20 tips of a famous psychologist – how to counteract “brainwashing” Bashny.Net

The well-known social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who has devoted fifty years of his scientific career to studying the influence of power and social pressure on human behavior, offers a recipe for countering brainwashing. In order not to face unwanted psychological impact, the organizer of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment advises to adhere to 20 simple rules to reduce vulnerability to manipulation.

The purpose of mind control is to manipulate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that rely on the use of fundamental human needs to achieve compliance or obedience to the desired rules and behavioral directions of state, political, religious, commercial, or other muniplators.





When one of us faces difficult problems, we often seek simple answers and simple actions to find the best way out. Becoming a person who is completely immersed in the teachings of a strong leader or in the total ideology of a cohesive group can be reassuring. But losing the desire to formulate unique, creative ideas in any situation is tantamount to giving up your self.

We need to feel that we can temporarily shut down, at least temporarily, our evaluative abilities and internal alertness. However, we must be able to go back and test our experiences, reflect on the choices we make, and evaluate the “benignness” of our engagement. Oscillation between these poles, immersion and re-distance for corresponding periods, is the task.

Most manipulative appeals strike their hardest, penetrating beyond reason to emotion, beyond consciousness to unspoken desires and fears, beyond the barriers of ordinary attitudes to fundamental concerns about one’s integrity and survival. Once someone has gained our trust, they can change our attitudes, creating an emotional conflict that requires immediate resolution. Making us feel scared, guilty or awkward, this manipulator is in a position to relieve our discomfort by providing reasonable explanations and calming solutions.

Large-scale systems of social persuasion depend on the control that your sense of belonging to a broad movement gives the manipulator. The believers lead us into their fiefdom and separate the “us” who are righteous and good from the “them” who are ignorant and evil. By limiting our access to ideas they find heretical or treacherous, they will gradually eliminate other versions of reality.

When tightly knit groups are isolated from external sources of information and expertise, and the leader prescribes a policy perspective before other members of the group have a chance to make their views public, decision-making processes deteriorate. People become more engaged in searching for and maintaining unanimity in thinking than in carefully weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions, putting forward controversial moral questions, and critically assessing solutions. Often, unanimous resolutions are reached in advance, and group members are forced to support them no matter what happens, even though the reality is that we are part of the decision-making process.

The stricter the system, the more likely it is that the slightest challenge will be met with retaliation. In prisons, mental hospitals, religious or political cults, military institutions and concentration camps, the “authorities” have virtually complete control over the existence of others, and the slightest deviation or threat to this force is intolerable.

We cannot make impartial decisions when we are isolated from information. The key to preventing a system from usurping is to maintain external interests and sources of social support.

It is because we can exercise our cognitive capacity to critically reflect on ideas, institutions, and our own behavior that we are able to perceive choices beyond those offered by convenient dogma and seemingly hopeless circumstances. As thinking beings, we can resist the temptation to engage in the “heart-feeling realization” offered by cult leaders, which involves listening and appreciating with our heart rather than our own mind.

It is only by knowing our own vulnerability and the enduring tendency to believe that our inner traits are more powerful than the forces of the situation that we can come to understand that there are indeed potential situational forces working for us. And with this realization of the fundamental error of overestimating the strength of character while underestimating the strength of a situation, we can avoid unwanted forms of social control by exercising our freedom to choose what to do and who to be. With self-awareness and reality control, we can begin to win against potential mind manipulators.

Below is a set of recommendations for resisting mind control. Think about them, learn them, practice them, teach them to others, improve them, adapt them to your situation—or ignore them. It's your choice.

1. Practice at times behaviors that deviate from your usual norm (be sometimes deviant); break your usual role and personal image; learn to accept rejection; play with self-observation from different points of view.

2. Practice saying, “I made a mistake,” “I’m sorry,” “I was wrong,” “...and I learned from that mistake.”

3. Be aware of the general perspective that others use to frame a problem (situation, event) because accepting their framework in their terms gives them a power advantage. Be prepared to take a step back and reject this framework as a whole, suggest your alternative before discussing the details.

4. Be prepared to suffer short-term losses in money, self-esteem, time, and effort than to suffer a rift over a pernicious commitment that keeps you trapped. Accept “low costs,” ignore temptation, and move on with life-knowledge drawn from your mistake or wrong decision and allowing you not to repeat it.

5. Be prepared to step back from any situation and say to yourself and the controlling other, “I can go on living without your love, friendship, affection, mistreatment, even if such an action might hurt – until you stop doing X and start doing Y.”

6. Always avoid the need to take questionable actions that the change provocateur insists must be done immediately; get out of the situation, take time for reflection, get impartial additional opinions, never rush to immediately agree.

7. Insist on clear explanations, without ambiguous speech; paraphrase your view of it. Don’t let change provocateurs make you feel stupid; weak explanations are signs of deception or a lack of adequate knowledge in the supposedly informed interlocutor.

8. Be sensitive to situational demands, no matter how trivial they may seem: role relationships, uniforms, symbols of power, signs, titles, group pressure, rules, ostentatious consensus, slogans, duties and obligations.

9. Be especially wary of establishing a host-guest relationship in which you are encouraged to feel and act as a guest, thus putting limits on your freedom of choice and action.

10. Don’t believe in simple solutions to complex personal, social, and political problems.

11. Remember that there is no such thing as genuine, unconditional love from strangers; love, friendship, and trust must develop over time and usually involve interchange, overcoming, and complicity—some work and commitment on your part.

12. When you find yourself in an environment of impersonal influence, individualize yourself and the influencer to establish mutual humanity, individuality, shared interests; break through role constraints through eye-to-eye contact, personal names, and praise; own your and partner identities.

13. Avoid "total situations" that are unusual and in which you have little control and freedom; immediately determine the limits of your autonomy; check for psychological and physical outlets: accept small quarrels as acceptable costs of leaving what could have been a greater loss if completed.

14. Practice "independent participation" ("impartial interest"), engage your mind in critical evaluation, turn off your emotions in confrontations with those who are Macchiavellian strong manipulators.

15. Greed and self-inflicted flattery will far advance mind control manipulators and cheating agents, but only if you allow yourself to be seduced by these false motives; resist their temptation by targeting the most honest, confident person you know.

16. Recognize your symptoms of guilt and induction of guilt provoked in you by others; never act out of guilt. Be tolerant of guilt as part of your human nature, and do not rush to improve it on the paths others plan for you.

17. Be mindful of what you’re doing in a given situation, and don’t let habit and routine make you act mindlessly in what is a slightly different situation.

18. There is no need to maintain alignment between your actions at different points in time; you can change and not stick to the false standard of being “reliable” and maintaining the status quo.

19. Legitimate and legitimate authority deserves respect and sometimes our obedience, but illegitimate authority must always be rejected, disobeyed and exposed.

20. It is not enough to openly express differences of opinion or to suffer emotionally from illegal activities or changing the rules of the game – you must be willing to openly disobey, defend, challenge and suffer the consequences of such behavior.



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