A History of Brainwashing and its Use Today
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. What is the line between persuasion and coercion?

How do you know where the boundary is between your thoughts and those who are trying to influence you? Historian of science Rebecca Lamov provides a fascinating entree into these questions in her new book, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion, which begins in the POW camps of North Korea but spends much time dwelling here in our region's emergent cults and emerging technologies. That's all coming up next right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Years ago, I was going through some of the archives of The Atlantic magazine when I happened upon a 1955 article titled, "Brainwashing: Time for a Policy." Beyond the quite funny headline, I read, quote, "The Korean War confronted us with a new secret weapon: brainwashing, the conquest not of a man's body but of his mind and spirit."

And indeed, it was in the context of the Cold War that this concept of brainwashing burst into American society. In a big, ambitious book out today, historian of science Rebecca Lamov traces the path that brainwashing took from American prisoners of war to Haight-Ashbury to the canyons of Los Angeles and finally, the Internet.

It's a fascinating and strangely relevant history. And she joins us this morning to talk about the book, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion. Welcome, Rebecca. Thanks so much, Alexis. So let's start in Korea. You've got this horrible war. You have American soldiers captured and something happens to them. I mean, tell me why you end up with this, you know, Atlantic story and many others about brainwashing in the mid 50s.

Well, so the Korean War, although it's often referred to in the U.S. as the Forgotten War, when it is remembered and at the time became known for this kind of brainwashing crisis that emerged because, on the one hand, high-level Air Force pilots were being shown –

to crimes that they probably didn't commit of dropping biological warfare over China. So they were being shown in newsreels doing these things and then returning troops, especially the injured ones, the ones who had been POWs, were also evidencing in the opinion of the military these kind of concerning signs of violence.

what they were calling brainwashing or a kind of having been ideologically transformed. I mean, is there a difference or sort of how did people start to discuss, people at the time, the difference between brainwashing and just kind of being convinced of something by someone? Well, perhaps at the time there wasn't much discussion about that because brainwashing really became this kind of thing

an emergency and a sense of this radical transformation. So a little bit later, there would be some discussion of, well, doesn't media do some similar things? Advertising, aren't they a subliminal persuasion? But initially, it just burst onto the scene first with a 1950 article by a former OSS operative named Edward Hunter saying, the communists have this new weapon that's never been seen before in history. And that was indeed the title of an article in the U.S. press in the New Yorker.

something new in history, that there were psychological techniques and this kind of deep knowledge that the communists had developed that could actually turn our troops into another person. And that is drawing on the kind of like Maoist re-education tradition. Like, is there a there there? Are we making this up as part of the Cold War? Or is there something that they're doing that is new?

I think that is exactly the right question because initially historians and others tended to think, I mean, looking back at the Cold War, the kind of atmosphere, paranoia and suspicion of communism and that this might have been a lot of smoke and little fire. And I think those factors are certainly at play. But

But what I discovered in my research and China scholars have also elaborated on in recent years is that the troops were actually subjected to formal Maoist re-education, thought reform, much more deliberately done than previously known and that they were converted, they were transformed. Even if these transformations weren't permanent, I think that one of our mistakes is thinking that if it doesn't last forever, then it wasn't real. But there were certainly real effects and consequences.

That's what I end up being really taken by in my research. Yeah. And I mean, this, because this is sort of the defining example of brainwashing in the 20th century, you kind of look at how you could maybe abstract from that process a little bit to say, like, in general, what would we say brainwashing is and how does it work? Well, one thing you could say is...

So I like to use the synonym coercive persuasion because it captures, and brainwashing is often just has become an insult. When I started my research, it was a kind of throwaway term that seemed to suggest something outlandish and impossible and kind of, you know, just unlikely to exist. But coercive persuasion is a helpful synonym because it captures the combination of

extreme forcefulness, so coercion, but also not simply that, not simply what happens to people at the very end of a regime of torture. Torture can be involved, interrogation, forcefulness is involved, but also there's persuasion within this built into this situation. It often takes place in an enclosed situation. So

Coercive persuasion captures that. And then one of the key taglines that researchers on brainwashing in the early years used was from the testimony of a Hungarian religious cardinal who had early on experienced this set of techniques and technologies. And he said, looking back, without knowing what had happened to me, I had become another person. So it's

It's sort of like you don't even realize at what point, but you're no longer yourself. I mean, one of the fascinating things about your research and kind of looking back at how brainwashing was described, you have these people who've gone through this incredibly intense process.

experience of the war, both fighting it and then also being captured and being marched to these camps and, you know, having people dying on the march in the camps and all these. I mean, this is a what we would now call traumatic experience. And yet at the time, this is like not remarked upon at all that these, you know, that the pre brainwashing experience was this incredibly destabilizing and horrifying moment.

Yeah, that's exactly what I found remarkable. And having worked with this material for a couple decades now, I think initially this did – I never noticed this, but at a certain point I was just going through, you know, thinking about these are young men and later young women who go through things that are scarcely imaginable because it starts out with extreme –

destabilizing situations. And as you were saying, I mean, men who are on these death marches where they might die just between one step and another or just simply, you know,

having to cut off their own toes, losing half of their body weight. Their war wounds were untreated. They were given two rice balls a day to survive. And this goes on for years. And some of them just left, not even finished high school. So in a part of the world they were unprepared for and to fight a war they didn't even know was a war. They thought it was a police action. Some of them literally thought they'd be

in police cars in this place called Korea. And they find themselves captured and held in POW camps and under conditions that were extremely brutal. So, wait, can you remind me?

Yeah, we were just kind of walking through like the trauma of this experience goes unremarked by people at the time. Yeah. So there were these these men when they came back, the ones so several of them, a whole cadre of them didn't elected not to return. But of the hundreds of troops who came back in the early Operation Little Switch, they were extensively studied on while they were returning on ship and also once they returned to the U.S. and

But in the huge files that were amounted, amassed by expert psychiatrists and sociologists and many experts convened on these men because they were concerned about to try to understand what had happened, none of them mentioned trauma once. It's used in relationship to the idea of neurosis in one article.

Yeah, what did you end up thinking?

Ended up thinking it was a combination of many of these factors one that a friend of mine actually was trained as a psychiatrist during these years and he said you were trained to think that in an entire career you might run across one or two traumatized patients in a lifetime because it was so rare and this would be someone maybe who had experienced burns all over their entire body or a prisoner of war so in a sense

it seems strange that the experiences of POWs returning from Korea wouldn't have immediately triggered the idea of trauma. But I think it's partly because the more extreme experiences, the loss of half of their body weight, the starvation, the, you know, watching their comrades die was in the past. And by the time they returned, they had, they didn't show, they didn't have external signs of it. And secondly, trauma, so trauma wasn't,

widely diagnosed. Also, I think there was a discomfort with the vulnerability implied by trauma. What do you mean? I think that there was a sense that the men, it was more useful and thinkable that they had been traitors than that they had undergone conditions which, if one imagined oneself into them,

it becomes destabilizing just to think about that. What would you do to survive? And the men themselves actually commented on this. Some of the returning injured POWs wrote a poem together that's captured in one academic article, and they say, yes, I was brutally wounded. It's not great poetry, but they said, nonetheless, it gets a point across. It can be forgiven, yeah. Yeah, they can. And they're collaborating. But they say something like, yes, I was

badly wounded, but what does that mean to you? And they say, yes, all these things happen, but you'll never understand. And I think their experience was indeed that people mostly didn't understand. And as a result, they would just say, oh, you're one of those. They were sort of seen as either traitors or freakishly weak. There was something, maybe American mothers had coddled them too much, or maybe they had fallen for some

Some of them said they were susceptible to Asian women or there was all sorts of theories lobbed at them. So many of them just elected never to speak about it again. We're talking about the troubling history and future of brainwashing with Rebecca Lamov, professor of history of science at Harvard. Latest book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion. We'll be back right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Rebecca Lamov, a professor of the history of science at Harvard. She's got a book out today, The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion. I love your questions about what we have called and continue to call brainwashing. The number is 866-733-6786.

That's 866-733-6786. As we'll get into in this segment, we know some members of our audience may have had some experience themselves or a family member who experienced something like this. Love to hear from you. Forum at KQED.org or you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. We're KQEDforum.

I want to talk a little bit about how the concept of brainwashing works in your book in the sense that you you want to or, you know, coercive persuasion. These the other sort of terms that you bring to bear. At one point you say brainwashing is not rare, but common. What do you mean by that? Well, I guess I was.

Reflecting on the fact that I think we imagine brainwashing as something that happens elsewhere and we often want to distance ourselves from it. So even having done all this research, whenever I hear about a cult, there's so many cult documentaries, there's a great fascination with it. We also, our airwaves and digital landscapes are full of tales of scams, people who fall for scams. But

Whatever forces led someone to that point are often ones that are, when you follow along with the story, you're always thinking about, this is where I would have broken off. This is where I wouldn't have fallen for it. Use them as instructive and distancing parables. Whereas what I wanted to think about and what I found in my research is that it is a potential problem.

I think I read a potential of every moment and that it's especially useful when applied to one's own experiences because that's exactly, there's a strange way that brainwashing or coercive persuasion hides itself. It becomes invisible at certain moments and therefore we think it only happens over there or under odd and strange and unimaginable circumstances, but it's all too imaginable. Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically saying, you know, the human body is a machine that can simply be trained with, you know, a stimulus. And it kind of feels like brainwashing unites those two fears, that there'd be this subconscious change to people that was outside of their control and that would sort of rewire them beneath the surface. Yeah.

That's amazing that you put those together, because that's exactly what I wrote my dissertation on before I even fully got onto the topic of brainwashing. But I was interested in the mid-20th century merging that many people don't know about between behaviorism and learning theory, which is what it evolved into around that time, and Freudianism. And there were actual

attempts to deliberately take the vocabulary of behaviorism and subsume Freudian concepts of the unconscious within it. That happened at the Yale Institute of Human Relations. But brainwashing really poses those same questions. What if the deep inner life is also susceptible to conditioning in various ways and isn't that

a destabilizing thought too. Yeah, I find that one legitimate. I mean, I feel like there was this moment of time where the idea of like, quote unquote, subliminal messaging becomes like so powerful or at least so feared. Yeah. No, it's really, it's like attractive yet, you know, extremely repellent at the same time. I think that's

Yeah. And I found that teaching the class, I determined or I started to teach a class at University of Washington when I was a postdoc. And then I've continued to teach it at Harvard on brainwashing, which I call something like brainwashing and mind control techniques in the 20th century. And I find that students are drawn to it for that very reason. First of all,

Is it a how-to course? It does sound that way. It sounds a little bit. You're like, no, that's the rest of your education. Exactly. There's a tension built in it. Let's talk a little bit about the Bay Area connections here, in part because kind of where your story goes after Korean POWs and Cold War...

recognition of something has happened to these men, even if we're not exactly sure what or how it works or if they're bad or if they're good. Pretty soon after that, people are like, "Well, maybe we can do that." Seems like. And you get this set of scholars who are studying people in Haight-Ashbury, kind of trying to figure out what's happening to their minds.

Right. So interestingly, and I thought this had been surprisingly not remarked on very often, is that the great experts on brainwashing during the Korean War then kind of reinvented themselves or naturally reemerged during debates over cults and what was happening to many of the young people. And these, especially the Bay Area, was a particular site of this debate.

concern by parents often or family members, but also society-wide, especially after the Manson crimes, that young people and generally people you wouldn't have expected were susceptible to a set of

to some sort of techniques that were little understood. So the very same experts reappeared on the scene and sometimes testified, sometimes served as therapists or deprogrammers and offered a helpful set of analytical tools to understand. What did they say was happening to these young people?

Well, they, I mean, in short, they said it's brainwashing, but that turned out not to be very effective as a legal defense or as a, you know, to help people get out of cults. But they, what was more helpful was the earlier research on, I mean, I think,

cult members who, or ex-cult members, when they read the descriptions of the POWs, they resonated with them, with the steps of...

of what had happened. So what I call in my book, ungrounding and how that takes place in several steps. And then also with the Maoist thought reform process and also the conditions that in which this occurred. And one of the main ones that Robert J. Lifton, who was one of the experts in both of those cases,

said was central was milieu control, which is a situation a person find themselves in where the information coming in is highly controlled and subject to sculpting. And then several other steps follow along after milieu control.

We're going to come back to milieu control in the context of the internet in a few minutes. But I wanted to get, Judd writes in to say, "Jakalil's propaganda, the formation of men's attitude, is the bible of methods used for brainwashing. He raised important questions about propaganda along with propaganda's uses in supposed democratic capitalistic societies.

Although readily acknowledges its uses in then existing communist states, Soviet Union, China, North Korea, etc., brainwashing per se is just one aspect of propaganda. Even today, we're having the same debates about facts versus fiction and disinformation and misinformation. The main difference is that nowadays, brainwashing is usually associated with cultish behavior.

Love to hear from you. I mean, have you or someone close to you had an experience with one of these cults or brainwashing? Have you thought about these issues in some other context? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org or you can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, or KQED Forum.

So let's talk a little bit about Patty Hearst. Just give us the quick, like, primer. She's the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, right? Hearst Castle, you know, this known fancy family. And she's living in Berkeley. Right. So she's one of, I think...

Three or four sisters who grew up in the Hearst family. And I think Woodside, she, at the age of 19, she was a sophomore at UC Berkeley studying, I think, art history. And she came to the attention of a radical underground community.

leftist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army as a perfect symbol of capitalism and all that they opposed. So they decided to abduct her. They called it a righteous arrest. So they came to her doorway where she was living with her fiance, who was her former math teacher. They abducted her, knocked him out, abducted her, and held her in a closet for a

about 50 days, blindfolded her, read malice tracts to her, forced her to make cassette tape recordings in which she spoke to her parents and appealed to them. And then as these recordings went on, she

She increasingly espoused the ideas of this group that had abducted her. She would also say she hadn't been brainwashed, but she was also raped in the closet. She was, you know, obviously, she had no freedom of movement at all. So her ordeal was...

was again at the very edge of human, the human capacity to survive. And in fact, she later told an interviewer that she had to decide if she was going to survive at all. And this group was highly militarized. So they had many, they were constantly doing war games and weapons, you know, looting their weapons. They had already assassinated the

Oakland school superintendent. Yeah, exactly. So she knew they were capable of violence. And she said at some point she decided she she would choose to try to live. And she and she described how at that point she began to accommodate her thoughts to coincide with theirs. Yeah.

And at some point she is involved in a series of crimes that are committed by this group and she's eventually picked up. And instead of being treated as a victim of things, I mean to date really, I mean still this is the larger the narrative you're writing against.

She's treated as kind of this like rich girl who turned and picked up the gun and went on like a crime spree. Obviously, that's not the story that you are telling here. Right. But I'm interested in the incredible persistence of that story, which I sometimes call the wild spree narrative as if she had...

As if she had all along just been waiting to be kidnapped and join this group and go out of time. Raped and kept in a closet for 50 days. Exactly. But this was highly successful. So I...

I focus on her story and her abduction, but also these questions that would be raised and that were successfully raised in the trial because one of the notable things about the trial was that her defense adopted a brainwash. They tried to use, they brought four of the experts from the Korean War period onto the stand who are now called experts, and they were asked to describe brainwashing. So it really became a public forum, almost like a,

public test of whether people could understand and sympathize with brainwashing and whether a jury would buy that. And they very much did not is the end of that. And even to this day, polls rarely show any sympathy for her. And one of the ways that she was

she was blamed for what had happened was that she, as the prosecution said, she seemed very agile when she was holding the gun during the bank robbery and captured on camera doing that. And she said, in order to survive, I had to actually become a soldier in their army. Right. You know, it's interesting because in cults,

We many people now do extend quite a degree of sympathy to people who have joined cults and then gotten out right I mean or or had something happen within them Do you think that people's thinking on this has evolved? But maybe the that change in their thinking has not sort of extended back to what happened to Patty Hearst. I wonder Yeah, I mean

I noticed that Jeffrey Toobin's a legal writer who wrote a big book about Hurston. In an interview, he said he kind of echoed the prosecution's line, which is that she was a willing bandit. She was ripe for the plucking, is what he said. So these logics do replicate themselves, especially sometimes when it has to do with a woman who, I mean, evidence that was used in court against her was that they claimed she hadn't been raped because she seemed to be in love with her.

her kidnapper. Um, so this, these kinds of arguments do persist. And I wonder, um, I'd be curious if, if any of your listeners who call in who have former members of cults, how they do experience and how much sympathy they experienced, because I found that many ex members don't really speak about it publicly just because their response is so, um, often, um,

It's unbelieving or not necessarily unsympathetic, but sort of like distancing, like you're sort of turned into an oddity. Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, if anyone wants to call in with that kind of experience, I'd be really curious to hear it as well. The number is 866-733-6786. The email is form at kqed.org.

I mean, there's a bunch of different questions coming in about whether you consider certain things brainwashing or cults, perhaps an obvious one for San Francisco listeners. Does your guest consider the cult of Trump, a.k.a. MAGA, a form of brainwashing by the complete and utter devotion MAGA devotees exhibit? It truly seems like there is nothing Trump can do that will sway them away from their devotion. Like, how do you apply this in the political sphere?

I mean, you can apply it and there are books that do. I think there is a book called The Cult of Trump, which is by an exit counselor and Steve Hassan. So, I mean, that's a good book to read if you want to explore that. But what I'm more interested in is actually, I find it less useful to describe huge ways of the population and more useful to

in my own research to try to examine the everydayness of it, what we were talking about earlier, is its potential in each of us. Because I think one of the, I mean, maybe this is controversial finding, is that I think this is a common phenomenon that we're all experiencing. We're all in it together. Not to say that people don't have different experiences, but that it's useful as a lens into one's own. How are we all experiencing it?

I mean, just in the sense of digital immersion and exposure to social media. And I think in a certain way, we all now can. This is what I mean by hyper persuasion, which is the last phrase in my book. Sort of the last. So my book is organized so that the first two sections, one is about

the early Cold War, the others about intensive cult experiences. And then I sort of experimentally apply that to social media and digital environments and the types of destabilization or ungrounding, which is a key term that can occur in interactions we all increasingly have. And that my definition of ungrounding, a process of sustaining successive shocks to the point of disorientation,

could apply in many different political arenas. You know, for me, it felt like the big ungrounding of our times is a pandemic, right? I mean, everything that people thought was, when we talked about it just yesterday, people were listening to the show with Ed Yong, everything people thought was solid turned out to be liquid or gas, you know? And I think it doesn't strike me as totally shocking that we've seen this explosion of kind of

belief systems and other things like in the thing. But we'll talk about that when we come back. We're talking about the troubling history and future of brainwashing and probably the present as well with Rebecca Lamov, professor of the history of science at Harvard. The book out today is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control and

and hyper persuasion. After the break, we're going to get to a bunch more of your calls and comments. And we're going to talk about what brainwashing has to say about all those hours you spend on the internet. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more with Rebecca Lamov right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about brainwashing with Rebecca Lamov, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, whose latest book is The Instability of Truth, Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion. I want to start this segment with a question that kept occurring to me in the book, which is,

Are we essentially self-brainwashing, spending all this time on the internet? Are we essentially wiring in, we are ourselves coercing people

into being persuaded in all kinds of different directions. Like, how do you think about the process? Like, when you do this application in the third part of the book, what's happening to us? What are we doing to ourselves? Yeah, that's a very pertinent... It's a great question. I think that's a...

That's a useful way to look at it, that we put ourselves in situations. We are making tiny choices, but they seem so trivial. And one of my goals in the book, so each tiny click we make or response or emoticon or emoji or text that we contribute to this and an online conversation of whatever sort is

It seems very minor, and it seems outrageous to compare the tininess of these micro decisions to something as vast as... There's no closet, you know? Yeah, there's no closet. Nobody blindfolded you and forced you to listen to Mao for 37 hours or something. So how could you compare these two things? And yet, I think not just cumulatively, but the tininess is what is deceptive and...

To go back to, I mean, you had mentioned earlier B.F. Skinner. I mean, one of his bestsellers. I mean, he's really well known for being an avatar of conditioning. And I've always wondered how he...

He authored a bestseller that was called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It's so insane. Yeah. That book is wild. Yeah. It's exactly wild because it carries out its promise to describe exactly how we are beyond freedom and dignity as human beings, that we think we're free and we think we have dignity, but these are simply illusions. We think we have any free will at all, but mostly entirely in responding to freedom.

to the webs of conditioning in which we find ourselves. So, I mean, I don't agree with Skinner, but I do think we're far more malleable, far, far orders of degrees more malleable than we believe. So these tiny decisions we're making, as anxiety-producing as that may be, are important and even quite resonant in sculpting our experiences. Yeah, yeah.

I think as someone who was on Twitter for about 10 years from like 2011 to 2021 or so the experience of having all those people wired into your brain in a different way and like

It's hard to describe if you've never actually checked Twitter literally 100 times a day. But it changes who you are. There's no doubt about it. Maybe not to the extreme, but on the same spectrum, I think. We have a caller who'd like to remain anonymous coming in from Berkeley. Welcome.

Hi. I spent a few years in a religious cult when I was young, and I certainly didn't think, oh, I'm being indoctrinated. No. What did you think? It was happening without my conscious awareness. And...

That experience, it began with, you know, a lot of positive, friendly, you know, like, we love you. And then it transitioned later on in the later years into more coercion and sleep deprivation and just really awful. And, you know, that experience has made me...

suspicious for the rest of my life of things just in general and like larger society. And I've been hearing over the last few years whistleblowers talking about how all the social media sites and the

the smartphones and all that, were deliberately engineered to be addictive. And you heard these whistleblowers, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And you see a relationship between your experience and what you're hearing about how these platforms are built. I do. Yeah. And of course, there are a lot of...

a lot of differences. There's a lot of subtle detail, but the background is that we are being manipulated without our knowledge that it's happening.

What a great, thank you so much for bringing that to us. I'm sorry about the experience that you had, but appreciate it. I mean, Rebecca, do you want to respond? Yeah, that's such a thoughtful comment, and there are so many layers to it. I think that, I mean, one, it's important to bear in mind that even as we are making tiny decisions, our experiences are sculpted as well by the algorithmic designs, which are deliberately used.

used to maximize engagement of certain types and emotional, at the emotional level. And that's what I really ended up focusing on in my research is the way that internal states and emotional states are deliberately targeted and sort of harvested in a certain way in these platforms. And I was also interested in

The sense of, with entering a cult, I mean, many people think if you see a description later on of the dark, coercive, sleepless, and extremely harrowing experiences people end up having, you know, wonder how one might have entered into them. But many, many times they start with that.

with this the person feels transformed in a positive way often ecstatic states of communion with others perhaps you had felt cut off or lonely or without purpose and suddenly you have this group that you're part of it seems to have a mission often there are techniques and introduced that induce states of you know of that you've never experienced before there's love bombing as well so this is

And only later emerges the more extractive processes. And what one ex-cult member whose memoir I read called a dark hamster wheel of the soul where you really can't get out of it. So I think the listener in making her use of that experience, even as it continues to be painful, it's really admirable. Yeah.

I want to return to one of the themes from our first segment of the show which was about kind of the role of trauma in these things and

And this is quoting from the book, you know, what few people understand in working our way through seemingly infinite chain link series of micro decisions each of us faces every day is how emotional engineering in brackets, you know, by big tech companies through data mining is historically based in trauma. What do you mean by that? So this is a case I make in discussing first that one good place to discuss it is.

in the Facebook experiment of 2012 to 2014, which is, some people may know of this experiment, but I discovered some aspects of it that are less commented on. And this experiment was one that tapped about 700,000 users or 693,000 users without informing them, although the user agreement technically allowed experimentation. It altered

the feeds of these different users in different directions in a emotional valence. Either in one group, their news feed was altered to become more positive, and in a second group, it was altered to become more emotionally negative, and then in a third, there was a control group that was unaltered.

And then they tracked and measured how the responses people, these users gave. So whenever they did subsequently interact online was where the words they used and the gestures they made or whatever type more positive or negative correlating with how their feed had been altered. And they found that there was a measurable difference.

A small one, though. A small but measurable, statistically significant effect, especially with the negative change. And they announced that mass emotional contagion at scale had been achieved, which was part of what was remarkable and what made headlines.

So it is a small effect, but the effect was greater the greater extent the feed had been altered and also in the negative direction. But what I found interesting about the experiment, too, was that the Facebook research team pulled its definition of emotional contagion from a classic article from 1990 that had been published recently.

from a team at the University of Hawaii under Juliana Hatfield, who is a psychologist, which was the first time emotional contagion had been formally defined. And Hatfield et al. define emotional contagion based on a memoir by Vivian Gornick.

in which she describes her traumatic and traumatizing relationship with her mother. I mean, it's a literary masterpiece. And the words used to describe this relationship in which her mother, upon her father's death, became so deeply dependent on the daughter, emotionally manipulative, and even threw herself into her husband's grave, right?

clung to her daughter for years and almost destroyed her life. And that was so this extreme, extremely traumatizing relationship became the model that Facebook itself cited in the second sentence of its article to define emotional contagion. And what they were basically announcing was not only in life and in families, but across societies and across digital networks without people actually knowing each other, such emotional spread could occur.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Let's bring in Crystal in Mill Valley. Hey, Crystal. Welcome. Hi.

Hello. You're on. Hi. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to bring up, just in response to your question about people who've been in cults, like I was in a cult, and there was also sexual abuse in the cult as well. And I have found that to the extent that I have been able to heal from that experience, it has really taken...

me doing a lot of work to see where my responsibility was in it. Like, I mean, it's totally different with Patty Hearst. She had no choice, but somehow, you know, I, you know, it was the same thing. There was a big carrot at the beginning of having some amazing experiences. But, you know, there was day by day by day that I chose to stay and

And for me to heal to the extent that I have from that really took me getting through the hurt and, you know, experiencing the anger and then getting to a point where I really separated what was my responsibility and what was the teacher's responsibility. Yeah.

And to the extent that the healing has been able to take place, I had to own my own free will in that. And I happen to agree with you. I don't think that most people have very much free will. I happen to ascribe to the thing that, you know, our DNA is 98% the same as a chimpanzee's. And I think we have about 2% free will. But we do have some. Yeah.

And I think that it's important to really own that and

and own our responsibility and experiences if we want to heal from them. And, you know, this happened to me like, you know, 25 years ago. And of course, there's still some residue of it. But mostly I have been able to heal and move on because I said, OK, I chose, you know, even though I was young and dumb, I chose. Well, and maybe it's, you know, if you chose, then you could choose a different thing, too. Right. I mean, that feels part of it.

Crystal, thanks so much for sharing that experience with us. And again, also sorry about your experience. Rebecca, do you want to comment? Yes, I'm itching to jump in because that's such a great and insightful comment by Crystal. I think that that's the tricky part of brainwashing is it's not simply coercion. It's not simply deception. Though there is deceptive recruiting, sometimes people don't initially know

are uninformed. They're deliberately lied to about the group they may be joining. For example, the Moonies used to say, well, we can't tell people they're joining the Moonies because then they wouldn't join us. But once they're in, they find out. But there is just coercive persuasion also involves a certain amount of buy-in at a moment. I mean, even in Patty Hearst's case, she had to

decide she wanted to live, which seems like it's ridiculous to ask otherwise. But for many people, I think it can be clarifying to understand that you were a participant in this and that understanding the choices you've made is also empowering. It's not making you simply subject to this force that can never be

never be understood and never be walked away from. So I really appreciate that comment. I think it's really insightful. Thank you, Crystal. Let's go to Bob in Marin. Hello. Hey, Bob, go ahead. Hi. For the last, I guess, nine weeks, we've been subjected to what was explicitly called a shock and awe operation by the Trump administration with daily outrages, almost like clockwork. Last night, of course, we

you know, will be shocking with the half-life of, well, maybe till tomorrow. And I'd like the speaker to talk about this as a technique to soften up, numb, and convert the population to acceptance of fascism. I appreciate that question, Rebecca.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that I gather Steve Bannon had revealed this sort of playbook of flooding the zone. And one does feel watching the news and absorbing it because it does feel like an emotional absorption as well. That's one of...

The point is we think that we're rationally absorbing these things, but we're also emotionally absorbing them. So it can feel like you're following along this narrative where things are almost like a Netflix show where the plot is just spiraling. I think that that, so to go back to an earlier comment where you had a listener write in about Jacques Ellul saying,

I mean, this is, Elul's analysis of this unfolding, which he thought of as part of the technological society and of propaganda, involved two parts. One of them he called mythologization, which was the way that

So this comes from a definition of poison that in order to become immune to poison, a person would absorb a little bit every day. And so to some extent, I think it is we can see these techniques operating. We are exposed each day to more. And the question is, you know, at what point and in what way?

Do you respond? And then the other part that Will talked about was what he called sensibilization, which was just becoming kind of inert to it. And they operate in tandem.

Man, yeah, that resonates maybe a little too much. We have last couple comments from listeners. One listener writes, I had a relative who followed the religious guru Rajneesh. It's quite a strange trip to this day. They still can't think of anything but that guru. Let me go further and say that I would love this expert opinion on whether Magha is really a cult and needs a definition. I think you've addressed that. Another listener writes,

About 16 years ago, I attended a private lecture with a former professor of mine and hundreds of industry professionals. He was validating social science research using publicly available data from Twitter, trying to reproduce results about influence and the spread of information. He had convincing evidence that the opinion of Twitter at the time could be manipulated by compromising as few as six accounts. The entire room marveled at the potential in the advertising space. Privately, I thought that this was a weapon that nation states would use in the next war era.

Rebecca Lamov is professor of the history of science at Harvard. Her latest book, published today, congratulations, is The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much. It's been great to talk with you and your listeners. And thank you, though, to those who called in and shared your experiences. We really appreciate it. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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