced some propoganda-benefits to the forces opposing the United Nations, its main utility to the Chinese lay in the fact that it significantly increased the maximum number of prisoners that one guard could control, thus freeing other Chinese soldiers for front-line battlefield duties.

After the Korean War the term "brainwashing" came to apply to other methods of coercive persuasion and even to the effective use of ordinary propoganda and indoctrination. Formal discourses of the Chinese Communist Party came to prefer the more clinical-sounding term sī xǐang gǎi zào 思想改造 ("thought reform"). Metaphorical uses of "brainwashing" extended as far as the memes of fashion-following.

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Cults

Frequent disputes regarding brainwashing take place in discussion of cults and of new religious movements (NRMs). The controversy about the existence of cultic brainwashing has become one of the most polarizing issues among cult-followers, academic researchers of cults, and cult-critics. Parties disagree about the existence of a social process attempting coercive influence, and also disagree about the existence of the social outcome — that people become influenced against their will.

The issue gets even more complicated due to the existence of several definitions of the term "brainwashing" (some of them almoststrawman-caricature metaphors of the original Korean War era concept ) and through the introduction of the similarly controversial concept of " mind control" in the 1990s. (In some usages "mind control" and "brainwashing" serve as exact synonyms; other usages differentiate the two terms.) Additionally, some authors refer to brainwashing as a recruitment method (Barker) while others refer to brainwashing as a method of retaining existing members (Kent 1997; Zablocki 2001).

Theories on brainwashing have also become the subject of discussions in legal courts, where experts have had to pronounce their views before juries in simpler terms than those used in academic publications and where the issue became presented in rather black-and-white terms in order to make a point in a case. The media have taken up some such cases — including their black and white colorings.

Proponents of negative proof can quote Eileen Braker: in 1984 the British sociologist wrote in her book The Making of a Moonie : choice or Brainwashing (based on her first-hand studies of British members of the Unification Church ) that she had found no extraordinary persuasion techniques used to recruit or retain members.

Charlotte Allen reported that:

"[i]n his article in Nova Religio, Zablocki was worried less about those academics who may stretch the brainwashing concept than about those, like Bromely , who reject it altogether. And in advancing his case, he took a hard look at such scholars’ intentions and tactics. (His title is deliberately provocative: 'The Blacklisting of a Concept: The Strange History of the Brainwashing Conjecture in the Sociology of Religion.')"

In his book Combatting Cult Mind Control Steven Hassan describes the extraordinary persuasion technique that (in his opinion) members of the Unification Chirch used to accomplish his own recruitment and retention.

Philip Zimbardo writes that "[m]ind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles."

Some people have come to use the terms "brainwashing" or "mind control" to explain the otherwise intuitively puzzling success of some fast-acting episodes of religious conversion or of recruitment of inductees into groups known variously as new religious movements or as cults.

One of the first published uses of the term thought reform occurred in the title of the book by Robert jay Lifton: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China (1961). (Lifton also testified on behavioral-change methodologies at the 1976 trial of Patty Hearst .) In his book Lifton used the term "thought reform" as a synonym for "brainwashing", though he preferred the first term. The elements of thought reform as published in that book sometimes serve as a basis for cult checklists , and read as follows:

• Milieu Control
• Mystical Manipulation
• The Demand For Purity
• Confesion
• Sacred Science
• Loading the Language
  
• Doctrine Over Person
• Dispensing of Existance

Benjamin Zablocki sees brainwashing as a "term for a concept that stands for a form of influence manifested in a deliberately and systematically applied traumatizing and obedience-producing process of ideological resocializations". Zablocki states that this same concept, historically, also bore the names " Thought reform" and ''coercive persuasion''.

Proto-brainwashing

Before the popularization of the name and concept of "brainwashing" in the 1950s, popular lore often associated the enthusiasm and commitment of recruits joining cults to witchcraft or to mesmerism/hypnotism.

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New religious movements

The Association of World Academics for Religious Education

states that "... without the legitimating umbrella of brainwashing ideology,

deprogramming— the practice of kidnapping members of NRMs and destroying their religious faith — cannot be justified, either legally or morally."F.A.C.T.net states that "Forced deprogramming was sometimes successful and sometimes unsuccessful, but is not considered an acceptable, legal, or ethical method of rescuing a person from a cult." The Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) published a statement in 1977 related to brainwashing and mind control. In this statement the ACLU opposed certain methods "depriving people of the free exercise of religion". The ACLU also rejected (under certain conditions) the idea that claims of the use of "brainwashing" or of "mind control" should overcome the free exercise of religion.

In the 1960s, after coming into contact with new religious movements (NRMs, a subset of which have gained the popular designation of "cults"), some young people suddenly adopted faiths, beliefs, and behavior that differed markedly from their previous lifestyles and seemed at variance with their upbringings. In some cases, these people neglected or even broke contact with their families. Such changes appeared strange and upsetting to their families. To explain these phenomena, some postulated brainwashing on the part of new religious movements. Observers quoted practices such as isolating recruits from their family and friends (inviting them to an end-of-term camp after university for example), arranging a sleep-deprivation program (3 a.m. prayer-meetings ) and exposing them to loud and repetitive chanting. Another alleged technique of religious brainwashing involved love bombing rather than torture.

James Richardson, a professor of Sociology and Judicial Studies at the University of Nevada, states that if the NRMs had access to powerful brainwashing techniques, one would expect that NRMs would have high growth-rates, while in fact most have not had notable success in recruitment, most adherents participate for only a short time, and such groups have limited success in retaining members. Langone has rejected this claim, comparing the figures of various movements, some of which do (by common consent not use brainwashing and others of which some authors report as using brainwashing. (Langone, 1993)

In their Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, Bromley and Hadden present one possible ideological foundation of brainwashing theories that they state demonstrates the lack of scientific support: they argue that a simplistic perspective (one they see as inherent in the brainwashing metaphor) appeals to those attempting to locate an effective social weapon to use against disfavored groups, and that any relative success of such efforts at social control should not detract from any lack of scientific basis for such opinions.

Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of Psychology at Standford University, writes: "Whatever any member of a cult has done, you and I could be recruited or seduced into doing — under the right or wrong conditions. The majority of 'normal, average, intelligent' individuals can be led to engage in immoral, illegal, irrational, aggressive and self destructive actions that are contrary to their values or personality — when manipulated situational conditions exert their power over individual dispositions."(Zimbardo, 1997)

Some religious groups, especially those of Hindu and Buddhist origin, openly state that they seek to improve what they call the "natural" human mind by spiritual exercises. Intense spiritual exercises have an effect on the mind, for example by leading to an altered state of consciousness . These groups also state that they do not [condone the] use [of] coercive techniques to acquire or to retain converts.

On the other hand, several scholars in sociology and psychology have in recent^[update] years stated that many scholars of NRMs express a bias to deny any possibility of brainwashing and to disregard actual evidence. (Zablocki 1997, Amitrani 1998, Kent 1998, Beit-Hallahmi 2001)

Steven Hasan, author of the book combatting cult mind control, has suggested that the influence of sincere but misled people can provide a significant factor in the process of thought-reform. (Many scholars in the field of new religious movements do not accept Hassan's BITE model for understanding cults.)

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Brainwashing Techniques

In the late 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton studied former prisoners of Korean War and Chinese war camps. He determined that they'd undergone a multistep process that began with attacks on the prisoner's sense of self and ended with what appeared to be a change in beliefs. Lifton ultimately defined a set of steps involved in the brainwashing cases he studied:

1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth

­Each of thes­e stages takes place in an environment of isolation, meaning all "normal" social reference points are unavailable, and mind-clouding techniques like sleep deprivation and malnutrition are typically part of the process. There is often the presence or constant threat of physical harm, which adds to the target's difficulty in thinking critically and independently.

We can roughly divide the process Lifton identified into three stages: breaking down the self, introducing the possibility of salvation, and rebuilding the self.

Breaking down the self

• Assault on identity: You are not who you think you are.
  This is a systematic attack on a target's sense of self (also called his identity or ego) and his core belief system. The agent denies everything that makes the target who he is: "You are not a soldier." "You are not a man." "You are not defending freedom." The target is under constant attack for days, weeks or months, to the point that he becomes exhausted, confused and disoriented. In this state, his beliefs seem less solid.

• Guilt: You are bad.
  While the identity crisis is setting in, the agent is simultaneously creating an overwhelming sense of guilt in the target. He repeatedly and mercilessly attacks the subject for any "sin" the target has committed, large or small. He may criticize the target for everything from the "evilness" of his beliefs to the way he eats too slowly. The target begins to feel a general sense of shame, that everything he does is wrong.

• Self-betrayal: Agree with me that you are bad.
  Once the subject is disoriented and drowning in guilt, the agent forces him (either with the threat of physical harm or of continuance of the mental attack) to denounce his family, friends and peers who share the same "wrong" belief system that he holds. This betrayal of his own beliefs and of people he feels a sense of loyalty to increases the shame and loss of identity the target is already experiencing.

• Breaking point: Who am I, where am I and what am I supposed to do?
  With his identity in crisis, experiencing deep shame and having betrayed what he has always believed in, the target may undergo what in the lay community is referred to as a "nervous breakdown." In psychology, "nervous breakdown" is really just a collection of severe symptoms that can indicate any number of psychological disturbances. It may involve uncontrollable sobbing, deep depression and general disorientation. The target may have lost his grip on reality and have the feeling of being completely lost and alone.

  When the target reaches his breaking point, his sense of self is pretty much up for grabs -- he has no clear understanding of who he is or what is happening to him. At this point, the agent sets up the temptation to convert to another belief system that will save the target from his misery.

The Possibility of Salvation

• ­­Leniency: I can help you.
  With ­the target in a state of crisis, the agent offers some small kindness or reprieve from the abuse. He may offer the target a drink of water, or take a moment to ask the target what he misses about home. In a state of breakdown resulting from an endless psychological attack, the small kindness seems huge, and the target may experience a sense of relief and gratitude completely out of proportion to the offering, as if the agent has saved his life.

• Compulsion to confession: You can help yourself.
  For the first time in the brainwashing process, the target is faced with the contrast between the guilt and pain of identity assault and the sudden relief of leniency. The target may feel a desire to reciprocate the kindness offered to him, and at this point, the agent may present the possibility of confession as a means to relieving guilt and pain.

• Channeling of guilt: This is why you're in pain.
  After weeks or months of assault, confusion, breakdown and moments of leniency, the target's guilt has lost all meaning -- he's not sure what he has done wrong, he just knows he is wrong. This creates something of a blank slate that lets the agent fill in the blanks: He can attach that guilt, that sense of "wrongness," to whatever he wants. The agent attaches the target's guilt to the belief system the agent is trying to replace. The target comes to believe it is his belief system that is the cause of his shame. The contrast between old and new has been established: The old belief system is associated with psychological (and usually physical) agony; and the new belief system is associated with the possibility of escaping that agony.

• Releasing of guilt: It's not me; it's my beliefs.
  The embattled target is relieved to learn there is an external cause of his wrongness, that it is not he himself that is inescapably bad -- this means he can escape his wrongness by escaping the wrong belief system. All he has to do is denounce the people and institutions associated with that belief system, and he won't be in pain anymore. The target has the power to release himself from wrongness by confessing to acts associated with his old belief system.

  With his full confessions, the target has completed his psychological rejection of his former identity. It is now up to the agent to offer the target a new one.

Rebuilding the Self

• ­Progress and harmony: If you want, you can choose good.
  The agent introduces a new belief system as the path to "good." At this stage, the agent stops the abuse, offering the target physical comfort and mental calm in conjunction with the new belief system. The target is made to feel that it is he who must choose between old and new, giving the target the sense that his fate is in his own hands. The target has already denounced his old belief system in response to leniency and to­rment, and making a "conscious choice" in favor of the contrasting belief system helps to further relieve his guilt: If he truly believes, then he really didn't betray anyone. The choice is not a difficult one: The new identity is safe and desirable because it is nothing like the one that led to his breakdown.

• Final confession and rebirth: I choose good.
  Contrasting the agony of the old with the peacefulness of the new, the target chooses the new identity, clinging to it like a life preserver. 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."

(See How Cults Work: Indoctrination for details on the thought-reform process that takes place specifically in destructive cults.)

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 first-hand 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. 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.

While the U.S. consciousness was turned to brainwashing in the 1950s in the aftermath of the Korean War, brainwashing has been around for longer than that. Scholars have traced the roots of systematic thought reform to the prison camps of communist Russia in the early 1900s, 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.

Brainwashing Then and Now

Fictional Brainwashing 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 "1984" undergoes a classic case of brainwashing that ends with the famous concession to his tormentors: "two plus two equals five." In 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate," brainwashing produces a robot-like assassin incapable of overriding the control commands he's been programmed with. "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) positions institutional brainwashing as an option for violent convicts looking to shorten their sentences, and in 1997's "Conspiracy Theory," a mentally unstable, government-brainwashed assassin seeks to prove that some very powerful people have been tampering with his mind.

­In 19­29, Mao Tse-tung, 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 1951 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.S. government seemed to fear it was falling behind in the weapons race, because it began its own mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA began a program called MKULTRA. 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 1970s, although some claim it still happens under the radar. Public interest in brainwashing briefly subsided after the Cold War but resurfaced in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of countless non-mainstream political and religious groups during that era. Parents who were horrified by their children's new beliefs and activities were sure they'd been brainwashed by a "cult"." The mass suicides and killing sprees committed by a small percentage of those cults seemed to validate the brainwashing fears, and some parents went so far as to have their children kidnapped by "deprogrammers" to remove them from the influence of cult leaders.

­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 1970s 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 1976, 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 1979, President Carter commuted her sentence.