Brainwashing

From New World Encyclopedia


Brainwashing, also known as thought reform or re-education, is the systematic application of coercive techniques to change the beliefs or behavior of one or more people, usually for political or religious purposes. Whether any techniques at all exist that will actually work to change thought and behavior to the degree that the term "brainwashing" connotes is a controversial and at times hotly debated question.

Origin of the term

The term brainwashing is a relatively new term in the English language. Coercive persuasion had been seen during the Inquisition, the show trials against "enemies of the state" in the Soviet Union. However, the term brainwashing emerged only when the methodologies of these earlier movements were systematized during the early decades of the People's Republic of China for use in their struggles against internal enemies and foreign invaders. Until that time, descriptions were limited to concrete accounts of specific techniques.

The term first came into use in the United States in the 1950s during the Korean War, to describe those same methods applied by the Chinese communists to attempt deep and permanent behavioral changes in foreign prisoners, to disrupt the ability of captured United Nations troops to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment.

The term xǐ năo (洗脑, the Chinese term literally translated as "to wash the brain") was first applied to methodologies of coercive persuasion used in the "reconstruction" of the so-called feudal thought patterns of Chinese citizens raised under prerevolutionary regimes. In later times the term "brainwashing" came to apply to other methods of coercive persuasion, and even to the effective use of ordinary propaganda and indoctrination. In the formal discourses of the Chinese Communist Party, the more clinical-sounding term "sī xǐang gǎi zào" (thought reform) came to be preferred.


Thought reform

"Thought reform" refers to the alteration of a person's basic attitudes and beliefs by outside manipulation.

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). Liftone used the term thought reform as a synonym for brainwashing, though he preferred the former. The elements of thought reform detailed by Lifton are as follows:

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

Benjamin Zablocki described brainwashing as the "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." He notes that this same concept has historically been called thought reform and coercive persuasion.

Later use

The term brainwashing was originally used in the U.S. to explain why, compared to earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs defected to the Communists after becoming prisoners of war. 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 allegiances to the enemy was ameliorated after prisoners were repatriated and it was learned that few of them retained allegiance to the Marxist and anti-American doctrines that had been inculcated during their incarceration.

This raised the question as to whether these changes were just a facade, or if the core beliefs of the troops had been altered for the extent of their incarceration. The key finding was that when rigid control of information was terminated, and the former prisoners' natural methods of reality testing could resume functioning, the superimposed values and judgments were rapidly attenuated.

Popular speech continues to use the word "brainwashed" informally and pejoratively to describe persons subjected to intensive influence resulting in the rejection of old beliefs and in the acceptance of new ones; or to account for someone who holds strong ideas considered to be implausible and that seem resistant to evidence, common sense, experience, and logic. Such popular usage often implies a belief that the ideas of the allegedly brainwashed person developed under some external influence such as books, television programs, television commercials (as producing "brainwashed consumers"), video games, religious groups, political groups, or other people. "Mind control" expresses a conception only mildly less dramatic than "brainwashing," with "thought control" slightly milder again. With "thought reform" and "coercion" we start to move into acceptably neutral academic jargon and into the areas of "propaganda," "influence," and "persuasion."

People have come to use the terms "brainwashing" or "mind control" to explain the otherwise intuitively puzzling success of some methodologies for the religious conversion of inductees to new religious movements (including cults).

The term "brainwashing" is not widely used in psychology and other sciences, because of its vagueness and history of being used in propaganda, not to mention its association with hysterical fears of people being taken over by foreign ideologies. What is commonly called "brainwashing" may be better understood as a combination of manipulations to promote persuasion and attitude change, propaganda, coercion, capture-bonding, and restriction of access to neutral sources of information. It should be noted that many of these techniques are more subtly used (usually unconsciously) by advertisers, governments, schools, parents, and peers. In other words, such "brainwashing" is no more than the natural process of socialization.

Political brainwashing

The use of coercive persuasion techniques in China

The Communist Party of China used the phrase "xǐ nǎo" ("to wash the brain") to describe their methods of persuasion in ensuring that members who did not conform to the Party message were brought into orthodoxy. The phrase was a play on "xǐ xīn" (洗心 "to wash the heart"), a phrase found in many Daoist temples exhorting the faithful to cleanse their hearts of impure desires before entering.

In September 1950, the Miami Daily News published an article by Edward Hunter (1902-1978) entitled "'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It contained the first printed use of the English-language term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under-cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. An additional article by Hunter on the same subject appeared in New Leader magazine in 1951. In 1953, Allen Welsh Dulles, the CIA director at that time, explained that "the brain under [Communist influence] becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

In his 1956 book Brain-Washing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It, Edward Hunter described "a system of befogging the brain so a person can be seduced into acceptance of what otherwise would be abhorrent to him." According to Hunter, the process is so destructive of physical and mental health that many of his interviewees had not fully recovered after several years of freedom from Chinese captivity.

Following the armistice that interrupted hostilities in the Korean War, a large group of intelligence officers, psychiatrists, and psychologists was assigned to debrief United Nations soldiers being repatriated. The government of the United States wanted to understand the unprecedented level of collaboration, the breakdown of trust among prisoners, and other such indications that the Chinese were doing something new and effective in their handling of prisoners of war. Formal studies in academic journals began to appear in the mid-1950s, as well as some first-person reports from former prisoners. In 1961, two books were published by specialists in the field who synthesized these studies for the non-specialists concerned with issues of national security and social policy. Edgar H. Schein wrote on Coercive Persuasion, and Robert J. Lifton wrote on Thought Control and the Psychology of Totalism. Both books were primarily concerned with the techniques called "xǐ nǎo" or, more formally "sī xiǎng gǎi zào" (reconstructing or remodeling thought).

Although American attention came to bear on thought reconstruction or brainwashing as one result of the Korean War, the techniques had been used on ordinary Chinese citizens after the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The PRC had refined and extended techniques earlier used in the Soviet Union to prepare prisoners for show trials, and they in turn had learned much from the Inquisition. In the Chinese context, these techniques had multiple goals that went far beyond the simple control of subjects in the prison camps of North Korea. They aimed to produce confessions, to convince the accused that they had indeed perpetrated anti-social acts, to make them feel guilty of these crimes against the state, to make them desirous of a fundamental change in outlook toward the institutions of the new communist society, and, finally, to actually accomplish these desired changes in the recipients of the brainwashing/thought-reform. To that end, brainwashers desired techniques that would break down the psychic integrity of the individual with regard to information processing, with regard to information retained in the mind, and with regard to values. Chosen techniques included: dehumanizing of individuals by keeping them in filth, sleep deprivation, partial sensory deprivation, psychological harassment, inculcation of guilt, group social pressure, and so forth. The ultimate goal that drove these extreme efforts consisted of the transformation of an individual with a feudal or capitalist mindset into a "right thinking" member of the new social system, or, in other words, to transform what the state regarded as a criminal mind into what the state could regard as a non-criminal mind.

Later, two studies of the Korean War defections by Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein concluded that brainwashing had a transient effect when used on prisoners of war (POWs). Lifton and Schein found that the Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education of prisoners, but generally used their techniques of coercive persuasion to disrupt the ability of the prisoners to organize to maintain their morale and to try to escape. The Chinese did, however, succeed in having some of the prisoners make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of physical and social deprivation and disruption, and then by offering them more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, better food, warmer clothes or blankets. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even these measures of coercion proved quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people.

In essence, the prisoners did not actually adopt Communist beliefs. Rather, many of them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of extreme physical abuse. Moreover, the few prisoners influenced by Communist indoctrination apparently succumbed as a result of the confluence of the coercive persuasion, and of the motives and personality characteristics of the prisoners that already existed before imprisonment. In particular, individuals with very rigid systems of belief tended to snap and realign, whereas individuals with more flexible systems of belief tended to bend under pressure and then restore themselves when the external pressures were removed.

The methods of thought control proved extremely useful when they came to be employed for gaining the compliance of prisoners of war. Key elements in their success included tight control of the information available to the individual and tight control over the behavior of the individual. When, after repatriation, close control of information ceased and reality testing could resume, former prisoners fairly quickly regained a close approximation of their original picture of the world and of the societies from which they had come. Furthermore, prisoners subject to thought control often had simply behaved in ways that pleased their captors, without changing their fundamental beliefs. So the fear of brainwashed sleeper agents, such as that dramatized in the novel and the films The Manchurian Candidate, never materialized.

Terrible though the process frequently seemed to individuals imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party, these attempts at extreme coercive persuasion ended with a reassuring result: they showed that the human mind has enormous ability to adapt to stress and also a powerful homeostatic capacity. John Clifford gave an account of one man's adamant resistance to brainwashing in In the Presence of My Enemies that substantiated the picture drawn from studies of large groups that were reported by Lifton and Schein. Allyn and Adele Rickett wrote a more penitent account of their imprisonment (Allyn Rickett had by his own admission broken PRC laws against espionage) in Prisoners of the Liberation, but it too detailed techniques such as the “struggle groups” described in other accounts. Between these opposite reactions to attempts by the state to reform them, experience showed that most people would change under pressure and would change back when the pressure was removed. The other interesting result was that some individuals derived benefit from these coercive procedures due to the fact that the interactions, perhaps as an unintended side effect, actually promoted insight into dysfunctional behaviors that were then abandoned.

Thus, although the use of brainwashing on United Nations prisoners during the Korean War produced some propaganda benefits, 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 to go to the battlefield.

Mass brainwashing

In societies where the government maintains tight control of both the mass media and education system and uses this control disseminate propaganda on a particularly intensive scale, the overall effect can be to "brainwash" large sections of the population. This is particularly effective where nationalist or religious sentiment is invoked and where the population is poorly educated and has limited access to independent or foreign media.

Refutation of political brainwashing

Dick Anthony, a research and forensic psychologist, has claimed that the CIA invented the brainwashing ideology as a propaganda strategy to undercut communist claims that American prisoners of war in Korean communist camps had voluntarily expressed sympathy for communism, and that definitive research demonstrated that collaboration by western POWs had been caused by fear and duress, and not by brainwashing (Anthony 1990). He argued that the CIA brainwashing theory was pushed to the general public through the books of Edward Hunter, who was a secret CIA psychological warfare specialist passing as a journalist. He further asserted that for twenty years starting in the early 1950s, the CIA and the Defense Department conducted secret research (notably including Project MKULTRA) in an attempt to develop practical brainwashing techniques (possibly to counteract the brainwashing efforts of the Chinese), and that their attempt was a failure.

Brainwashing controversy in new religious movements and cults

In the 1960s, after coming into contact with new religious movements (NRMs, popularly referred to as "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. All of these changes appeared very strange and upsetting to their families. To explain these phenomena, the theory was postulated that these young people had been brainwashed by these new religious movements by isolating them 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.

Various social scientists attempted to develop theories of this process. Psychologist Steven Hassan, suggested that the influence of sincere but misled people can provide a significant factor in the process of thought reform. However, many scholars in the field of new religious movements did not accept Hassan's Bite model for understanding cults. Conway and Siegelman (1978) described sudden, drastic alterations of personality in people who joined NRMs. They claimed that such people were subjected to practices designed to impair the brain's powers of information processing leading to delusions and altered awareness and thinking. Under such conditions, they describe the mind as "snapping" under the pressure, and realigning with the patterns of thought presented by those in control of the process.

Defenders of the NRMs and those who join them, have likened the personality changes to the conversion experience of one such as Saint Paul or Saint Francis of Assisi. They point out that radical changes in both belief and action are the hallmark of a conversion experience.

In such attempts to characterize NRMs as conducting brainwashing, or to refute such accusations, it became clear that there is no agreed upon definition of brainwashing in the context of religious faith. Indeed, what some claimed as a religious conversion experience, others described as brainwashing. There is no agreement about the existence of a social process attempting coercive influence, nor about the existence of the social outcome that people are influenced against their will.

Additionally, some refered to brainwashing as a recruitment method (Barker 1984) while others refered to brainwashing as a method of retaining existing members (Kent 1997, Zablocki 2001).

In 1984, British sociologist Eileen Barker said in her book The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing, which was based on her first hand studies of British Unification Church members, that she had found no extraordinary persuasion techniques being used to recruit or retain members.

Thus, social scientists who have studied new religious movements, have concluded that religious groups can have considerable influence over their members, and that that influence may have come about through deception and indoctrination. Indeed, many sociologists observe that "influence" occurs ubiquitously in human cultures, and some argue that the influence exerted in "cults" or new religious movements does not differ greatly from the influence present in practically every domain of human action and of human endeavor.

Going beyond just acknowledging that the influence of religions, including NRMs, is no more "brainwashing" than any other societal influences, the concept of "deprogramming" began to come under attack. For, if a person was not "programmed" through coercive techniques, there is no reason to use such techniques to "deprogram" them. The Association of World Academics for Religious Education, stated 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."

The APA and the brainwashing theories

In the early 1980s, some U.S. mental health professionals became controversial figures due to their involvement as expert witnesses in court cases against new religious movements. In their testimony, they stated that anti-cult theories of brainwashing, mind control, or coercive persuasion were generally accepted concepts within the scientific community. The American Psychological Association (APA) in 1983 asked Margaret Singer, one of the leading proponents of coercive persuasion theories, to chair a taskforce called DIMPAC to investigate whether "brainwashing" or coercive persuasion did indeed play a role in recruitment by such movements.

Before the taskforce had submitted its final report, however, the APA submitted on February 10, 1987 an amicus curiæ brief in an ongoing case. The brief characterized the theory of brainwashing as not scientifically proven and suggests the hypothesis that cult recruitment techniques might prove coercive for certain sub-groups, while not affecting others coercively, stating that "[t]he methodology of Drs. Singer and Benson has been repudiated by the scientific community," that the hypotheses advanced by Singer were "little more than uninformed speculation, based on skewed data," and that "[t]he coercive persuasion theory ... is not a meaningful scientific concept."

The APA subsequently withdrew its signature from this brief, and later rejected the DIMPAC report due to insufficient evidence. Later, APA Division 36 (then Psychologists interested in Religion Issues, today Psychology of Religion) in its 1990 annual convention approved the following resolution:

"The Executive Committee of the Division of Psychologists Interested in Religious Issues supports the conclusion that, at this time, there is no consensus that sufficient psychological research exists to scientifically equate undue non-physical persuasion (otherwise known as "coercive persuasion", "mind control", or "brainwashing") with techniques of influence as typically practiced by one or more religious groups. Further, the Executive Committee invites those with research on this topic to submit proposals to present their work at Divisional programs." (PIRI Executive Committee Adopts Position on Non-Physical Persuasion Winter, 1991, in Amitrano and Di Marzio, 2001)

Zablocki (1997) and Amitrani (2001) citinbg APA boards and scholars on the subject, concluded that there is no unanimous decision of the APA regarding this issue.

Brainwashing in fiction

Despite lack of evidence that brainwashing techniques exist that are capable of altering the beliefs, attitudes, and thought processes of individuals, the concept has appeared in a number of fictional forms. Some examples include:

  • In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, brainwashing is used by the totalitarian government of Oceania to erase nonconformist thought and rebellious personalities.
  • The alarmist concept of brainwashing functioned as a central theme in the movie The Manchurian Candidate in which Communist brainwashers turned a soldier into an assassin through something akin to hypnosis. The idea that one person could be so enslaved to another as to do their bidding even when no longer under duress, has fascinated dramatists and movie viewers throughout the ages.
  • In the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, criminals are re-educated in an attempt to remove their violent tendencies.

Conclusion

There seems to be little to no accord among specialists on the existence of brainwashing. Theories about how brainwashing takes place include torture, depriving sleep, and other exercises meant to alter the state of mind of the subject. Due to the difficulty of separating the brainwashed from those just acting to avoid these hardships combined with the problem that the brainwashed seem to return to their normal thinking once removed from the brainwashing environment it is near impossible to make any scientific study into brainwashing and its effects.

A distinction must be made between the modifying of beliefs versus the modifying of behavior. The changing of a subject's behavior through coercive persuasion is possible but it is not necessarily brainwashing. Only when this change in behavior stems from a core change in beliefs can it be refereed to as brainwashing. Acting to avoid pain or some other kind of discomfort is not mind manipulation it is simply an act of self preservation.

It is important though to remember both the power and the delicate nature of the mind. It is not far fetched to believe that under extreme circumstances outside forces could influence our mental state. Our understanding of reality comes from our environment, so it stands to reason that a drastic change in environmental factors could drastically alter our grip on reality. Brainwashing as a practice though, is till undefined and unproven.

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