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Brainwashing is the systematic effort to get someone to adopt a particular deceptive, loyalty, instruction, or doctrine without their will or awareness. "Brainwashing" is also a colloquial term that refers in general to psychological techniques that manipulate action or thought against a person's will, desire, or knowledge. It attempts to damage individual or group attitudes, frames of reference, , Value theory or loyalties by demonstrating that current thinking patterns and attitudes are wrong and need change. Brainwashing is said to reduce its subject's ability to think critically or independently, to allow the introduction of new, unwanted thoughts and ideas into their minds.
The term "brainwashing" was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government appeared to make people cooperate with them during the Korean War. Research into the concept also looked at Nazi Germany and present-day North Korea, at some criminal cases in the United States, and at the actions of human traffickers. Scientific and legal debate followed, as well as media attention, about the possibility of brainwashing being a factor when lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was used, or in the induction of people into groups which are considered to be .
Brainwashing has become a common theme in popular culture especially in War novel, thrillers, and science fiction stories. In casual speech, "brainwashing" and its verb form, "brainwash", are used figuratively to describe the use of propaganda to sway public opinion.
The earliest known English-language usage of the word "brainwashing" in an article by a journalist Edward Hunter, in Miami News, published in 1950. Hunter was an Anti-communism and worked for the CIA. Hunter and others used the Chinese term to explain why, during the Korean War (1950–1953), some American prisoners of war (POWs) cooperated with their Chinese captors, and even in a few cases defected to their side. British radio operator Robert W. Ford and British army Colonel James Carne also claimed that the Chinese subjected them to brainwashing techniques during their imprisonment.
The U.S. military and government laid charges of brainwashing in an effort to undermine confessions made by POWs to war crimes, including biological warfare. After Chinese radio broadcasts claimed to quote Frank Schwable, Chief of Staff of the First Marine Air Wing admitting to participating in germ warfare, United Nations commander General Mark W. Clark asserted: "Whether these statements ever passed the lips of these unfortunate men is doubtful. If they did, however, too familiar are the mind-annihilating methods of these Communists in extorting whatever words they want ... The men themselves are not to blame, and they have my deepest sympathy for having been used in this abominable way."
Beginning in 1953, Robert Jay Lifton interviewed American servicemen who had been POWs during the Korean War as well as priests, students, and teachers who had been held in prison in China after 1951. In addition to interviews with 25 Americans and Europeans, Lifton interviewed 15 Chinese citizens who had fled after having been subjected to indoctrination in Chinese universities. (Lifton's 1961 book , was based on this research.) Lifton found that when the POWs returned to the United States their thinking soon returned to normal, contrary to the popular image of "brainwashing."
In 1956, after reexamining the concept of brainwashing following the Korean War, the U.S. Army published a report entitled Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War, which called brainwashing a "popular misconception". The report concludes that "exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of 'brainwashing' of an American prisoner of war in Korea."
In 1974, Patty Hearst, a member of the wealthy Hearst family, when 19 years old was Kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing militant organization. After several weeks of captivity, she agreed to join the group and took part in their activities. In 1975, she was arrested and charged with bank robbery and the use of a gun in committing a felony. Her attorney, F. Lee Bailey, argued in her trial that she should not be held responsible for her actions since her treatment by her captors was the equivalent of the alleged brainwashing of Korean War POWs (see also Diminished responsibility). Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe, James T. Richardson, Springer Science & Business Media, 2012, p. 518 Bailey developed his case in conjunction with psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and psychologist Margaret Singer. They had both studied the experiences of Korean War POWs. (In 1996, Singer published her theories in her best-selling book Cults in Our Midst. Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace , Margaret Thaler Singer, Jossey-Bass, publisher, 2003, ) Despite this defense, Hearst was found guilty.
In 1990, Steven Fishman, who was a member of the Church of Scientology, was charged with mail fraud for conducting a scheme to sue large corporations via conspiring with minority stockholders in shareholder class action lawsuits. Fishman's attorneys notified the court that they intended to rely on an insanity defense, using the theories of brainwashing and the expert witnesses of Singer and Richard Ofshe to claim that the Church of Scientology had practiced brainwashing on him, which left him unsuitable to make independent decisions. The court ruled that the use of brainwashing theories is inadmissible in expert witnesses, citing the Frye standard, which states that scientific theories utilized by expert witnesses must be generally accepted in their respective fields. Since then, United States courts have consistently rejected testimony about mind control or brainwashing on the grounds that these theories are not part of accepted science under the Frye standard.
In 2003, the brainwashing defense was used unsuccessfully in defense of Lee Boyd Malvo, who was charged with murder for his part in the D.C. sniper attacks. Mental Condition Defences and the Criminal Justice System: Perspectives from Law and Medicine, Ben Livings, Alan Reed, Nicola Wake, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, p. 98 Oldenburg, Don (21 November 2003). "Stressed to Kill: The Defense of Brainwashing; Sniper Suspect's Claim Triggers More Debate" , The Washington Post, reproduced in Defence Brief, issue 269, published by Steven Skurka & Associates Allegations of brainwashing have also been raised by plaintiffs in child custody cases.Richard Warshak (2010). Divorce Poison: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing. New York: Harper Collins.Richardson, James T. Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers 2004, p. 16, .
Thomas Andrew Green, in his 2014 book Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in American Legal Thought, argues that the brainwashing defense undermines the law's fundamental premise of free will. Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in American Legal Thought, Thomas Andrew Green, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 391 LaFave's Criminal Law, 5th (Hornbook Series), Wayne LaFave, West Academic, 18 March 2010, pp. 208–210 In 2003, forensic psychologist Dick Anthony said that "no reasonable person would question that there are situations where people can be influenced against their best interests, but those arguments are evaluated based on fact, not bogus expert testimony."
Philip Zimbardo defined mind control as "the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition or behavioral outcomes." He suggested that any human being is susceptible to such manipulation.
Benjamin Zablocki, late professor of sociology at Rutgers University said that the number of people who attest to brainwashing in interviews (performed in accordance with guidelines of the National Institute of Mental Health and National Science Foundation) is too large to result from anything other than a genuine phenomenon. He said that in the two most prestigious journals dedicated to the sociology of religion there have been no articles "supporting the brainwashing perspective," while over one hundred such articles have been published in other journals "marginal to the field." He concluded that the concept of brainwashing had been blacklisted.Phil Zuckerman. Invitation to the Sociology of Religion. Psychology Press, 24 July 2003 p. 28
Eileen Barker criticized the concept of brainwashing because it functioned to justify costly interventions such as deprogramming or exit counseling. Review, William Rusher, National Review, 19 December 1986. She has also criticized some mental health professionals, including Singer, for accepting expert witness jobs in court cases involving NRMs. Barker's 1984 book, ,Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing?, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, United Kingdom, . describes the religious conversion process to the Unification Church (whose members are sometimes informally referred to as Moonies), which had been one of the best-known groups said to practice brainwashing. Moon's death marks end of an era , Eileen Barker, CNN, 3 September 2012, Although Moon is likely to be remembered for all these things—mass weddings, accusations of brainwashing, political intrigue and enormous wealth—he should also be remembered as creating what was arguably one of the most comprehensive and innovative theologies embraced by a new religion of the period. Barker spent close to seven years studying Unification Church members and wrote that she rejects the "brainwashing" theory because it does not explain why many people attended a recruitment meeting and did not become members nor why so many members voluntarily disaffiliate or leave groups. New Religious Movements – Some Problems of Definition George Chryssides, Diskus, 1997. The Market for Martyrs , Laurence Iannaccone, George Mason University, 2006, "One of the most comprehensive and influential studies was The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? by Eileen Barker (1984). Barker could find no evidence that Moonie recruits were ever kidnapped, confined, or coerced. Participants at Moonie retreats were not deprived of sleep; the lectures were not "trance-inducing" and there was not much chanting, no drugs or alcohol, and little that could be termed a "frenzy" or "ecstatic" experience. People were free to leave, and leave they did. Barker's extensive enumerations showed that among the recruits who went so far as to attend two-day retreats (claimed to be Moonie's most effective means of "brainwashing"), fewer than 25% joined the group for more than a week, and only 5% remained full-time members one year later. And, of course, most contacts dropped out before attending a retreat. Of all those who visited a Moonie center at least once, not one in two hundred remained in the movement two years later. With failure rates exceeding 99.5%, it comes as no surprise that full-time Moonie membership in the U.S. never exceeded a few thousand. And this was one of the most successful New Religious Movements of the era!"Oakes, Len "By far the best study of the conversion process is Eileen Barker's The Making of a Moonie ..." from Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities, 1997,
James Richardson said that if the new religious movements had access to powerful brainwashing techniques, one would expect that they would have high growth rates, yet in fact, most have not had notable success in recruiting or retaining members. For this and other reasons, sociologists of religion including David Bromley and Anson Shupe consider the idea that "cults" are brainwashing American youth to be implausible.
Thomas Robbins, Massimo Introvigne, Lorne Dawson, Gordon Melton, Marc Galanter, and Saul Levine, amongst other scholars researching NRMs, have argued and established to the satisfaction of courts, relevant professional associations and scientific communities that there exists no generally accepted scientific theory, based upon methodologically sound research, that supports the concept of brainwashing.Richardson, James T. 2009. "Religion and The Law" in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Peter Clarke. (ed) Oxford Handbooks Online. p. 426
In 1999, forensic psychologist Dick Anthony criticized another adherent to this view, Jean-Marie Abgrall, for allegedly employing a pseudoscientific approach and lacking any evidence that anyone's worldview was substantially changed by these coercive methods. He claimed that the concept and the fear surrounding it was used as a tool for the anti-cult movement to rationalize the persecution of minority religious groups. Additionally, Anthony, in the book Misunderstanding Cults, argues that the term "brainwashing" has such Sensationalism that its use is detrimental to any further scientific inquiry. (2025). 9780802081889, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802081889
In 2016, Israeli anthropologist of religion and fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Adam Klin-Oron said about then proposed "anti-cult" legislation:
The director Sidney Gottlieb and his team were apparently able to "blast away the existing mind" of a human being by using torture techniques; however, reprogramming, in terms of finding "a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void", was not so successful. "MKUltra, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea."
Controversial psychiatrist Colin A. Ross claims that the CIA was successful in creating programmable so-called "Manchurian Candidates" even at the time. The CIA experiments using various psychedelic drugs such as LSD and Mescaline drew from previous Nazi human experimentation. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control: By John Marks. P 93 (c)1979 by John Marks Published by Times Books
In 1979, John D. Marks wrote in his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate that until the MKUltra program was effectively terminated in 1963, the agency's researchers had found no reliable way to brainwash another person, as all experiments at some stage always ended in either amnesia or catatonia, making any operational use impossible.
A bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report, released in part in December 2008 and in full in April 2009, reported that U.S. military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 had based an interrogation class on a chart copied from a 1957 Air Force study of "Chinese Communist" brainwashing techniques used to elicit false confessions from American POWs during the Korean War. The report showed how the Secretary of Defense's 2002 authorization of the aggressive techniques at Guantánamo led to their use in Afghanistan and in Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib.
Russian historian Daniel Romanovsky, who interviewed survivors and eyewitnesses in the 1970s, reported on what he called "Nazi brainwashing" of the people of Belarus by the occupying Germans during the Second World War, which took place through both mass propaganda and intense re-education, especially in schools. Romanovsky noted that very soon, most people had adopted the Nazi view that the Jews were an inferior race and were closely tied to the Soviet government, views that had not been at all common before the German occupation. Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, David Bankier, Israel Gutman, Berghahn Books, 2009, pp. 282–285. Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, Jonathan Petropoulos, John Roth, Berghahn Books, 2005, p. 209 The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, Barbara Epstein, University of California Press, 2008, p. 295 Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, John-Paul Himka, Joanna Beata Michlic, University of Nebraska Press, 2013, pp. 74, 78 *
Italy has had controversy over the concept of plagio, a crime consisting in an absolute psychological—and eventually physical—domination of a person. The effect is said to be the annihilation of the subject's freedom and self-determination and the consequent negation of his or her personality. The crime of plagio has rarely been prosecuted in Italy, and only one person was ever convicted. In 1981, an Italian court found that the concept is imprecise, lacks coherence and is liable to arbitrary application.Alessandro Usai Profili penali dei condizionamenti mentali, Milano, 1996 .
Recent scientific book publications in the field of the mental disorder dissociative identity disorder (DID) mention torture-based brainwashing by criminal networks and malevolent actors as a deliberate means to create multiple "programmable" personalities in a person to exploit this individual for sexual and financial reasons.Alayarian, A. (2018). Trauma, Torture and Dissociation: A Psychoanalytic View. (n.p.): Taylor & Francis. Schwartz, H. L. (2013). The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: A Relational Approach to Internalized Perpetration in Complex Trauma Survivors. US: Taylor & Francis. Earlier scientific debates in the 1980s and 1990s about torture-based ritual abuse in cults was known as "satanic ritual abuse," which was mainly viewed as a "moral panic."
published by the Church of Scientology in 1955 about brainwashing. L. Ron Hubbard authored the text and alleged it was the secret manual written by Lavrentiy Beria, the NKVD chief, in 1936. When the FBI ignored him, Hubbard wrote again stating that Soviet agents had, on three occasions, attempted to hire him to work against the United States, and were upset about his refusal, and that one agent specifically attacked him using electroshock as a weapon.
Kathleen Barry, co-founder of the United Nations NGO, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), prompted international awareness of human sex trafficking in her 1979 book Female Sexual Slavery. Biography at The People Speak Radio In his 1986 book Woman Abuse: Facts Replacing Myths, Lewis Okun reported that: "Kathleen Barry shows in Female Sexual Slavery that forced female prostitution involves coercive control practices very similar to thought reform." Woman Abuse: Facts Replacing Myths, Lewis Okun, SUNY Press, 1986, p. 133 In their 1996 book, Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States, Rita Nakashima Brock and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite report that the methods commonly used by pimps to control their victims "closely resemble the brainwashing techniques of terrorists and paranoid cults." Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States, Rita Nakashima Brock, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Fortress Press, 1996, p. 166
In his 2000 book, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, Robert Lifton applied his original ideas about thought reform to Aum Shinrikyo and the War on Terrorism, concluding that, in this context, thought reform was possible without violence or physical coercion. He also pointed out that in their efforts against terrorism, Western governments were also using some alleged mind control techniques. Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, Owl Books, 2000.
In her 2004 popular science book, , neuroscientist and physiologist Kathleen Taylor reviewed the history of mind control theories, as well as notable incidents. In it, she theorized that persons under the influence of brainwashing may have more rigid neurological pathways, and that can make it more difficult to rethink situations or to be able to later reorganize these pathways.
In 2006 is a non-fiction book about the evolution of brainwashing from its origins in the Cold War through to today's War on Terror. The author, Dominic Streatfeild,
uses formerly classified documentation and interviews from the CIA.
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Non-suggestive interviews of Sirhan Sirhan over eleven years by psychologist Daniel Brown provided evidence of Sirhan's preparation as a Manchurian Candidate for the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.O'Sullivan, Shane (2018). " The Real Manchurian Candidate". Retrieved 5 October 2025. Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK, Douglass, James W., Orbis Books, 2025. pp. 67-86. ISBN 978-1626986268.
In the 1950s, some American films were made that featured brainwashing of POWs, including The Rack, The Bamboo Prison, Toward the Unknown, and The Fearmakers. Forbidden Area told the story of Soviet secret agents who had been brainwashed through classical conditioning by their own government so they wouldn't reveal their identities. In 1962, The Manchurian Candidate (based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon) "put brainwashing front and center" by featuring a plot by the Soviet government to take over the United States by using a brainwashed sleeper agent for political assassination.
The concept of brainwashing became popularly associated with the research of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, which mostly involved dogs as subjects. In The Manchurian Candidate the head brainwasher is "Dr. Yen Lo, of the Pavlov Institute."
The science fiction stories of Cordwainer Smith (pen name of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966), a U.S. Army officer who specialized in military intelligence and psychological warfare during the Second World War and the Korean War) depict brainwashing to remove memories of traumatic events as a normal and benign part of future medical practice.
Brainwashing remains an important theme in science fiction. A subgenre is corporate mind control, in which a future society is run by one or more business corporations that dominate society, using advertising and mass media to control the population's thoughts and feelings. Terry O'Brien commented: "Mind control is such a powerful image that if hypnotism did not exist, then something similar would have to have been invented: The plot device is too useful for any writer to ignore. The fear of mind control is equally as powerful an image."
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