Brainwashing

Brainwashing or thought reform is the application of coercive techniques to change the beliefs or behavior of one or more people for political purposes. Whether any techniques at all exist that will actually work to change thought and behavior to the degree that the term "brainwashing" connotes is a controversial and at times hotly debated question.

Origin and use of the term

The term brainwashing is a relatively new term in the English language. Before 1950, it did not exist. Earlier forms of coercive persuasion had been seen during the Inquisition, the show trials against "enemies of the state" in the Soviet Union, etc., but no specific term emerged until the methodologies of these earlier movements were systematized during the early decades of the Peoples Republic of China for use in their struggles against internal class enemies and foreign invaders. Until that time, descriptions were limited to concrete descriptions of specific techniques.

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The term x? n?o (??, the Chinese term literally translated as "wash brain") was first applied to methodologies of coercive persuasion used in the "reconstruction" (g?i zào)of the so-called feudal (f?ng jìan) thought patterns of Chinese citizens raised under prerevolutionary regimes. The term first came into use in the United States in the 1950s during the Korean War, to describe those same methods as applied by the Chinese communists to attempt deep and permanent behavioral changes in foreign prisoners, and especially during the Korean War to disrupt the ability of captured United Nations troops to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment.

Related Topics:
United States - 1950 - Korean War - Chinese communists - Captured

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It was consequently used in the US to explain why, compared to earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs defected to the Communists after becoming prisoners of war. Later analysis determined that some of the primary methodologies employed on them during their imprisonment included sleep deprivation and other intense psychological manipulations designed to break down the autonomy of individuals. American alarm at the new phenomenon of substantial numbers of U.S. troops switching their allegiances to the enemy was ameliorated after prisoners were repatriated and it was learned that few of them retained allegiance to the Marxist and anti-American doctrines that had been inculcated during their incarcerations. The key finding was that when rigid control of information was terminated and the former prisoners' natural methods of reality testing could resume functioning, the superimposed values and judgments were rapidly attenuated.

Related Topics:
American - GI - Communist - Sleep deprivation - Marxist - Doctrine

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Although the use of brainwashing on United Nations prisoners during the Korean War produced some propaganda benefits, its main utility to the Chinese lay in the fact that it significantly altered the number of prisoners that one guard could control, thus freeing other Chinese soldiers to go to the battlefield.

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In later times the term "brainwashing" came to apply to other methods of coercive persuasion and even to the effective use of ordinary propaganda and indoctrination. And in the formal discourses of the Chinese Communist Party, the more clinical-sounding term "s? x?ang g?i zào" (thought reform) came to be preferred.

Related Topics:
Persuasion - Propaganda

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Many people have come to use the terms "brainwashing" or "mind control" to explain the otherwise intuitively puzzling success of some methodologies for the religious conversion of inductees to new religious movements (including cults).

Related Topics:
Mind control - Religious conversion - New religious movement - Cult

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The term 'brainwashing' is not widely used in psychology and other sciences, because of its vagueness and history of being used in propaganda, not to mention its association with hysterical fears of people being taken over by foreign ideologies. It is often more helpful to analyze 'brainwashing' as a combination of manipulations to promote persuasion and attitude change, propaganda, coercion, capture-bonding, and restriction of access to neutral sources of information. Note that many of these techniques are more subtly used (usually unconsciously) by advertisers, governments, schools, parents and peers, so the aura of exoticism around 'brainwashing' is undeserved.

Related Topics:
Psychology - Persuasion and attitude change - Propaganda - Coercion - Capture-bonding

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