Can people really be brainwashed? What each side of the debate says

It depends what you mean. If "brainwashing" means a secret technique that overrides a person's will, switching their beliefs on like a light, the evidence is weak: a 1956 US Army report found no conclusively documented case of brainwashing of an American prisoner of war in Korea, and Robert Jay Lifton found that prisoners' thinking soon returned to normal. But scholars do not agree on the milder question: whether intense social pressure and controlled environments can strongly influence people, and whether "brainwashing" is a useful word for it.

The word was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government appeared to make people cooperate during the Korean War. Psychologists including Margaret Singer later expanded the theories to explain conversions to some new religious movements. Sociologists were mostly skeptical. In 1987 a board of the American Psychological Association rejected a task force report chaired by Singer as lacking scientific rigor, and US courts have since consistently rejected testimony about mind control as not part of accepted mainline science.

Both sides have serious voices. Eileen Barker, who spent about seven years studying Unification Church members, rejected the theory because it does not explain why many people who attended a recruitment meeting never joined, or why so many members leave. Sociologist Benjamin Zablocki argued that the number of people who describe brainwashing is too large to be anything but a genuine phenomenon. This lesson lays out each case without choosing between them.