Content warning: This post will discuss violent acts committed by cults and their leaders
Each cult has its lore and each began in slightly different ways. However, by the by, there are many similarities that social psychologists and sociologists have studied over the years. In this post, I'll discuss how conformity influences human behavior and the factors that influence conformity.
Conformity was famously studied by Asch in the 50s. It was a simple design: have confederates (people he told to answer a certain way) enter a group discussion with a study participant. They all examined different rope lengths and determined which one was the same length as the comparison rope (as shown above). In the first trial, all confederates gave the correct answer, as did the participant. In the second trial, all the confederates gave the wrong answer and 75% of participants gave the incorrect answer to conform to the group. This was repeated 11 more times, and overall, participants conformed with the group 37% of the time. While this was a trivial situation, participants still reported internal conflict over the conflict between their perceptions and the perceptions of others. Asch and other researchers wanted to pinpoint social factors that influence conformity and concluded it was influenced by the following:
Uniformity of agreement. If everyone in the group gave the wrong answer, the participant would conform, but if one confederate gave the right answer, conformity went down by 75%
Difference in the wrong answer. Knowing someone else in the room disagreed with the group made the participant less likely to conform
Size. The smaller the group = the more likely to conform, but only up to 5 or 6 people. More than that didn't make much of a difference
While Asch only studied observable behavior, some brain imaging studies found that social pressure might sometimes influence perception as well. Berns did a study similar to Asch and found that conformity was associated with activation of the amygdala (where anxiety and stress responses come from and plays a large role in emotion), suggesting not conforming leads to anxiety and stress. They also found that conformity was associated with activation in the parietal and occipital lobes (areas associated with visual perception), suggesting conformity may influence our perception of reality.
There are also individual differences that influence conformity as there are with everything else in psychology. For example, those with low self-esteem are more likely than those with high self-esteem to conform. This could be because they fear rejection, or they want to feel accepted and part of the group. Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be a difference of sex. While it was originally thought that women were more likely to conform, later studies actually conducted by women found there was no sex difference in conformity levels. (Remember sex and gender are two different things).
One of, if not the most powerful (in my opinion), influences on conformity is deindividuation (loss of the individual). This is the process of people engaging in behavior they normally wouldn't when stripped of their individuality. This is typically the first step of initiating new members to the cult. Several factors contribute to deindividuation, but the most prominent are a lack of personal responsibility and a feeling of anonymity. While deindividuated, we are more susceptible to social influences like the impact of social roles. This is easily observable in practically any online comment section ever. One person leaves a negative comment and others become emboldened to do the same.
One of the most famous, and controversial, studies of psychology was conducted by Phillip Zimbardo at Stanford, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. When I covered ethics when I was teaching, this study was always covered because you can't make this stuff up. The reason this study was so controversial is the actual damage it had on participants. The first rule of psychology (and the first rule of APA Ethics) is to do good and do no harm (beneficence and nonmaleficence). Zimbardo actively harmed his participants. He wanted to know if the conditions of prisons stemmed from people's personalities or the roles they were forced to adopt. For anyone not familiar with this study, Zimbardo got college students and assigned them to the role of either prisoner or guard. The experiment went on for 6 days before it had to be ended due to the distress it was causing participants, especially those assigned to be prisoners. Those assigned to be guards fully adopted their roles and actively abused those assigned to be prisoners.
Deindividuation plays a role in crowds and mob psychology as well. It explains why crowd behavior is so unpredictable: it all depends on if people are behavior prosocially or antisocially. Depending on social norms, deindividuation can make us behave more or less aggressively.
References:
Stanford Prison Experiment: https://www.prisonexp.org/
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