Lessons from Jonestown

The mass suicide of People's Temple followers 25 years ago teaches psychologists what happens when
social psychology is placed in the wrong hands.
Most disturbingly, perhaps, leaders such as Jones appear to have derived some of their techniques from
social psychologists' research, raising questions about research ethics and the future direction of cult
research, says Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, APA's past-president and a psychology professor at Stanford
University. In as-yet unpublished research, Zimbardo has found that Jones quite possibly learned his
ability to persuade from a famous social thinker: George Orwell.
Through 25 years of research and interviews with Jonestown survivors, Zimbardo has found parallels
between the mind control techniques used by Jones at Jonestown--namely sophisticated types of
compliance, conformity and obedience training--and those described in Orwell's fictional book "1984." In
the book, Orwell provides a model for resistance as his main character, Winston Smith, stands up against
an omnipotent party system.
Others agree with Zimbardo that such findings raise ethical questions for social psychologists, given that
the likes of Jones draw from social psychology tenets and use them for harm, says Robert Cialdini, PhD,
who researches influence and is the Regents' Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University.
"Sources of influence can be like dynamite--they can be used for good or used for ill," Cialdini says.
"Social scientists need to pay more attention to not just the effectiveness of the strategies we study and
uncover but also the ethical ramifications of the use of these principles and practices."
He and Zimbardo also say social psychologists and other cult researchers must forge new research lines
on the misapplication of social psychology findings as well as their prosocial uses.
The mastermind
Indeed, Jonestown should serve as a warning to the social psychology community in what can happen
when principles of influence are abused by leaders of an organization, Zimbardo says. Jones, who acted as
the pastor of the People's Temple, studied Orwell's system of mind control described in "1984" and
commissioned a song that his followers were required to sing at Jonestown about the advent of the year
1984, Zimbardo has found.
Some of the mind control techniques Orwell described in "1984" that parallel methods Jones used include:
* "Big brother is watching you." Jones used this idea to gain the loyalty of his followers. He required
followers to spy on one another and blasted messages from loudspeakers so that his voice was always
present while they worked, slept and ate, Zimbardo says.
* Self-incrimination. Jones instructed followers to give him written statements about their fears and
mistakes and then, if they disobeyed him, he used that information to humiliate them or subject them to
their worst fears during public meetings. In "1984," the main character's resistance is broken when he is
subjected to his worst fear of being covered in rats.
* Suicide drills. Orwell's main character said that "the proper thing was to kill yourself before they get
you" in a threat of war. Jones had his followers do practice suicide drills right up to the actual mass suicide
event.
* Distorting people's perceptions. Jones blurred the relationship between words and reality, for example,
by requiring his followers to give him daily thanks for good food and work--yet the people were starving
and working six and a half days a week, Zimbardo says. Similarly, Orwell described such a technique,
which he called "newspeak."

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By mastering such mind control techniques, Jones was able to gain followers' obedience and loyalty,
Zimbardo says. "Jim Jones is probably the most charismatic cult leader in modern times in terms of his
personal appeal, oratory, his sexual appeal, his just sheer dynamism and his total participation in the
control of every member of his group," he explains.
Mindless compliance
These mind control techniques--coupled with the creation of a new social environment--provided Jones
with a powerful influence over his followers, Zimbardo says.
Quite arguably, Jones, through his natural understanding of social psychology, knew the way to obtain a
strong influence over his followers was to move them from their urban American environment to a remote
South American jungle, generating uncertainty in their new surroundings, Cialdini says. And when people
are uncertain, they look to others for cues on what to do, research has shown. Zimbardo notes that people
are particularly vulnerable when they are in new surroundings, feel lonely or disconnected.
"When you believe 'It can't happen to me,' that's when con artists or cult agents have you at their mercy
because then you're not as vigilant to the little situational ploys that can get you to step across the line,"
Zimbardo explains.
Social psychology has shown the "power of the crowd" for decades. For example, in the 1960s,
psychologists Stanley Milgram, PhD, Leonard Bickman, PhD, and Lawrence Berkowitz, EdD, demonstrated
social influence by having a group of people on a busy New York City sidewalk gaze up at nothing in the
sky. When one man looked up at nothing, only 4 percent of passersby joined him. When five people stood
on the sidewalk looking up at nothing, 18 percent of passersby joined them. And when a group of 15
gazed upward, 40 percent of passersby then joined, nearly stopping traffic in one minute.
As other cult leaders have done, Jim Jones used this "power of the crowd" influence in controlling others'
behavior, intellect, thoughts and emotions, says Steven Hassan, a licensed mental health counselor with
the counseling group Freedom of Mind and a former cult member. This includes instituting rigid rules and
regulations, withholding or distorting information, using hypnotic trances, and generating guilt and fear
among followers.
Building awareness
However, since Jonestown, many social psychologists remain unaware of the psychological impact of the
mind control techniques, often elucidated in social psychology research, that cults use to recruit and retain
members, Zimbardo says. Many psychologists remain skeptical that behavior is intentionally controlled by
these organizations at all, rather believing that people join cults of their own free will, as they do with
traditional religious groups.
Those who study cults, on the other hand, maintain that psychologists need to study how cults abuse
social psychology research. Psychologists are also needed to develop effective treatments for cult victims
to help them break free from a cult's influence before it's too late, so that, in cases like Jonestown, history
does not repeat itself.
"It's shocking to me that so many people today have not even heard of Jonestown," Hassan says. Yet,
Hassan observes the lasting psychological effects every day in his work with former cult victims, and he
says cults are growing more powerful and more cunning in their deceit--often by using psychological
research findings--while the public remains largely unaware of them.
If cults are going to abuse lessons from social psychology, psychologists must study how they are doing
this, Cialdini says. More attention to researching and working with cult victims is needed, Hassan adds.
For example, psychologists need specific training to work with former cult members, who often suffer from
dissociative or panic disorders, he explains.

"There are lots of individuals who are suffering," Hassan says, "and they need our help."

Mind control: psychological reality or mindless rhetoric?

One of the most fascinating sessions at APA's Annual Convention featured presentations by former cult
members. (See "Cults of hatred"). Several participants challenged our profession to form a task force on
extreme forms of influence, asserting that the underlying issues inform discourses on terrorist recruiting,
on destructive cults versus new religious movements, on social-political-"therapy" cults and on human
malleability or resiliency when confronted by authority power.
That proposal is intriguing. At one level of concern are academic questions of the validity of the conceptual
framework for a psychology of mind control. However, at broader levels, we discover a network of vital
questions:
* Does exposing the destructive impact of cults challenge the principle of religious freedom of citizens to
mindfully join nontraditional religious groups?
* When some organizations that promote religious or self-growth agendas become rich enough to wield
power to suppress media exposs, influence legal judgments or publicly defame psychology, how can they
be challenged?
* What is APA's role in establishing principles for treating those who claim to have suffered abuse by cults,
for training therapists to do so and for establishing guidelines for expert testimony?
Personal freedoms
A basic value of the profession of psychology is promoting human freedom of responsible action, based on
awareness of available behavioral options, and supporting an individual's rights to exercise them.
Whatever we mean by "mind control" stands in opposition to this positive value orientation.
Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised
by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral
outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological
principles.
Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and
identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments
and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral
manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian
leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats
or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings
where they are applied intensively.
A body of social science evidence shows that when systematically practiced by state-sanctioned police,
military or destructive cults, mind control can induce false confessions, create converts who willingly
torture or kill "invented enemies," engage indoctrinated members to work tirelessly, give up their money-and even their lives--for "the cause."
Power struggles
It seems to me that at the heart of the controversy over the existence of mind control is a bias toward
believing in the power of people to resist the power of situational forces, a belief in individual will power
and faith to overcome all evil adversity. It is Jesus modeling resistance against the temptations of Satan,
and not the vulnerability of Adam and Eve to deception. More recently, examples abound that challenge
this person-power misattribution.

4
From the 1930s on, there are many historical instances of state power dominating individual beliefs and
values. In Stalin's Moscow show trials, his adversaries publicly confessed to their treasons. Catholic
Cardinal Mindzenty similarly gave false confessions favoring his communist captors. During the Korean
War, American airmen confessed to engaging in germ warfare after intense indoctrination sessions. The
Chinese Thought Reform Program achieved massive societal conversions to new beliefs. It has also been
reported that the CIA put into practice nearly 150 projects--collectively termed MKULTRA--to develop
various forms of exotic mind control, including the use of LSD and hypnosis. More than 900 U.S. citizens
committed suicide or murdered friends and family at the persuasive bidding of their Peoples Temple cult
leader, Jim Jones.
The power of social situations to induce "ego alien" behavior over even the best and brightest of people
has been demonstrated in a variety of controlled experiments, among them, Stanley Milgram's obedience
to authority studies, Albert Bandura's research on dehumanization, my Stanford Prison Experiment and
others on deinviduation.
Understanding the dynamics and pervasiveness of situational power is essential to learning how to resist it
and to weaken the dominance of the many agents of mind control who ply their trade daily on all of us
behind many faces and fronts.

Panelists at a convention session on hatred asked APA to form a task force to investigate mind control
among destructive cults. BY MELISSA DITTMANN
Holding a briefcase filled with the explosive C4, Kerry Noble entered a church for gay men in Kansas City,
Mo., in 1984 with intentions of blowing it up. He waited for his opportunity as he sat among a crowd of
about 60 people.
"All I had to do was hit the timer and walk out," Noble said. "About 10 or 15 minutes later, there'd be an
explosion, and everyone would die."
Noble thought he was going to start a revolution. As a cult leader of the Covenant, Sword and the Arm of
the Lord (CSA), he was on a mission for his organization, which had come to hate homosexuals, blacks
and Jews.
But as Noble sat among the crowd, he put a face to his enemy. And his "enemy" appeared no different
than anyone else. He thought of the consequences--of what would have amounted to the largest terrorist
attack in America at the time. Then, he picked up the briefcase and left.
Noble joined other former cult members and experts at APA's 2002 Annual Convention in Chicago during
the session "Cults of hatred" to speak out on the effects of mind control and destructive cults. Panelists
made a plea to the association to form a task force to investigate mind control among destructive cults.
"Extreme influence [such as mind control and cults] has remained dormant in the field of psychology,"
Alan W. Scheflin, professor of law at Santa Clara University, told the audience.
Mind control, or "brainwashing" as it's commonly referred to by the media, is often viewed by many
psychologists as science fiction. However, panelists stressed that mind control is being used by cults to
recruit and maintain followers and can have dangerous and lasting psychological consequences.

5
Cults that use mind-control techniques "have been able to do so with impunity, and the people who are
victims of these techniques get no treatment," Scheflin said.
In fact, psychologists who do treat someone claiming to be a mind-control victim from a destructive cult
might face a malpractice action. "There are no legitimate treatments that are scientifically validated that
appear in peer review journals, although they are effective clinically," Scheflin said. "Therefore, they are
vulnerable to challenge in the courts. That has to stop. There is no reason why people who are true
victims of mind control or people who think they are victims and are wrong should not receive treatment
when they need it or want it."
The time is now for psychologists to investigate cults and their impact, Scheflin said, especially in light of
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. To fully understand the psychological factors that lead to terrorism, he
added, the answers might lie in understanding cults.
The cult mentality
Panelist Deborah Layton also encouraged more help for mind-control victims. "It can happen to the best of
us," Layton said.
At age 18, in the early 1970s, Layton's need for belonging attracted her to the Peoples Temple, a group
that offered her a sense of comfort and answers to life. The leader, the Rev. Jim Jones, made her feel like
she was joining the Peace Corps. A few years later, Layton went to Jonestown, the Guyana village where
Peoples Temple followers went to escape racism and persecution. However, the peaceful settlemen
appeared more like a "concentration camp," surrounded by armed guards, where food was scarce and
followers were required to work long hours.
She escaped from Jonestown in 1978 and reported to police about activities there, such as mass suicide
drills and people being held against their wills. Her prediction of a mass suicide came to fruition a few
months later when 913 followers drank lethal cyanide punch or were shot to death.
Layton felt ashamed at being warped into a cult. "If I could tell this story and explain it to the world, then
maybe I could take myself out of the muck of shame," Layton said.
Steve Hassan, a former cult member and licensed mental health counselor who specializes in helping
those in destructive cults, says recovery from a cult's mind control can be facilitated if victims attain the
proper information, support and interventions from former cult members.
As for Kerry Noble, the CSA cult grew out of a small, pacifistic church he joined in 1977, which over four
years gradually changed its religious philosophy. In 1978, the organization spent $52,000 on weapons. By
1981, the church had become an armed, extremist hate group.
Noble had a four-day armed standoff with the federal government in 1985 and spent two years in prison.
But, he said understanding the psychology behind mind control helped him in his eight-year battle to
recover. "I've learned that hate is a learned behavior," Noble said.
Cults often use behavior modification on followers, such as thought- stopping techniques and instilling an
"us-versus-them" mindset, Hassan said. With thought-stopping techniques, members are taught to stop
doubts from entering their consciousness about the cult, often with a key phrase they repeat. Phobia
indoctrination is also used, where cults play on a person's irrational fears, with threats such as the person
will develop cancer or go insane if he ever leaves or questions the group.
"Just as we can do short-term deep effective therapy to teach people about phobias and help them to get
over their phobia, we can do the same with cult mind-control victims," Hassan said.

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A destructive cult is an authoritarian regime, which uses deception when recruiting as well as mindcontrol techniques to make a person dependent and obedient, he said.
Al Qaeda fulfills the criteria for a destructive cult, Hassan said. "We need to apply what we know about
destructive mind-control cults, and this should be a priority with the war on terrorism. We need to
understand the psychological aspects of how people are recruited and indoctrinated so we can slow down
recruitment. We need to help counsel former cult members and possibly use some of them in the war
against terrorism."
A legitimate field of study?
In 1986, a group of psychologists formed a task force--Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and
Control (DIMPAC)--and submitted a report to APA that condemned cults for using brainwashing. But APA's
Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology found the report "unacceptable," lacking in
scientific evidence, relying too much on sensational anecdotes and providing insufficient information for
APA to take a position on the issue.
But Scheflin maintains that for the last 100 years society has been given clear signals that this is a
legitimate field of study, and psychology needs an organized response. For example, in the 1880s and
1890s, hypnosis was found to be used to implant false memories. In the 1920s, police were believed to
use "third-degree" interrogation techniques, where pain and suffering was inflicted on criminal suspects.
During the Moscow Trials in the 1930s, innocent political ideologists were forced to confess to being
traitors. In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese Communists allegedly used brain washing techniques during the
Korean War.
"These subjects are incredibly unappetizing and very difficult to grapple with, but they are an essential
part of the psychology of the human mind," Scheflin said. "We need to stop this germ from spreading."
In a 1980 survey, 54 percent of high school students in the San Francisco Bay area reported at least one
recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported three to five contacts, according to a study
of more than 1,000 students by APA President Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, and Cynthia F. Hartley. Those
numbers are expected to have increased with electronic media growing as a recruitment tool for cults.
Cults exist at every layer of society, said Stephen J. Morgan, a faculty member with the American
Management Association/Management Centre Europe in Brussels, Belgium. Morgan was an international
leader for an extremist political cult in the 1980s, which operated in 31 countries with 25,000 operatives.
While holding office in the British Labour Party, Morgan worked as a spy in carrying out activities against
the state.
About 10 years ago, Morgan left the organization and regained his self-identity. Today, he lectures all over
the world on mind control by terror cults. At APA's convention, he stressed the importance of a deeper
understanding of cults in understanding terrorism. Cult leaders are usually psychopaths with a desire for
power and often take ideas from politics, religion and psychology to fulfill their purpose, he said. Through
mind control, they are able to filter their thoughts and behaviors into "fanatical faith and belief" among
followers.
"We need to bring the panelists' experiences together with your expertise," Morgan told psychologists in
the audience. "It is a question of our health and safety as a nation."
Opposing terrorism by understanding the human capacity for evil
APA's president-elect on why the efforts to prevent future terrorist acts must begin with
understanding the root causes of the hatred against America.
BY PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO, PHD

7
Sept. 11, 2001, may change forever the way Americans live their lives. A small band of men armed only
with box cutters did what no other global superpower has been able to do to the United States. They
struck terror in our hearts by demolishing in a single hour an icon of American enterprise, the World Trade
Center. They went further in their daring attack by destroying a substantial section of the Pentagon, the
symbol of our military might. They exploded horror and chaos into our collective lives in ways none of us
had ever before experienced, not even the most seasoned war veteran. Thousands of people were
murdered, millions of lives were disrupted, trillions of dollars of business and income were lost.
The nation and the world remain in shock at the unimaginable devastation that has become a defining
moment for this generation.
They are the new breed of "terrorists," faceless people carefully programmed to destroy their enemy at all
costs. They are likely to be educated, well-trained, blindly obedient to authority, totally dedicated to a
religious-cultural ideology, living in a time zone of present fatalism, with few possessions and nothing to
lose except sacrificing their lives for a higher cause.
They embody "creative evil" at its worst, and in a form that could become most terrifying to democratic
nations everywhere.
In fact, this terrorist attack on U.S. sovereignty represents a new level of "creative evil" in which human
intellect subserves the basest motives of violence and destruction. Thus, it is imperative not to
underestimate the power and catalytic force of this new enemy. It is a shadowy force without identifiable
territorial boundaries, but one that has the charismatic power to unite disparate allies in many nations and
to clone kindred warriors with its fervent ideological mission and focused hatred toward America and its
allies.
We cannot underestimate this evil
We have begun to appreciate the extent to which this complex, expertly choreographed terrorist attack
was the end product of extensive planning, training and professional expertise that required financial
resources and networks of co-conspirators living among us. They had to know how a dozen or more of
their team members could breach airport security. They knew to select transcontinental jetliners filled to
capacity with jet fuel that on explosion could melt steel girders. They had to understand enough kinetic
physics and structural engineering to know the locations on the World Trade Center that would make it
maximally vulnerable to their explosive attack. They had to know how to pilot commercial jetliners, how to
disarm warning signals and how to enable four huge airplanes to fly in and out of our major urban centers
undetected.
This creatively evil enemy cannot be underestimated any longer. Moreover, we have to change our
perception of this attack as "senseless violence," as it has often been described. Of course, this tragic
destruction of lives and property does not make sense to us because it is incomprehensible that any
individual or group would engage in such evil deeds. Calling it "senseless," "mindless," "insane" or the
work of "madmen" is wrong for two reasons. It fails to adopt the perspective of the perpetrators, as an act
with a clearly defined purpose that we must understand to challenge it most effectively. And such negative
labeling lulls us into thinking it is random, not comparable to anything we do understand, and is making
us disrespectful of the high level of reasoned intellect behind these deeds, however distorted or diabolical
it may be.
Constructive efforts at preventing future similar acts of international violence best begin with attempts to
understand not only the "who" question, but the "what" question as well. Our national leaders will seek
out those who orchestrated this destructive attack against our nation and eventually bring them to justice.
But even if the identifiable terrorist leaders were to be eliminated, would that stop future terrorism?
Unlikely, unless we know what are the root causes of the hatred against America, unless the ideological,
political and social bases of the mentalities of the next generation of potential terrorists are more fully
appreciated and efforts to change them are engaged.

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Evil has always existed in many forms and will continue to flourish in different ways in different places.
Surely, there are individuals we acknowledge as embodying evil, just as Lucifer and Satan do--Hitler,
Stalin, Pol Pot and other national tyrants. They are all dead, yet evil flourishes throughout the world with
nameless conductors orchestrating ever-new violence. It is well for us now to go beyond our tendency to
focus on dispositional evil as a peculiar property or characteristic of despicable particular individuals.
Instead, we might consider focusing on the situational determinants of evil in order to recognize the
generic forces of evil, to identify the breeding grounds of evil that can seduce even good people to become
perpetrators of evil.
Even while acknowledging our individual and national need for retribution and punishment of the leaders
of these terrorist attacks, we must also realize that without altering the fundamental sources of antiAmerican and anti-democratic beliefs and values in other nations, new replacements will emerge for each
tyrant leader we punish or kill.
What research has found
Much psychological research reveals the ease with which ordinary people can be recruited to engage in
harmful behaviors against their fellows. In one classic study by Stanley Milgram, the majority of ordinary
American citizens who participated in it blindly obeyed an authority figure and administered what they
believed were painful, even lethal shocks to a stranger. Albert Bandura showed that intelligent students
were willing to be extremely aggressive toward other groups of students merely because they were
characterized as just "like animals."
In another demonstration from my own laboratory, normal college students recruited to role-play prison
guards became their roles in a matter of days, behaving with escalating violence and sadism toward their
prisoners--other college students.
We know that a cult leader, Jim Jones, reverend of San Francisco's People's Temple, was able to program
his followers to commit suicide, or to kill one another on his command; more than 900 American citizens
did so in the jungles of Guyana. Research by John Steiner (an Auschwitz survivor) indicates that most Nazi
concentration camp guards were "ordinary men" before and following their years of perpetrating evil.
Our focus ahead
Many more examples could be culled to illustrate reasons why we should not demonize these terrorists as
an alien breed. Instead, we should focus on a better understanding of the mind-control tactics and
strategies that might make even good people engage in evil deeds at some time in their lives, and that
might recruit new generations of impoverished young people into lives of terrorism. We need also to
acknowledge openly "the dark side of religion" in terms of how religiously based value systems can be
perverted to justify and reward the most horrendous of human deeds. Unbridled evil has been carried out
in the name of religion and condoned in the name of God over the centuries by most nations of the world,
and still is.
The efforts of our military forces in tracking down and destroying the terrorist leaders has a collateral risk.
It models revenge and retaliation at a national level that can become a stimulus for individual hostility
toward innocent citizens in our own country whose ethnicity, religion or appearance might be similar to
those of the terrorists. Research by Dane Archer shows that homicide rates increase dramatically following
all wars, the same for victor or loser nations, presumably because individuals learn to use violent means
of conflict resolution, as had been sanctioned by their national leaders. We cannot allow that transfer of
hostility to develop because it fuels the cycle of violence started by the terrorists. Terrorists create terror;
terror creates fear and anger; fear and anger create aggression, and aggression against citizens of
different ethnicity or religion creates racism and, in turn, new forms of terrorism.
We must individually and collectively refuse to adopt the terrorists' devaluing of human life. If we do not,
and we yield to the quiet rage of hatred that their vile deeds have generated in most of us; then our
desire to destroy them at all costs allies us more with the forces of evil than of good. We have seen the

9
enemy; do not allow it to become us. We have also witnessed the tremendous outpouring of positive
emotions, goodwill and heroic deeds of Americans in response to this tragedy. We are giving money and
blood, selflessly donating our skills and energies, and even sacrificing our lives to help others. This
tragedy may in the long run help to nurture the best in us all; to rekindle civic engagement, to connect
each more fully with family, friends and neighbors, to put community and nation before self interests. It
may give us new reasons to be genuinely proud to be Americans who oppose evil with tolerance,
compassion, justice and love.
It is time for American heroism to oppose terrorism. A new era has been ushered into our lives as
individuals and as a nation. Heroism is to be defined not only as the sacrifice of life for others, but
broadened to include the opening of ourselves to the needs of others. Heroes are ready and willing to
share their precious commodities, like their time and sense of vulnerability with others in meaningful faceto-face encounters. They rise above the pressures toward mindless compliance and situationally induced
conformity. They are both uniquely individual and uniquely socially focused. Heroic deeds reinforce the
bonds of the human condition in ways that resist the forces of terror and evil. It is time to choose to be a
hero in your own family and community.