Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 18:49, 13 November 2004

Template:TotallyDisputed The term brainwashing first came into public currency in the U.S. during the Korean War in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs appeared to defect to the Communists after becoming prisoners of war. Brainwashing consisted of the methodology used by the Chinese communists to attempt to cause deep and permanent behavioral changes in their own people, to do the same thing to foreigners imprisoned within the boundaries of China itself, and to disrupt the ability of prisoners of war to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment. Although the use of brainwashing on U.N. prisoners during the Korean War produced some propaganda benefits, its main utility to the Chinese army was that it significantly altered the number of prisoners that could be controlled by one guard, freeing other Chinese soldiers to go to the battlefield. In later times the term "brainwashing" came to be applied to other methods of coercive persuasion and even to the effective use of ordinary propaganda. The term "brainwashing" has often been used to explain some methodologies for the religious conversion of inductees to new religious movements including cults.

'Brainwashing' is a loaded term, suggesting nefarious intent and grotesque methods, with more currency in the public mind than in psychology. Brainwashing generally amounts to little more than a combination of persuasion and attitude change, propaganda and coercion.

The Korean war and the origin of the term

Two studies of the Korean War defections by Robert Lifton and Edgar Schein concluded that brainwashing was transient in its effect when used on United_Nations prisoners of war. They 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 were, however, able to get some of the prisoners to make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of deprivation 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 were 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 who were influenced by Communist indoctrination were believed to have done so as a result of the confluence of the coercive persuasion, and the motives and personality characteristics of the prisoners that already existed before imprisonment.

The use of coercive persuasion techniques within China around that time

Brainwashing, as it was popularly called, or thought reform, as it was more formally designated, consisted of techniques consisted of methodologies that had their origins in methods used previously in the Soviet Union to prepare prisoners for show trials, and techniques used even earlier in the Inquisition. These techniques had multiple goals that went far beyond the simple efficiency of control desired in the prison camps of North Korea. They were intended to produce confessions, to convince the accused that they were indeed perpetrators of 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 changes in them. To that end, techniques were used that broke 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. To those ends many techniques were used, including dehumanizing of individuals by keeping them in filth, sleep deprivation, psychological harrassment, inculcation of guilt, group social pressure, etc. The ultimate goal that drove these extreme efforts was the transformation of an individual with a "feudal" mindset or a capitalist mindset into a "right thinking" member of the new social system.

While the methods of thought control were extremely powerful, a key element in their success was tight control over the information available to the individual so as to greatly hinder reality testing and bias the subject's total picture of the world, and when this close control of information could no longer be maintained former prisoners fairly quickly regained an objective picture of the world and the societies from which they had come. So the fear of brainwashed sleeper agents, such as was dramatized in The Manchurian Candidate, never materialized.

Terrible though the process frequently was to individuals imprisoned by the CCP, the reassuring result of these attempts at extreme coercive persuasion was to show that the human mind has enormous ability to adapt to stress and also a powerful homeostatic capacity. The account of one man's resistance to brainwashing is given in In the Presence of My Enemies, by John Clifford, S.J.

Brainwashing by cults

In the 1960s some young people suddenly adopted faiths, beliefs, and behavior that were very different from their previous lifestyles and at variance with their upbringing, after coming into contact with new religious movements. The converts sometimes neglected or even broke contact with their families. All this was very strange and upsetting for their family members. To explain these phenomena, the theory was postulated that these young people had been brainwashed by these new religious movements, pejoratively called cults. One of the most prominent advocates of this theory was the controversial Margaret Singer who was discredited, when her psychological theory of 'mind control' was declared "not scientific" by the American Psychological Association .

Psychologists, sociologists, most ex-members of purported cults and most anti-cult activists now accept that the brainwashing theory has been discredited. Some anti-cult activists, like Steven Hassan started using the term mind control as a more modern alternative.

It was alleged that these cults would recruit new members 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 (3am prayer meetings) and exposing them to loud and repetitive chanting. Another alleged technique of religious brainwashing involved love bombing rather than torture.

It should be noted that some religious groups openly state, especially those of Hindu and Buddhist origin, that they seek to improve 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.

Informal use

The word brainwashed is still informally and pejoratively used to describe someone who holds strong ideas that the speaker considers to be implausible and that seem resistant to evidence, common sense, experience and logic. It is mainly used when the speaker believes that the ideas of the allegedly brainwashed person developed under external influence e.g. books, TV programs, other people or a religious organization.

Dramatization

Template:Spoiler The idea was central to the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate in which a soldier was turned into an assassin through brainwashing. It is also central to The Ipcress File, where Michael Cain tries to resist being re-programmed and The Naked Gun where Reggie Jackson is used in an effort to kill Queen Elizabeth II.

See also

• Conditioning
• Cognotechnology
• Deprogramming
• Hypnosis
• Indoctrination
• Thought reform
• Milgram experiment
• Stockholm syndrome

References and external links

• Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Brainwashing Controversy.
• Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961);
• Edgar H. Schein et al., Coercive Persuasion (1961)
• Shapiro, K. A. et al, Grammatical distinctions in the left frontal cortexJ. Cogn. Neurosci. 13, 713-720 (2001).
• Thought Reform: A Brief History of the Model and Related Issues: Part I By Lawrence A. Pile Pile is a employee of the Wellspring Retreat & Resource Center, a residential treatment facility for victims of thought reform and cultic abuse, located in the USA
• Brainwashing: a Synthesis of the Communist Textbook on Psychopolitics, with an Introduction by Eric D. Butler
• Brainwashing and the Cults: The Rise and Fall of a Theory (lengthy essay) by J. Gordon Melton
• Report of the APA Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Techniques of Persuasion and Control, November 1986
• "Brainwashing" : Career of a Myth in the United States and Europe - Paper delivered by Dr Massimo Introvigne at the CESNUR-REMID conference held in Marburg, Germany, on March 27-29,1998

• Popular psychology