What are Lifton's criteria for thought reform, and what is the BITE model?

Robert Jay Lifton's eight criteria for thought reform are a checklist of the ways a group can control its members' minds: milieu control, mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and dispensing of existence. They serve as a framework for assessing ideological totalism, coercive control and "cultishness" in groups. The BITE model is a later, simpler checklist by Steven Hassan: control of Behavior, Information, Thought and Emotion.

Lifton was a psychiatrist. His research began in 1953 with interviews of American servicemen who had been held captive in the Korean War, plus 15 Chinese who had fled after being subjected to indoctrination in universities in China. His 1961 book studied the coercive techniques used in China. Among his findings: after the prisoners returned home, their thinking soon returned to normal, so in these cases the change did not last.

Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church, developed BITE as an effort to measure degrees of exploitative control or undue influence. Neither list is a verdict. Some researchers in the sociology of religion criticise applying mind-control theory to new religious movements, and religious studies professor Eugene Gallagher argues that it generalizes a justified suspicion of some manipulative leaders into a mind-control idea for all groups.