What is Brainwashing?
Brainwashing in this guidebook will be discussed in terms of its use in psychology. In this relation, brainwashing is referred to as a method of thought reform through social influence. This kind of social influence is occurring all throughout the day to every person, regardless of whether they realize it or not. Social influence is the collection of methods that are used in order to change other people’s
behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. For example, compliance methods that are used in the workplace could technically be considered a form of brainwashing because they require you to act and think a specific way when you are on the job.
Brainwashing can become more of a social issue in its most severe form because these approaches
work at changing the way someone thinks without the subject consenting to it.
For brainwashing to work effectively, the subject is going to need to go through a complete isolation and dependency due to its invasive influence on the subject. This is one of the reasons that many of the brainwashing cases that are known about occur in totalistic cults or prison camps. The brainwasher, or the agent, must be able to gain complete control over their subject. This means that they must control the eating habits, sleeping
patterns, and fulfilling the other human needs of the subject and none of these actions can occur without the will of the agent. During this process, the agent will work to systematically break down the subject’s whole identity to basically make it not work right anymore. Once the identity is broken, the agent will work to replace it with the desired beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The process of brainwashing is still up for debate whether or not it will work.
Most psychologists hold the beliefs that it is possible to brainwash a subject as long as the right conditions are present. Even then, the whole
process is not as severe as it is presented in the media. There are also different definitions of brainwashing that make it more difficult to determine the effects of brainwashing on the subject. Some of these definitions require that there must be some sort of threat to the physical body of the subject in order to be considered
brainwashing. If you follow this definition, then even the practices done by many extremist cults would not be considered true brainwashing as no
physical abuse occurs.
Other definitions of brainwashing will rely on control and coercion without physical force in order to get the change in the beliefs of the subjects.
Either way, experts believe that the effect of brainwashing, even under the ideal conditions, is only a short term occurrence. They believe that the old identity of the subject is not completely eradicated with the practice; rather, it is put into hiding and will return once the new identity is not reinforced anymore.
Robert Jay Lifton came up with some interesting thoughts on brainwashing in the 1950s after he studied prisoners of the Chinese and Korean War camps.
During his observations, he determined that these prisoners underwent a multistep process to brainwashing. This process began with attacks on the sense of self with the prisoner and then
ended with a supposed change in beliefs of the subject. There are 10 steps that Lifton defined for the brainwashing process in the subjects that he studied. These included:
1. An assault on the identity of the subject
2. Forcing guilt on the subject
3. Forcing the subject into self- betrayal
4. Reaching a breaking point
5. Offering the subject leniency if they change
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling the guilt in the intended direction
8. Releasing the subject of supposed guilt
9. Progressing to harmony
10. The final confession before a rebirth
All of these stages must take place in an area that is in complete isolation. This means that all of the normal social references that the subject is used to
coming in contact with are unavailable.
In addition, mind clouding techniques will be employed in order to expedite the process such as malnutrition and sleep deprivation. While this might not be true of all brainwashing cases, often there is a presence of some sort of physical harm which contributes to the target having difficulty in thinking
independently and critically like they normally would.
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