Brainwashing
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Brainwashing (also known as mind control, menticide, coercive persuasion, thought control, thought reform, and forced re-education) is the concept that the human mind can be altered or controlled by certain psychological techniques. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds,[1] as well as to change their attitudes, values, and beliefs.[2][3]
The term "brainwashing" was first used in English by
Brainwashing has become a common theme in popular culture, especially in
China and the Korean War
The Chinese term xǐnǎo (洗腦,"wash brain")
The
The U.S. military and government laid charges of brainwashing in an effort to undermine confessions made by POWs to war crimes, including biological warfare.[15] After Chinese radio broadcasts claimed to quote Frank Schwable, Chief of Staff of the First Marine Air Wing admitting to participating in germ warfare, United Nations commander General Mark W. Clark asserted: "Whether these statements ever passed the lips of these unfortunate men is doubtful. If they did, however, too familiar are the mind-annihilating methods of these Communists in extorting whatever words they want ... The men themselves are not to blame, and they have my deepest sympathy for having been used in this abominable way."[16]
Beginning in 1953,
In 1956, after reexamining the concept of brainwashing following the Korean War, the U.S. Army published a report entitled Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War, which called brainwashing a "popular misconception". The report concludes that "exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of 'brainwashing' of an American prisoner of war in Korea."[19]
Legal cases and the "brainwashing defense"
The concept of brainwashing has been raised in defense of criminal charges. The 1969 to 1971 case of Charles Manson, who was said to have brainwashed his followers to commit murder and other crimes, brought the issue to renewed public attention.[21][22]
In 1974, Patty Hearst, a member of the wealthy Hearst family, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing militant organization. After several weeks of captivity, she agreed to join the group and took part in their activities. In 1975, she was arrested and charged with bank robbery and the use of a gun in committing a felony. Her attorney, F. Lee Bailey, argued in her trial that she should not be held responsible for her actions since her treatment by her captors was the equivalent of the alleged brainwashing of Korean War POWs (see also Diminished responsibility).[23] Bailey developed his case in conjunction with psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and psychologist Margaret Singer. They had both studied the experiences of Korean War POWs. (In 1996, Singer published her theories in her best-selling book Cults in Our Midst.[24][25][26]) Despite this defense, Hearst was found guilty.[23]
In 1990,
In 2003, the brainwashing defense was used unsuccessfully in defense of Lee Boyd Malvo, who was charged with murder for his part in the D.C. sniper attacks.[29][30]
Thomas Andrew Green, in his 2014 book Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in American Legal Thought, argues that the brainwashing defense undermines the law's fundamental premise of free will.[31][32] In 2003, forensic psychologist Dick Anthony said that "no reasonable person would question that there are situations where people can be influenced against their best interests, but those arguments are evaluated based on fact, not bogus expert testimony."[30]
Allegations of brainwashing have also been raised by plaintiffs in child custody cases.[33][34]
Anti-cult movement
In the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-cult movement applied the concept of brainwashing to explain seemingly sudden and dramatic
Philip Zimbardo defined mind control as "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 or behavioral outcomes,"[39] and he suggested that any human being is susceptible to such manipulation.[40]
In 1999,
In 2016, Israeli anthropologist of religion and fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Adam Klin-Oron said about then proposed "anti-cult" legislation:
In the 1980s there was a wave of 'brainwashing' claims, and then parliaments around the world examined the issue, courts around the world examined the issue, and reached a clear ruling: That there is no such thing as cults…that the people making these claims are often not experts on the issue. And in the end courts, including in Israel, rejected expert witnesses who claimed there is "brainwashing."[60]
Scientific research
Research by the U.S. government
For 20 years, starting in the early 1950s, the
Controversial psychiatrist Colin A. Ross claims that the CIA was successful in creating programmable so-called "Manchurian Candidates" even at the time.[64] The CIA experiments using various psychedelic drugs such as LSD and Mescaline drew from previous Nazi human experimentation.[65]
In 1979, John D. Marks wrote in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate that until the MKUltra program was effectively terminated in 1963, the agency's researchers had found no reliable way to brainwash another person, as all experiments at some stage always ended in either amnesia or catatonia, making any operational use impossible.[10]
A bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report, released in part in December 2008 and in full in April 2009, reported that U.S. military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 had based an interrogation class on a chart copied from a 1957 Air Force study of "Chinese Communist" brainwashing techniques used to elicit false confessions from American POWs during the Korean War. The report showed how the Secretary of Defense's 2002 authorization of the aggressive techniques at Guantánamo led to their use in Afghanistan and in Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib.[66]
American Psychological Association Task Force
In 1983, the
However, On 11 May 1987, the APA's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology (BSERP) rejected the DIMPAC report because the report "lacks the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur" and concluded that "after much consideration, BSERP does not believe that we have sufficient information available to guide us in taking a position on this issue."[68]
Other areas and studies
The modern techniques of brainwashing and menticide—those perversions of psychology—can bring almost any man into submission and surrender. Many of the victims of thought control, brainwashing, and menticide that we have talked about were strong men whose minds and wills were broken and degraded. But although the totalitarians use their knowledge of the mind for vicious and unscrupulous purposes, our democratic society can and must use its knowledge to help man to grow, to guard his freedom, and to understand himself.[70]
Russian historian
Italy has had controversy over the concept of plagio, a crime consisting in an absolute psychological—and eventually physical—domination of a person. The effect is said to be the annihilation of the subject's freedom and self-determination and the consequent negation of his or her personality. The crime of plagio has rarely been prosecuted in Italy, and only one person was ever convicted. In 1981, an Italian court found that the concept is imprecise, lacks coherence and is liable to arbitrary application.[77]
Recent scientific book publications in the field of the
In his 2000 book, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, Robert Lifton applied his original ideas about thought reform to
In her 2004
In popular culture
In
In the 1950s, some American films were made that featured brainwashing of POWs, including The Rack, The Bamboo Prison, Toward the Unknown, and The Fearmakers. Forbidden Area told the story of Soviet secret agents who had been brainwashed through classical conditioning by their own government so they wouldn't reveal their identities. In 1962, The Manchurian Candidate (based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon) "put brainwashing front and center" by featuring a plot by the Soviet government to take over the United States by using a brainwashed sleeper agent for political assassination.[98][99][100] The concept of brainwashing became popularly associated with the research of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, which mostly involved dogs as subjects.[101] In The Manchurian Candidate, the head brainwasher is "Dr. Yen Lo, of the Pavlov Institute."[102]
The science fiction stories of Cordwainer Smith (pen name of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966), a U.S. Army officer who specialized in military intelligence and psychological warfare during the Second World War and the Korean War) depict brainwashing to remove memories of traumatic events as a normal and benign part of future medical practice.[103]
Mind control remains an important theme in science fiction. A subgenre is corporate mind control, in which a future society is run by one or more business
See also
- Advertising
- Marketing
- Behavior modification
- Indoctrination
- Manipulation (psychology)
- Abusive power and control
- Psychological warfare
- Undue influence
- Hypnosis
- Political abuse of psychiatry
- Reality distortion field
- Coercion
- Unethical human experimentation in the United States
- Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
Further reading
- ISBN 978-0-8078-4253-9.; Reprinted, with a new preface: University of North Carolina Press, 1989 (Online at Internet Archive).
- Lifton, Robert J. (2000). Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. Owl Books.
- Meerloo, Joost (1956). "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing". World Publishing Company.
- Taylor, Kathleen (2004). Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control. Oxford University Press.
- .
- .
- Zimbardo, P. (1 November 2002). "Mind Control: Psychological Reality or Mindless Rhetoric?". Monitor on Psychology. Archived from the original on 4 July 2016. Retrieved 2 June 2016.
Notes
- ^ Note: xīn can mean "heart", "mind", or "centre" depending on context. For example, xīn zàng bìng [zh] means Cardiovascular disease, but xīn lǐ yī shēng [zh] means psychologist, and shì zhōng xīn [zh] means Central business district.
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During the Korean War, captured American soldiers were subjected to prolonged interrogations and harangues by their captors, who often worked in relays and used the "good-cop, bad-cop" approach – alternating a brutal interrogator with a gentle one. It was all part of "Xi Nao" (washing the brain). The Chinese and Koreans were making valiant attempts to convert the captives to the communist way of thought.
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- manipulationwhen synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively. A body of social science evidence shows that when systematically practiced by state-sanctioned police, military or destructive cults, mind control can induce false confessions, create converts who willingly torture or kill 'invented enemies,' and engage indoctrinated members to work tirelessly, give up their money—and even their lives—for 'the cause.'
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The Rev. Sun Myung Moon was a self-proclaimed messiah who built a global business empire. He called both North Korean leaders and American presidents his friends but spent time in prisons in both countries. His followers around the world cherished him, while his detractors accused him of brainwashing recruits and extracting money from worshippers.
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- deprived of sleep; the lectures were not "trance-inducing" and there was not much chanting, no drugs or alcohol, and little that could be termed a "frenzy" or "ecstatic" experience. People were free to leave, and leave they did. Barker's extensive enumerations showed that among the recruits who went so far as to attend two-day retreats (claimed to beMoonie's most effective means of "brainwashing"), fewer than 25% joined the group for more than a week, and only 5% remained full-time members one year later. And, of course, most contacts dropped out before attending a retreat. Of all those who visited a Moonie center at least once, not one in two hundred remained in the movement two years later. With failure rates exceeding 99.5%, it comes as no surprise that full-time Moonie membership in the U.S. never exceeded a few thousand. And this was one of the most successful New Religious Movements of the era!"
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