What Does Science Say About Brainwashing?

“Brainwashing” was coined in 1950 for US soldiers who returned from Korean War captivity praising communism. Most scientists reject the dramatic, instant “mind control” version: by 1956 US studies found it didn’t hold up, and in 1987 the APA called the idea scientifically unproven. What is real is coercive persuasion, the slow, forced reshaping of someone’s beliefs.

The name Rev. Jim Jones might ring a bell for some of you. If not, then you might be more familiar with the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid”, which was born from the infamous Jonestown massacre in 1978.

This massacre revealed one of the most unbelievable and gruesome sides of humankind. Jim Jones was a charismatic leader who managed to convince over 900 people to commit mass suicide; the victims included many small children who were forced to ingest the poison by adults and had no choice in the matter.

Imagine finding hundreds of bodies lying on top of each other because some guy said drinking fruit punch laced with cyanide was the only way to go. What could possess someone to willingly do something like that to themselves and their children?

Most people will tell you that these people were ‘brainwashed’ into committing such an act.

Upon hearing such stories, I grew up believing that anyone could be brainwashed to do anything. After all, what other possible reason could there be for 900 people to kill themselves like that?

So… what can science really tell us about brainwashing?

Where It All Began

The era of the World Wars was filled with uncertainty, bloodshed, and unimaginable atrocities. The Korean War in 1950 was no different.

The simmering tension between North and South Korea came to a boiling point in 1950, when North Korea attempted to invade South Korea to unite the country. Fearing support from China and the Soviet Union’s communist regime in North Korea, the United Nations sent out its own troops to assist South Korea.

It was during this tumultuous time that many US soldiers were sent to the front lines. What followed shocked the entire world.

Americans that were released after being captured by the communist nations often became communist supporters themselves. In a book by Kathleen Taylor on brainwashing, she describes the soldiers’ behaviors based on Edward Hunter’s observations and says:

“[…] Some emerged from the prisoner of war camps as, apparently, converted Communists ready to denounce their country of birth and sing the praises of the Maoist way of life.”

In order to understand what really happened to these American soldiers that had once believed in their own society enough to die for it, government agencies in the US started to investigate.

One of the people writing about it was Edward Hunter, an American journalist (and reported intelligence operative) who covered Asia. He was baffled by the way some returning soldiers acted, as if they had become broken records repeating the same dialogue over and over again, often insisting that no physical harm had been done to them.

In a September 1950 newspaper article, Hunter put a name to this slow, forcible conversion of a person to a belief system contrary to their own. He called it ‘brainwashing’, borrowing the term from the Chinese phrase xǐ nǎo, literally ‘wash brain’.

The word quickly became a sensational phenomenon perpetuated by the media and the public. Suddenly, brainwashing became a topic of discussion in every household and back alley.

This fear became so real that the US started pouring resources into research on brainwashing.

Research On Brainwashing

Since no one could evidentially explain the strange behavior that the American soldiers were exhibiting, US organizations funded research on the impact of drugs, sensory deprivation, and hypnosis on the human mind.

However, under the veil of doing good, many experiments were found to have been conducted in highly unethical ways. Project MKUltra is a perfect example of this.

Project MKUltra

The CIA believed that the enemies had used mind control techniques to brainwash their soldiers. Thus, in 1953 it launched Project MKUltra to test out drugs (like LSD) and other methods (like electroshock therapy and sensory deprivation) on often unsuspecting individuals to ‘brainwash’ them.

In 1973, most of the records of these studies were deliberately destroyed on the orders of Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time, along with project chemist Sidney Gottlieb, but the truth always has a way of coming out.

In 1974, The New York Times exposed the CIA’s illegal domestic spying. The outcry led to the 1975 Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations, which dragged MKUltra into the open. Surviving records later revealed that the agency had even contemplated using radiation for mind control.

Such experiments and the media sensation that followed have made it very difficult to continue exploring the science of brainwashing. One military psychiatrist that greatly benefitted from the media frenzy was William Sargant.

William Sargant’s Explanation

In his book, Battle for the Mind, Sargant explains that brainwashing has its roots in Pavlov’s conditioning experiments. In his famous dog experiment, Pavlov conditioned the canines to associate the sound of a bell with food. Eventually, whenever the dogs heard the bell, they would start salivating, even when food wasn’t there.

However, Sargant was more fascinated by what Pavlov described happening to the dogs later. Pavlov said that a majority of the experimented dogs forgot about their conditioning after they narrowly escaped death during a flood in 1924. Sargant supplemented the findings of Pavlov by saying that “ […] extreme nervous excitement could result in inhibition of the brain’s cortex, causing a ‘rupture’ in previous conditioning.”

Keep in mind that many modern scientists do not agree with this statement, particularly because this theory hadn’t gone through the vigorous and thorough peer-reviewed testing that is often demanded by the scientific community.

On top of that, Sargant was a controversial psychiatrist who was known to employ unnecessary physical therapy, like electric shocks, to ‘cure’ his patients. Most of his more extreme approaches ended up worsening his patients’ situations.

Hearing all this, it’s no wonder that scientists presently want to distance themselves from the word brainwashing. This gave way to new terminologies, such as coercive persuasion or thought reform, by Edgar Schein and Robert Lifton, respectively.

Coercive Persuasion

Edgar Schein was an MIT professor well-known for his work on coercive persuasion. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines coercive persuasion as:

“systematic, intensive indoctrination of political or military prisoners, using such methods as threats, punishments, bribes, isolation, continuous interrogation, and repetitious ‘instruction.’”

Unlike the other investigators, Schein points out that coercive persuasion is not limited to people who are imprisoned or in cults. It also isn’t what the media portrays brainwashing to be.

You don’t suddenly stop believing in everything you know. In fact, coercive persuasion is a slow and gradual psychological force that could make you adopt different ideologies. This force could be persuasion tactics, such as stress, that could make you do what you may not have done otherwise.

According to Schein, there are three stages of ‘brainwashing’ (based on Kurt Lewin’s change model):

Stage 1: Unfreezing

Shake the person’s belief system in any way possible, so much so that they start to doubt themselves. This would give them the motive to change or adopt new ideologies.

Stage 2: Changing

This is when new principles are instilled into the minds of those being coerced. Let’s take an example of how we do this in our everyday lives. You might have long believed the idea that we only use 10% of the brain. Then someone provides you with scientific proof, such as MRI studies, that demonstrate the falseness of this statement. You find merit in the argument and start to believe that the 10% usage idea is only a myth.

Coercive persuasion could involve any possible means of changing a person’s perspective, including mind-altering techniques, such as hypnosis or repetition.

Stage 3: Refreezing

The new beliefs are then incorporated into the person’s routine, essentially ‘freezing’ those thoughts and beliefs in place.

However, Schein’s isn’t the only explanation. There are several others, including the work of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, whose 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism laid out eight psychological themes (such as milieu control, the demand for purity, and ‘loading the language’) that he saw in coercive environments.

One thing to remember is that the dramatic, total ‘mind control’ of the movies has never survived scientific scrutiny. When the APA convened a task force on coercive persuasion in the 1980s, it rejected the final report in 1987 for lacking scientific rigor, and US courts have repeatedly thrown out ‘brainwashing’ defenses. The takeaway: coercion, stress, and social pressure can genuinely wear down a person’s resistance over time, but no one can flip your beliefs like a switch.

Conclusion

From the shocking tales of American soldiers in the Korean War to cult indoctrination that still happens to this day, brainwashing has become the go-to explanation for people’s sudden conversion away from their normal ways of behaving. However, as the story of Project MKUltra shows, the early attempts to study it were as unreliable as they were unethical. So is brainwashing real? The cinematic version, where a few words or a drug can instantly seize control of your mind, is not. What scientists do recognize is coercive persuasion: a slow grind of stress, isolation, and social pressure that can wear down a person’s resistance over time. It is powerful, but it is gradual, reversible, and far from the magic switch the movies promise. The more we understand it, the better we can recognize it, and stay in control of our own thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors!