PRESSING YOUR BUTTONS
One way in which we can shape the
beliefs of others is by rational persuasion. Suppose, for example, that I want
someone to believe that Buckingham Palace is in London (which it is). I could
provide them with a great deal of evidence to support that belief. I could also
just take them to London so they can see with their own eyes that that’s where
Buckingham Palace is located.
But what if these kinds of method
aren’t available? Suppose I have little or no evidence to support the belief I
nevertheless want people to accept. Suppose I can’t just show them that it’s
true. How else might I get them to believe?
I might try to dupe them, of
course. I could produce fraudulent evidence and bogus arguments. But what if I
suspect this won’t be enough? What if I think my deceit is likely to be
detected? Another option is to drop even the pretence of rational persuasion
and to adopt what I call Pressing your
Buttons.
Belief-shaping mechanisms
All sorts of causal mechanisms can
be used to shape belief. For example, our beliefs are shaped by social and
psychological mechanisms such as peer pressure and a desire to conform. Finding
ourselves believing something of which our community disapproves is a deeply
uncomfortable experience, an experience that may lead us unconsciously to
tailor what we believe so that we remain in step with them. We’re far more
susceptible to such social pressures than we like to believe (as several famous
psychological studies have shown[i]).
Belief can also be shaped through
the use of reward and punishment. A grandmother may influence the beliefs of
her grandson by giving him a sweet whenever he expresses the kind of beliefs of
which she approves, and ignores or smacks him when he expresses the “wrong”
sort of belief. Over time, this may change not just the kind of beliefs her
grandson expresses, but also the kinds of belief he holds.
Perhaps beliefs might also be
directly implanted in us. Some suppose God has implanted certain beliefs in at
least some of us. Our evolutionary history may also produce certain beliefs, or
at least certain predispositions to belief. For example, there’s growing
evidence that a disposition towards religious belief is part of our
evolutionary heritage, bestowed on us by natural selection. But even if neither
God, nor evolution, has implanted beliefs in us, perhaps we’ll one day be able
to implant beliefs ourselves using technology. Perhaps we’ll be able to strap a
brain-state-altering helmet on to an unwitting victim while they sleep, dial in
the required belief, press the red button and “Bing!”, our victim wakes up with
the belief we’ve programmed them hold. That would be a rather cruel trick. Some
hypnotists claim a similar ability to, as it were, directly “inject” beliefs
into people’s minds.
Obviously, these kinds of causal
mechanism can operate on us without our realizing what’s going on. I might
think I condemn racism because I have good grounds for supposing racism is
morally wrong, but the truth is I have merely caved into peer pressure and my
desire not to be ostracised by my liberal family and friends. If a belief has
been implanted in me by, say, natural selection, or by some
brain-state-altering device then, again, I may not be aware that this is the
reason why I believe. Suppose, for example, that some prankster to programmes
me to believe I have been abducted by aliens using the belief-inducing helmet
described above. I wake up one morning and find, as a result, that I now very
strongly believe I was taken aboard a flying saucer during the night. I have no
awareness of the real reason why I now hold that belief – of the mechanism that
actually produced the belief in me. If asked how I know I was abducted, I will
probably say “I Just Know!”
Isolation, control, uncertainty, repetition, emotion
I’m going to focus here on five
important belief-shaping mechanisms: isolation,
control, uncertainty, repetition
and emotion.
(i)
isolation. Isolation is a useful belief-shaping tool. An isolated
individual is more vulnerable to various forms of psychological manipulation.
If you want someone to believe something that runs contrary to what their
friends and family believe, it’s a good idea to have them spend some time at a
retreat or remote training camp where their attachment to other ideas can more
easily be undermined. Cults often isolate their members in this way. The The
cult leader Jim Jones physically moved both himself and all his followers to
the Guyanan jungle (where they all eventually committed suicide). Isolation is
also recommended by some within more mainstream religions. In the UK,
hermetically sealed-off religious schools are not uncommon. Students at the
Tarbiyah Academy in Dewsbury, for example, are allegedly taught that
‘the enemies of
Allah’ have schemed to poison the thinking and minds of [Muslim] youth and to
plant the spirit of unsteadiness and moral depravity in their lives. Parents
are told that they betray their children if they allow them to befriend
non-Muslims.[ii]
A related
mechanism is:
(ii)
control. If you want people to accept your belief system, it’s unwise to
expose them to alternative systems of belief. Gain control over the kind of
ideas to which they have access and to which they are exposed. Censor beliefs
and ideas that threaten to undermine your own. This kind of control is often
justified on the grounds that people will otherwise be corrupted or confused.
Totalitarian regimes will often remove “unhealthy” books from their libraries
if the books contradict the regime. All sorts of media are restricted on the grounds
that they will only “mislead” people. Schools under totalitarian regimes will
sometimes justify preventing children from discovering or exploring other
points of view on the grounds they will only succeed in “muddling” children.
Take a leaf out of the manuals of such regimes and restrict your followers’
field of vision so that everything is interpreted through a single ideological
lens – your own.
(iii)
uncertainty. If you want people to abandon their former beliefs and embrace
your own, or if you want to be sure they won’t reject your beliefs in favour of
others, it helps to raise as much doubt and uncertainty as possible about those
rival beliefs. Uncertainty is a potent source of stress, so the more you
associate alternative beliefs with uncertainty, the better. Ideally, offer a
simple set of geometric, easily formulated and remembered certainties designed
to give meaning to and cover every aspect of life. By constantly harping on the
vagaries, uncertainties and meaninglessness of life outside your belief system,
the simple, concrete certainties you offer may begin to seem increasingly
attractive to your audience.
(iv)
repetition. Encourage repetition. Get people to recite what you want them
to believe over and over again in a mantra-like way. Make the beliefs trip
unthinkingly off their tongues. It doesn’t matter whether your subjects accept
what they are saying, or even fully understand it, to begin with. There’s still
a fair chance that belief will eventually take hold. Mindless repetition works especially
well when applied in situations in which your subjects feel powerful pressure
to confirm. Lining pupils up in playgrounds for a daily, mantra-like recitation
of your key tenets, for example, combines repetition with a situation in which
any deviation by an individual will immediately result in a hundred pairs of
eyes turned in their direction.
(v)
emotion. Emotion can be harnessed to shape belief. Fear is particularly
useful. In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four, the regime seeks control not just over people’s behaviour,
but, even more importantly, what they think and feel. When the hapless rebel
Winston is finally captured, his ”educators” make it clear that what ultimately
concerns them are his thoughts:
“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”
“To make them confess.”
“No, that is not the reason. Try again.”
“To punish them.”
“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and
his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract
your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you
here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one
whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not
interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not
interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.[iii]
The terrifying contents of Room 101
eventually cause Winston to succumb. He ends up genuinely believing that if Big
Brother says that 2 plus 2 equals five, then two plus two does equal five. Many real regimes have been prepared to employ
similarly brutal methods to control what is going on in people’s minds.
However, emotional manipulation can take much milder forms yet still be
effective. For example, you might harness the emotional power of iconic music
and imagery. Ensure people are regularly confronted by portraits of Our Leader
accompanied by smiling children and sunbeams emanating from his head (those
Baghdad murals of Saddam Hussein spring to mind). Ensure your opponents and
critics are always portrayed accompanied by images of catastrophe and
suffering, or even Hieronymus-Bosch-like visions of hell. Make people emotional
dependent on your own belief system. Ensure that what self-esteem and sense of
meaning, purpose and belonging they have is derived as far as possible from
their belonging to your system of belief. Make sure they recognise that
abandoning that belief system will involve the loss of things about which they
care deeply.
It goes without saying that these
five mechanisms of thought-control are popular with various totalitarian
regimes. They are also a staple of many extreme religious cults.
Applied determinedly and
systematically, these mechanisms can be highly effective in shaping belief and
suppressing “unacceptable” lines of thought. They are particularly potent when
applied to children and young adults, whose critical defences are weak, and who
have a sponge-like tendency to accept whatever they are told.
Note that traditional mainstream
religious education has sometimes also involved heavy reliance on many,
sometimes all, of these five mechanisms. I was struck by a story a colleague
once told me that, as a teenage pupil of rather strict Catholic in the 1960’s,
she once put her hand up in class to ask why contraception was wrong. She was
immediately sent to the headmaster who asked her why she was obsessed with sex.
Interestingly, my colleague added that, even before she asked the question, she
knew she shouldn’t. While never explicitly saying so, her school and wider
Catholic community had managed to convey to her that asking such a question was
unacceptable. Her role was not to think and question, but to passively accept.
My colleague added that, even today, nearly half a century later later, despite
the fact that she no longer has any religious conviction, she finds herself
feeling guilty if she dares to question a Catholic belief. So effective was her
religious upbringing in straight-jacketing her thinking that she still feels instinctively that to do so is to
commit a thought-crime.
Of course, religious education
doesn’t have to be like this, and often it isn’t. An open, questioning attitude
can be encouraged rather than suppressed. Still, it’s clear that some mainstream
religions have historically been very reliant upon such techniques so far as
the transmission of the faith from one generation to the next is concerned. In
some places, they still are.
Brainwashing
Applied in a consistent and systematic fashion these various
techniques add up to what many would call “brainwashing”. Kathleen Taylor, a
research scientist in physiology at the University of Oxford, upon whose work I
am partly drawing here, has published a book on brainwashing. In an associated
newspaper article, Taylor writes that:
One
striking fact about brainwashing is its consistency. Whether the context is a
prisoner of war camp, a cult’s headquarters or a radical mosque, five core
techniques keep cropping up: isolation, control, uncertainty, repetition and
emotional manipulation.[iv]
Taylor adds in her book that within
the discipline of psychology, “brainwashing” is an increasingly superfluous
word. It can be a misleading term, associated as it is, with
Manchurian-Candidate-type stories of seemingly ordinary members of the public
transformed into presidential, assassins on hearing a trigger phrase. As Taylor
says, that kind of brainwashing is a myth. Case studies suggest there is
no “magic”
process called “brainwashing”, though many (including the U.S. government) have
spent time and money looking for such a process. Rather the studies suggest
that brainwashing… is best regarded as a collective noun for various,
increasingly well-understood techniques of non-consensual mind-change.
The unwitting and well-intentioned brainwasher
Often, those who use such
techniques are despicable people with the evil aim of enslaving minds. Edward
Hunter, the CIA operative who coined the phrase back in 1950, characterized
brainwashing in emotive terms:
The intent is to
change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet – a human
robot – without the atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to
create a mechanism in flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought
processes inserted into a captive body. What that amounts to is the search for
a slave race that, unlike the slaves of olden times, can be trusted never to
revolt, always to be amenable to orders, like an insect to its instincts.
Perhaps this
very often was the intent so far as the regimes of which Hunter had experience
were concerned. However, surely the intent to produce mental slaves is not
required for brainwashing. Sometimes those who apply these techniques genuinely
believe themselves to be doing good. Their intention is not to enslave but to free their victims from evil and
illusion. Yet, despite the absence of any evil intent, heavy reliance on such
techniques still adds up to brainwashing. Brainwashers can be good people with
little or no awareness that what they are engaged in is brainwashing.
The consenting victim
In the second Taylor quotation
above, Taylor says that brainwashing involves various techniques of non-consensual mind-change. That cannot
be quite right. Of course, prisoners-of-war don’t usually consent to being
brainwashed. But people can in principle consent. In one well-known thriller,
the trained assassin at the heart of the film turns out to have agreed to be
brainwashed. The fact that he consented to have such techniques applied to him
doesn’t entail that he wasn’t brainwashed.
People sometimes willingly submit
themselves to brainwashing. They sign up to be brainwashed at a cult’s training
camp, say. Admittedly, they will not usually describe what they have signed up
to as “brainwashing”. As they see it, even while they are fully aware that the
above techniques will be applied to them, they nevertheless suppose they are
merely being “educated” - being put through a process that will open up their
minds and allow them to see the truth.
Also notice that people are
sometimes forcibly confronted with the truth. I might be forced to look at
compelling evidence that someone I love has done some terrible deed, evidence
that does convince me that they’re guilty. So not only is not all brainwashing
non-consensual, not all non-consensual mind-change is brainwashing.
Reason vs. brainwashing
So what is brainwashing, then? What marks it out from other belief-shaping
mechanisms? At this point, some readers might be wondering whether what I am
calling “brainwashing” is really any different to any other educational method.
Isn’t the application of reason to persuade really just another form of
thought-control? Just another way of wielding power over the minds of others?
So why shouldn’t we favour brainwashing over reason? Particularly if no one is
actually being coerced, threatened or harmed?
In fact, there’s at least one very
obvious and important difference between the use of reason and the use of these
kinds of belief-shaping techniques. Reason is truth-sensitive. It favours true
beliefs over false beliefs. Trying making a rational case for believing that
New Jersey is populated with ant-people or that the Earth’s core is made of
yoghurt. Because these beliefs are false, you’re not going to find it easy.
Reason functions, in effect, as a
filter on false beliefs. It’s not one hundred percent reliable of course –
false beliefs can still get through. But it does tend to weed out false
beliefs. There are innumerable beliefs out there that might end up lodging in
your head, from the belief that Paris is the capital of France to the belief
that the Earth is ruled by alien lizard-people. Apply your filter of reason,
and only those with a fair chance of being true will get through. Turn your
filter off, and your head will soon fill up with nonsense.
And yet many belief systems do
demand that we turn our filters off, at least when it comes to their own
particular beliefs. In fact, those who turn their filters off – those whose
minds have become entirely passive receptacles of the faith – are often held up
by such belief-systems as a shining example to others. Mindless, uncritical
acceptance (or, as they would see it, a simple, trusting faith in the
pronouncements of Big Brother) is paraded as a badge of honour.
Reason is a double-edged sword. It
does not favour the beliefs of the “educator” over those of the “pupil”. It
favours those beliefs that are true. This means that if you try to use reason
to try to bring others round to your way of thinking, you run the risk that
they may be able to demonstrate that it is actually you that’s mistaken. That’s
a risk that some “educators” aren’t prepared to take.
The contrast between the use of
reason to persuade, and the use of the kind of belief-shaping mechanisms
outlined above, is obvious. You can use emotional manipulation, peer pressure,
censorship and so on to induce beliefs that happen to be true. But they can be
just effectively used to induce belief that Big Brother loves you, that there
are fairies at the bottom of the garden and that the Earth’s core is made of
yoghurt. Such techniques do indeed favour the beliefs of the “educator” over
those of the “pupil”. Which is precisely why those “educators” who suspect they
may end up losing the argument tend to favour them.
I call the application of such
non-truth-sensitive belief-inducing techniques – techniques that don’t require
even the pretence of rational persuasion – Pressing
Your Buttons. Brainwashing involves the systematic and dedicated
application of such button-pressing techniques.
Of course, to some extent, we can’t
avoid pressing the buttons of others. Nor can we entirely avoid having our own
buttons pressed. That fact is, we all have our beliefs shaped by such non-truth
sensitive mechanisms. No doubt we flatter ourselves about just how “rational”
we really are. And, like it or not, you will inevitably influence the beliefs
of others by non-truth-sensitive means.
For example, my own children’s
beliefs are undoubtedly shaped by the kind of peer group to which I introduce
them, by their desire to want to please (or perhaps annoy) me, by the range of
different beliefs to which I have given them access at home, and so on. But of
course that’s not yet to say I’m guilty of brainwashing my children. The extent
to which we shape the beliefs of other by pressing their buttons, rather than
relying on rational means, is a matter of degree. There’s a sliding scale of
reliance on non-truth-sensitive mechanisms, with brainwashing located at the
far end of the scale. There’s clearly a world of difference between, on the one
hand, the parent who tries to give their child access to a wide range of
religious and political points of views, encourages their child to think,
question, and value reason, and allows their child to befriend children with
different beliefs and, on the other hand, the parent who deliberately isolates
their child, ensures their child has access only to ideas of which the parent
approves, demands formal recitation of certain beliefs, allows their child to
befriend children who share the same beliefs, and so on.
The dehumanizing effect of button-pressing
So one key difference between
relying on reason to influence the beliefs of others and relying on button
pressing is that only the former is sensitive to truth. Button pressing can as
easily be used to induce false or even downright ridiculous beliefs as it can
true beliefs.
There is also a second important
difference worth noting. As the philosopher Kant noted, when you rely on reason
to try to influence the beliefs of others, you respect their freedom to make
(or fail to make) a rational decision. When you resort to pressing their
buttons on the other hand, you are, in effect, stripping them of that freedom. Your subject might think they’ve made
a free and rational decision, but the truth is they’re your puppet – you’re
pulling their strings. By resorting to button-pressing – peer pressure, emotional manipulation,
repetition, and so on – you are, in effect, treating them as just one more bit
of the causally-manipulatable natural order – as mere things. The button-pressing approach is, in essence, a dehumanizing
approach.
Conclusion
Clearly, a cult that employs
full-blown brainwashing at a training camp is a cause for concern. If the
beliefs it induces are pernicious – if, for example, followers are being lured
into terrorism – then obviously we should alarmed. However, even if the beliefs
induced happen to be benign, there’s still cause for concern.
One reason we should be concerned
is the potential hazard such mindless
and uncritical followers pose. They may as well have cotton wool in their ears
so far as the ideas and arguments of non-believers are concerned. They are
immune to reason. Trapped inside an Intellectual Black Hole, they are now
largely at the mercy of those who control the ideas at its core. The dangers
are obvious.
Such extreme examples of
brainwashing are comparatively rare. Still, even if not engaged in full-blown
brainwashing, if the promoters of belief system come increasingly to rely on
button-pressing to shape the beliefs of others, that too is a cause for
concern. The more we rely on button-pressing, the less sensitive to reason and
truth our beliefs become.
[i]
Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments revealed people are prone to denying the
evidence of their own eyes if it brings them into disagreement with others
(though admittedly this is not quite the same thing as changing what one
believes in order to conform). See Asch, S. E. “Effects Of Group Pressure Upon
The Modification And Distortion Of Judgment” in H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, Leadership And Men (Pittsburgh,
PA: Carnegie Press, 1951).
[ii]
The Times, 20th July 2005,
p. 25.
[iii]
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 265
[iv]
Kathleen Taylor, “Thought Crime” The
Guardian, 8th October 2005, p. 23.
Comments
This seems to be question begging. For example:
Q: How do I know John's methods of persuasion are reason-based and not simply brainwashing techniques?
A: Because his methods tend to favor true beliefs over false beliefs.
Q: But how do I know whether a belief is true or false?
A: By using reason-based methods that favor true beliefs.
And getting it right most of the time, as you suggest, doesn't quite fix the circularity problem here.