...Why Individuals Conform to Cult Behavior Jesse A. G. Oakes Social Psychology ~ Fisher College Why Individuals Conform to Cult Behavior When answering the question why and how do individuals conform to cult behavior, one will perhaps better understand this scenario along with how it takes place by remembering and referring to the fundamentals of persuasion. Accomplished through not only the Central Route of persuasion, containing the critical content, but also the Peripheral Route lending to the acceptance and trust of the individual viewed as the leader, messenger, through superficial cues. In association with these fundamentals, it is important to realize the individual being drawn into a cult, more than likely has existing personal circumstances, which places them in a fragile state, which allows them to be more easily preyed upon. When speaking of the word “cult”, as individuals we each have a personal opinion of the word and what it means. However most if not all make a judgment and apply it to a group generally in regards to belief and/or practices in the realm of religion. Another reference, specifically, Merriam-Webster.com the word “cult” is defined as formal religious worship, a system of religious beliefs and ritual, great devotion to a person, idea, object, or movement. Research conducted by Margaret Singer, Ph.D. and reported in Psychology Today (January, 1979), encompassed individuals who were involved with cults, and later left either on their own...
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...difference between a sect and a cult?" Answer: The word sect comes from the Latin word secta, which means “school of thought.” It is a subjective term that may apply to a religious faith or denomination, or it may refer to a heretical splinter group. Sometimes, the connotation is one of disapproval, similar to the “destructive heresies” spoken of in 2 Peter 2:1, though there are no consistent or accepted exemplars to use to identify a sect. Sects are found in all religions. Islam has Sunnis and Shias, Judaism has Orthodox and Karaites, Hinduism has Shiyaism and Shaktism, and Christianity has Baptists and Lutherans. These are all examples of religious sects, and they can be thought of as “branches” of different religions. There are also non-religious sects, such as capitalists and socialists among economists, or Freudians and Jungians among psychiatrists. In contradistinction, the word cult always carries a negative connotation. There are specific criteria used to identify a cult. In Combatting Cult Mind Control, deprogrammer Steven Hassan singles out what he refers to as “destructive cults,” which he defines as “a pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people that have dictatorial control. It uses deception in recruiting new members (e.g. people are NOT told up front what the group is, what the group actually believes and what will be expected of them if they become members).” Hassan also correctly points out that cults are not only religious; they...
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...effects that these tools for change have had on people’s lives. Like any powerful tool in the right hands it can repair, but in the wrong hands it can destroy, it all depends on the intention and moral judgments of the user. My purpose for writing this book is to shine a light on those who choose to use these transformative tools for their own personal gain. Cults, are just some of the organizations which use countless techniques to get its members to commit themselves and take part in what may be harmful activities. The sum of these techniques constitutes what many professionals have come to call “Repatterning." It's also known as "thought reform," "hypnotic programming", "mental conditioning," and “mind control”. These techniques involve the systematic breakdown of a person's sense of self. Patty Hearst, heiress to the Hearst publishing fortune, became famous in the 1970s after she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which has come to be known as a "political cult”. Hearst was locked in a dark closet for several days after her kidnapping and was kept hungry, tired, brutalized and afraid for her life while Cult members bombarded her with their anti-capitalist political ideology. Within two months of her kidnapping, Patty had changed her name, issued a statement in which she referred to her family as the "pig-Hearsts" and appeared on a security tape robbing a bank with her kidnappers. Emotional Repatterning is an umbrella term for any number of techniques used to...
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...Cults are intriguing and arouse curiosity in the minds of people who have accepted life in society and joined humanity the way it is. It is amazing to think that people leave their life of normalcy to put their trust in something that is alien but promises them something in return or will save their souls from whatever will harm them. There are many causes that affect people s minds to make them join cults. Cults are very promising, can be very eye-opening, and may be the only option left for some people because of what has happened to them in their life or the mental state they are in. Cults, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, are systems or communities of religious worship that may include obsessive devotion to a person or ideal. In our society, cults are common and have the potential to be destructive. This paper will focus on the factors such as education, stake in conformity, turning points, and strength of local religious organizations that may cause people to join cults, as determined by Stark and Bainbridge. It will also discuss the methods used by cults to influence new recruits and current members. Cult leaders employ tactics such as information deprivation, extinction of former identities, and scarcity in order to maintain their authority. All these techniques combined create an environment that can be classified as a cult. Traditionally, cults have formed after or during turbulent periods of history, when people are most vulnerable. However, not...
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...particular (religious) messages: "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (St Matthew 11:28). Deprivation was seen by generations of scholars, not necessarily Marxists, as the cause of both personal religious commitment and sect and cult formation. The German scholars Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch were pioneers with regard to the relationships between sect and church membership, and social class and status group. In The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Holt 1929), H. Richard Niebuhr saw sects as the "churches of the disinherited"; because of their lack of economic and political power, the less privileged needed religion most, and sects and cults could provide their members with compensation for the lack of social and personal success. In the 1950s and 1960s, much theorizing centered on the construction of typologies. This was also the case in deprivation theory. For example, Charles Glock (1964, Glock and Stark 1965) distinguished five types of deprivation, depending on the kinds of strain felt: economic, social, organismic, ethical, and psychic deprivation. Every type gave rise to a particular type of religious group, respectively: sect, church, healing movement, reform movement, or cult. According to the class into which it fell, Glock could predict the "career" of the particular religious group. According to Bryan Wilson (1973), most new religious movements in the Third World were either thaumaturgic—that is, they responded to very specific and...
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...Candace T. Cults: A Dangerous Devotion “The most dangerous lie is that which most closely resembles the truth” - Jan Groenveld This quote above is by Jan Groenveld an Australian who has her own experiences as a former member of the LDS Church which deals with Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and was featured in Richard Guilliatt’s book Talk of the Devil. Her definition of a cult is any group that has a pyramid type authoritative figure with all teachings and guidance coming from the person at the top. The group will claim to be the only way to God and will use thought reform and mind control to keep their members. Unfortunately, after 15 years in a cult she finally realized that she was being controlled rather than controlling her own life. She wanted to let people know about her experiences in order to help others. She is so hated by the church of scientology for exposing them that her name is not even allowed to pop up under scientology on Google. In the United States, it is estimated that there are 5,000 cults that are actively recruiting people, no matter the age and walks of life. Jan Groenveld made it her mission to help people recognize cults, spiritually abusive behaviors and how to defend them from persuasion. Because the beliefs in cults are so believable people become locked into a “thinking box” which makes them unable to see the world around them. The topic that I chose to analyze is religious cults. I chose this because I thought...
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...Religion is one that fascinates me. Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious Millenarian group based in San Diego, California, founded in the early 1970s and led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group who had committed suicide in order to reach what they believed was an alien space craft following Comet Hale–Bopp. The new religious movement sounds crazy when first reading about it and after writing this essay I hope to learn subjects such as, what are the forms of salvation within the religion and how does the religion address the problem of evil. When looki ng at different websites the first thing that popped up when searching for Heaven’s Gate was the word cult and that’s exactly what I thought about for the group because it reminded me of exactly that. I find it really hard to think of the group as a serious religion since many of them took their own life when I am a Christian and believe strongly against suicide. The first Subject that I would like to talk to you about is what the forms of salvation are when it comes to the new religious movement known as the Heaven’s Gate religion. The group led by Marshall Applewhite had a very interesting way of thinking and it showed when they became convinced that the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet masked a spacecraft that would enable the members of Heaven’s Gate to ascend to heaven. The group lived in a house in California and with Applewhite’s and...
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...a different set of rules and principles. For practical reasons, a cult or sect is sometimes defined as `any religious group with a distinctive worldview of its own derived from, but not identical with, the teachings of a major world religion. As we are speaking here of special groups which usually pose a threat to people's freedom and to society in general, cults and sects have also been characterized as possessing a number of distinctive features. These often are that they [groups] are often authoritarian in structure, that they exercise forms of brainwashing and mind control, that they cultivate group pressure and instill feelings of guilt and fear, etc. Sects are found in all religions. Islam has Sunnis and Shias, Judaism has Orthodox and Karaites, Hinduism has Shiyaism and Shaktism, and Christianity has Baptists and Lutherans. These are all examples of religious sects, and they can be thought of as “branches” of different religions. There are also non-religious sects, such as capitalists and socialists among economists, or Freudians and Jungians among psychiatrists. In contradistinction, the word cult always carries a negative connotation. There are specific criteria used to identify a cult. In Combatting Cult Mind Control, deprogrammer Steven Hassan singles out what he refers to as “destructive cults,” which he defines as “a pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people that have...
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...consume the deadly concoction. It took approximately four minutes for each follower to die in convulsions. A few escaped, and as one escapee put it, “they were drinking the poison like they were hypnotized or something” (Cialdini 152). Commonly referred to as “The Jonestown Massacre,” the events at Jonestown sparked an international interest in a more general type of organization called a cult. A cult by is an organization that uses intensive indoctrination techniques to recruit and maintain members into a totalist ideology (Crawley 1). Almost everyone is susceptible to the influence of a cult and members are usually intelligent and idealistic. Typically associated with unorthodox religious groups, the definition of a cult can pertain to any group, including military organizations, governments, families, or companies. Cults instill and maintain unwavering commitment intheir members by using a set of psychological tools that are called mind control. Ruinous mind control can be conceptualized in terms of four primary components, which together form the acronym B.I.T.E. (Hassan 1): a) Behavior Control b) Information Control c) Thought Control d) Emotional Control...
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...paper, cultism, indecent dressing and some other related social vices will be dealt with in light of their causes, consequences and possible remedial steps. 1.1 Definition of Basic Terms * Social vices * Cultism * Secret cult * Secret societies * Indecent dressing Social vices: Social vices are forms of evil, wicked and criminal actions or behaviours in the society. These are social problems and have been thought of as social situations that a large number of observers feel are inappropriate and need remedying. Social vices are those acts and conditions that violate societal norms and values. Cultism: The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defined cult as a small group of people who have extreme religious beliefs and who are not part of any established religion. Secret Cult: Ogunade (2002) defined a secret cult as an enclosed organized association or group devoted to the same cause. It is an enclosed group having an exclusive sacred ideology and a series of rites centred on their sacred symbols. Secret cult is a terminology coined by a former Military Head of State- Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida between 1983 -1984. Before this period, these gangs had always been referred to as fraternities. The members of the cult, according to Ogunade (2002) commit themselves to oath and allegiance, which serves as their...
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...Yana Garcia Mander 13.0 hw. Assess the view that cults and sects are fringe organisations that are inevitably short lived and of little influence on contemporary society. Cults and sects are often hard to differentiate from one another, as a lot of them have very similar features such as a world-rejecting values and the offer of alternative explanations to traditional beliefs. According to Troeitsch, sects tend to be small, tight-knitted groups of individuals that often disagree with mainstream values and attempt to change society for the better. Cults on the other hand, are loosely knit, require a lot less commitment and do not always hold concrete beliefs. While some sects are low profile and harmless, others carry out horrific actions and rituals which have become apparent to the public through the media, such as 'Heaven’s Gate': a sect that conducted mass suicides as a way of gaining access to heaven, and the 'People’s Temple', a sect lead by the Reverend Jim Jones who famously drove a mass suicide in a jungle campsite in South America. The idea that neither sects nor cults are long lasting is an important one, with theologians such as Richard Neibuhr suggesting that sects cannot survive beyond one generation. He states that as they are often led and “held together” by one charismatic individual who claims to have some kind of “divine power”, following the death of this leader, the sect usually disappears. Furthermore, second generation members that are...
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...2 “Losing My New Religion”: Rachel was just a 17-year-old girl who had fallen in love with Wayne, a 24-year-old member of the Children of God cult, now formally known as the Family International. Taking six months off work to educate herself about how a cult works, Rachel’s mother fought to prevent Rachel from joining the Family International. Her efforts paid off when Rachel started having second thoughts and started questioning the ways of the cult. Realizing the idea that she would have to live communally with other members of her husband’s cult, Rachel began to get cold feet. She was upset knowing that she would have to join the Family in order for them to have a sexual relationship together. Eventually Rachel decided to not be involved with the cult. It is obviously clear on why Rachel had thought about joining the cult. She was young and thought that she had really fallen in love. In the religious economic theory, a cult is defined as ‘a religious movement that represents faiths that are new and unconventional to society’. Even though their doctrines are viewed as unconventional and immoral by the media, the Family International still firmly believes in abandoning all responsibilities and cutting all ties with family and friends, and handing over or “donating” their entire possessions to the group. The cult also used sex to win support, recruit members, and meet influential friends at socially public places such as bars. Its former leader, David Berg,...
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...© Kamla-Raj 2006 J. Soc. Sci., 12(3): 193-198 (2006) A Critique of Students’ Vices and the Effect on Quality of Graduates of Nigerian Tertiary Institutions Oto J. Okwu Department of Agricultural Extension and Communication, University of Agriculture, Makurdi, Nigeria E-mail: oto079@yahoo.com KEYWORDS Students; vices; education; socialization; society; social problems ABSTRACT One of the most pressing issues in minds of people in Nigeria as far as education is concerned today is that pertaining to the quality or standard of education. Qualitative education should lead to detectable gains in knowledge, skills and values. There are, however, several students’ vices that seem to be militating against realization of the desired qualitative education in Nigerian tertiary institutions. Some of these vices are cultism, drug abuse, examination malpractice, obscene dressing and sexual promiscuity/harassment. Each of these vices and the possible social and academic implications are explained. Major employers of Nigerian graduates have widely agreed on quality decline in higher education in the country, particularly in the areas of communication in oral and written English and technical proficiency. It is recommended that the responsibility of preventing or curbing general students’ vices in Nigerian tertiary institutions be a collective one resting on parents, teachers, religious leaders, authorities of the institutions as well as government. This can be done through appropriate upbringing...
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...Assess the view that cults and sects are fringe organisations that are inevitably short lived and of little influence on contemporary society. Cults and sects are often hard to differentiate from one another, as a lot of them have very similar features such as a world-rejecting values and the offer of alternative explanations to traditional beliefs. According to Troeitsch, sects tend to be small, tight-knitted groups of individuals that often disagree with mainstream values and attempt to change society for the better. Cults on the other hand, are loosely knit, require a lot less commitment and do not always hold concrete beliefs. While some sects are low profile and harmless, others carry out horrific actions and rituals which have become apparent to the public through the media, such as 'Heaven’s Gate': a sect that conducted mass suicides as a way of gaining access to heaven, and the 'People’s Temple', a sect lead by the Reverend Jim Jones who famously drove a mass suicide in a jungle campsite in South America. The idea that neither sects nor cults are long lasting is an important one, with theologians such as Richard Neibuhr suggesting that sects cannot survive beyond one generation. He states that as they are often led and “held together” by one charismatic individual who claims to have some kind of “divine power”, following the death of this leader, the sect usually disappears. Furthermore, second generation members that are born into sects may not maintain...
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...Assess the view that new religious movements are mainly for the middle classes and the young. A new religious movement is a spiritual organisation founded after world war 2. They do not only have their name 'new' because of this but also due to the way they present themselves as alternatives to traditional religions. I will begin to explore the view that these new religions are designed to appeal to the middle classes and the young. Movements set up before this time were either sects or cults. Although the definitions of these terms have developed over the years to result in different meanings and connotations, many sociologists have attempted to distinguish between the characteristics of each organisation. In 1981, Troeltsch said that the characteristics of a sect include attracting those from the lower classes and that young children cannot usually directly enter a sect. These aspects are already deemed to be contrasting with those of a NRM. A cult,,, on the other hand, has no single definition accepted by sociologists but are described by Bruce as being 'a loosely knit group organised around some common themes and interests but lacking any sharply defined and exclusive belief system.' Wallis arranged new religious movements into three categories; world rejecting, world accommodating and world affirming. World rejecting new religious movements are known for being critical of the outside world and therefore actively seek change. An example of a NRM that rejected the world...
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