In his weekly podcast, cultism expert Dr. Steven Hassan spoke with social psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Jay Van Bavel about conformity and groupthink, revealing some specifics about how people can be brainwashed by using “social media polarization, identity and psychological warfare.”
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Van Bavel notes a cultural shift in the world toward the individualistic. .
“When people think about groups, they have a notion that groups lead us down dark pathways. And I mean that you study that they do and they can lead you to have a cult psychology and that could be a real cult, religious community — [it] could also be an organization,” Van Bavel explained.
The example in his book, The Power of Us, was about the powerful corporation Enron, which became one of the world’s most dominant companies before going bankrupt. A Scottish professor characterized it as a kind of corporate cult with all of the features that a religious cult might also have. So, there is certainly a good and bad side to groups, he said.
“What are the things you can do in groups to make them tip from kind of these dark influences to a more positive influence and that’s the piece that is called norms. So once you identify with a group, you look around to people like you and to leaders in the group to figure out — how do I be a good group member? And if you see role modeling off of negative, nasty behavior or blind conformity or rationalization of terrible things you’re doing, then you kind of can head down that direction,” he explained.
The other is being part of a community that supports one another, lifts each other up and values dissent, he continued.
“And we are just as capable of going in that direction. I would argue potentially even more capable,” he added.
When speaking to Oprah Winfrey last month, Van Bavel made the comment that our society desperately needs political leaders to create healthy norms. Hassan said he saw Oprah respond to that comment by making “a face” but didn’t comment on it.
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“But I’m out there, and I’m like, this guy’s a malignant narcissist,” he said, bashing President Donald Trump.
What is missing on our society today, said Dr. Hassen, is that humans are “social beings. We want to think we’re individuals. But, no, we’re socialized from childhood, and we survive and thrive by our networks of healthy cooperative behavior. And that’s what’s missing now is this environment of psychological warfare that’s trying to demoralize us and separate us and distrust experts, for example.”
Hassen characterized the attack on experts and science as a kind of “military psychological warfare strategy”
It’s what the MAGA movement does with controlling access to information
“This is something that you see in any really dysfunctional group is they try to cut you off from other sources of information, especially ones that are accurate. And to the extent that they do that, you become dependent on them, not just emotionally and socially, but cognitively about what is the state of the world and what to believe. And then once you have that, it’s very hard to escape that. You get trapped in their universe,” said Van Bavel.
He brought up how cults help develop rationalizations for events that perhaps don’t align with their belief system. So, if a cult claims aliens will arrive and they don’t, they invent the idea that the power of our prayers is what stopped it. The same is true on the far right.
“So, like, go to Newsmax,” said Van Bavel. “Something bad happens that doesn’t align with your worldview, they come up with the rationalizations for you. And that’s, I think, part of what they do, is a lot of times — it’s not explicit misinformation. It’s rationalizations for things that don’t otherwise fit. That’s what I thought about hyperpartisan news for a long time. I haven’t really seen like that written up that way or analyzed that way, but it seems to me that that’s partly what they’re doing.”
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