This is perhaps not the nicest entry in this book, and it definitely falls into the “you really shouldn’t try this at home” category. That said, there’s much to learn from Patty Hearst’s kidnappers, cults, and the North Korean army. And with a little practice, you too can dehumanize friends and family to the point at which they’re susceptible to your evil will. (Ominously, Philip Zimbardo writes, “Whatever any member of a cult has done, you and I could be recruited or seduced into doing.”)
First the background:
Central to the definition of brainwashing is its ability to adjust not only our beliefs but also our values. It’s not simply that we come to think that sacrificing the white-clad virgin Connie Swail will raise a god capable of destroying the world, but that we believe this is the right thing to do.
But the line between coercion into a cult and conversion into a religion is ambiguous. When is it brainwashing? Maybe it’s at the point of consent—if you want to be washed then it’s your right to be. But who’s competent to make these decisions? Mental patients? Teenagers choosing to join a cult? Adults experiencing an evangelical “love bombing”?
And when does it stick? In the case of many Korean War prisoners, brainwashing proved to be more playing along to avoid torture than actual conversion to communist values. Interestingly, soldiers who originally had rigid belief systems were more likely to flip and adopt communism, while soldiers whose original beliefs were flexible were more likely to bend their beliefs while in captivity and spring back to their original values once released.
No matter the intention and results, the method remains largely the same:
The first and most important requirement is absolute control of the victim. No longer can the victim depend on him- or herself to fulfill basic needs; instead he or she needs you. Then dehumanize the victim, stripping away the self by systematically denying every descriptor—gender, profession, ethnicity, ideology, etc.—that the victim uses to define him- or herself. Eventually nothing of the victim’s self remains but the intense notion that the self is bad. At this point, offer an alternative: communism, cultism, desperadoism? Anything, really. And this system offers salvation: “Look, it’s not you that’s bad, it’s your mistaken beliefs.” And choosing the new beliefs allows the victim to rebuild a new, very different self.
Voilà: Automatons of the new world order? Aiders and abbeters of mayhem? Homicidal, blood-drinking hobos? With brainwashing, anything’s possible.
Modern Dehumanization
Historically, equating races with animals has allowed slavery, internment, and extermination. But we’ve learned our lesson, right?
Implicit association tests—in which a subject responds to an image before executive function has the chance to override impulse—show that the answer is emphatically no. For example, one study found that participants paired faces of people living in traditional societies with animal- and childlike descriptive words. And in times of national stress, this dehumanization tends to bubble to the surface of the melting pot.
Test your own implicit associations and contribute to the research at implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
Wild Kingdom: Amorous Ostriches
Does the captive ostrich experience Stockholm syndrome? Or is there another explanation for farm-raised ostriches’ courtship behavior toward their human keepers? Is this phenomenon somehow funnier because the results were published in a journal called British Poultry Science?
