Brain Washing

 

Systematic effort to persuade nonbelievers to accept a certain allegiance, command, or doctrine. A colloquial term, it is more generally applied to any technique designed to manipulate human thought or action against the desire, will, or knowledge of the individual. By controlling the physical and social environment, an attempt is made to destroy loyalties to any unfavourable groups or individuals, to demonstrate to the individual that his attitudes and patterns of thinking are incorrect and must be changed, and to develop loyalty and unquestioning obedience to the ruling party.

 

The term is most appropriately used in reference to a program of political or religious indoctrination or ideological remolding. The techniques of brainwashing typically involve isolation from former associates and sources of information; an exacting regimen requiring absolute obedience and humility; strong social pressures and rewards for cooperation; physical and psychological punishments for non-cooperation ranging from social ostracism and criticism, deprivation of food, sleep, and social contacts, to bondage and torture; and continual reinforcement.

 

The nature of brainwashing as it occurred in communist political prisons received widespread attention after the Chinese Communist victory in 1949 and after the Korean and Vietnamese wars. More recently, its reported use in fringe religious cults and radical political groups has aroused concern in the United States.

 

Deprogramming, or reversing the effects of brainwashing through intensive psychotherapy and confrontation, has proved somewhat successful, particularly with religious cult members.

 

The depth and permanence of changes in attitude and point of view depend on the personality of the individual, degree of motivation to be reformed, and the degree to which the environment supports the new frame of reference.

 

groupthink

 

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1855), founder of the house of Rothschild; lithograph by Friedrich Lieder, c. 1830.

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Map view of Europe on a geographical globe.

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A group of diverse individuals, who represent various occupations, stand with their arms raised in the air. labor day; laborers; construction worker; teacher; nurse; doctor; assistant; office staff; blue collar; workforce

    

The theory of groupthink was first developed by the social psychologist Irving Janis in his classic 1972 study, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, which focused on the psychological mechanism behind foreign policy decisions such as the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Vietnam War, and the Bay of Pigs invasion.

 

Janis’s attempt to determine why groups consisting of highly intelligent individuals often made bad decisions renewed interest in the study of how group behaviours, biases, and pressures affect group decision making. Groupthink has become a widely accepted theory particularly in the fields of sociapersuasion, the process by which a person’s attitudes or behaviour are, without duress, influenced by communications from other people. One’s attitudes and behaviour are also affected by other factors (for example, verbal threats, physical coercion, one’s physiological states). Not all communication is intended to be persuasive; other purposes include informing or entertaining. Persuasion often involves manipulating people, and for this reason many find the exercise distasteful. Others might argue that, without some degree of social control and mutual accommodation such as that obtained through persuasion, the human community becomes disordered. In this way, persuasion gains moral acceptability when the alternatives are considered. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s evaluation of democracy as a form of government, persuasion is the worst method of social control—except for all the others.l psychology, foreign policy analysis, organizational theory, group decision-making sciences, and management. As such, the notion was revived to help explain the interpretation of intelligence information regarding weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War (2003–11).

 

Janis identified a number of structural conditions leading to groupthink, related to the cohesiveness of a given decision-making group, the formal rules governing its decision-making process, the character of its leadership, the social homogeneity of participants, and the situational context they face.

 

The eight symptoms of groupthink include an illusion of invulnerability or of the inability to be wrong, the collective rationalization of the group’s decisions, an unquestioned belief in the morality of the group and its choices, stereotyping of the relevant opponents or out-group members, and the presence of “mindguards” who act as barriers to alternative or negative information, as well as self-censorship and an illusion of unanimity. Decision making affected by groupthink neglects possible alternatives and focuses on a narrow number of goals, ignoring the risks involved in a particular decision. It fails to seek out alternative information and is biased in its consideration of that which is available. Once rejected, alternatives are forgotten, and little attention is paid to contingency plans in case the preferred solution fails.

 

Proposals to prevent groupthink have included the introduction of multiple channels for dissent in decision making and mechanisms to preserve the openness and heterogeneity of a given group and have focused on the specific type of leadership required to prevent groupthink from occurring.

 

In the universities of Europe during the Middle Ages, persuasion (rhetoric) was one of the basic liberal arts to be mastered by any educated man; from the days of imperial Rome through the Reformation, it was raised to a fine art by preachers who used the spoken word to inspire any number of actions, such as virtuous behaviour or religious pilgrimages. In the modern era, persuasion is most visible in the form of advertising.

 

The process of persuasion can be analyzed in a preliminary way by distinguishing communication (as the cause or stimulus) from the associated changes in attitudes (as the effect or response).

 

Analysis has led to the delineation of a series of successive steps that a person undergoes in being persuaded. The communication first is presented; the person pays attention to it and comprehends its contents (including the basic conclusion being urged and perhaps also the evidence offered in its support). For persuasion to be effected, the individual must yield to, or agree with, the point being urged and, unless only the most immediate impact is of interest, must retain this new position long enough to act on it. The ultimate goal of the persuasive process is for individuals (or a group) to carry out the behaviour implied by the new attitudinal position; for example, a person enlists in the army or becomes a Buddhist monk or begins to eat a certain brand of cereal for breakfast.

 

Some, but by no means all, theorists emphasize similarities between education and persuasion. They hold that persuasion closely resembles the teaching of new information through informative communication. Thus, since repetition in communication modifies learning, they infer that it has persuasive impact as well and that principles of verbal learning and conditioning are widely and profitably applied by persuaders (as, for example, in the judicious repetition of television advertisements). The learning approach tends to emphasize attention, comprehension, and retention of the message.

 

While learning and perceptual theorists may stress objective intellectual steps involved in the process of being persuaded, functional theorists emphasize more subjective motivational aspects. According to this view, humans are essentially ego-defensive—that is, human activities and beliefs function to satisfy conscious and unconscious personal needs that may have little to do with the objects toward which those attitudes and actions are directed. The functional approach would theorize, for example, that ethnic prejudice and other forms of social hostility derive more from individual personality structure than from information about the nature of the social groups.

 

Other theories view the person confronted with persuasive communication as being in the vexing role of finding some reasonable compromise among many conflicting forces—e.g., individual desires, existing attitudes, new information, and the social pressures originating from sources outside the individual. Those who stress this conflict-resolution model (frequently called congruity, balance, consistency, or dissonance theorists) focus on how people weigh these forces in adjusting their attitudes. Some theorists who take this point of departure stress the intellectual aspects of persuasion, while others emphasize emotional considerations.

 

An extension of the conflict-resolution model is the elaboration-likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion, put forth in 1980 by American psychologists John Cacioppo and Richard Petty. The ELM emphasizes the cognitive processing with which people react to persuasive communications. According to this model, if people react to a persuasive communication by reflecting on the content of the message and its supporting arguments, the subsequent attitude change is likely to be more firmly established and more resistant to counterpersuasion. On the other hand, if people react to a persuasive communication with relatively little such reflection, the subsequent attitude change is likely to be ephemeral.

 

Each of the approaches considered above tends to neglect one or more steps in the process of being persuaded and thus serves to supplement rather than supplant the others. A more eclectic and inclusive approach, growing out of information-processing theory, is oriented toward a consideration of all the options implied by the communication aspects of source, message, channel (or medium), receiver, and destination (behaviour to be influenced); each option is appraised for its persuasive efficacy in terms of presentation, attention, comprehension, yielding, retention, and overt behaviour.