Brainwashing: Coercive Persuasion Techniques

Brainwashing is the subject of many films and documentaries, such as those about communists in Vietnam who brainwashed American soldiers. However, the process is not always as dramatic as in movies. You can better understand brainwashing if we describe it as the use of coercive persuasion techniques.

Coercive persuasion involves trying to exert influence over someone through force. This kind of persuasion is much stronger and more invasive. They include cults, totalitarian states, terrorist organizations and kidnappers who use this type of persuasion.

However, brainwashing someone or using coercive persuasion is not easy. You have to use different techniques to actually change someone’s belief, thinking process and way of feeling and acting.

These coercive persuasion techniques can be divided into four types: the social type, the emotional type, the cognitive type, and the type that induces dissociative states.

Social Techniques

In this case, techniques are used that are intended to manipulate and control the environment of the person being brainwashed. The goal is to weaken the person’s resistance, making it easier to convince him. Some of the social coercive persuasion techniques that one can use are:

• Isolation: This makes it a lot easier to brainwash someone. It involves being cut off from the rest of the world mentally, socially and physically. In other words, the individual is completely isolated.

• Information management: Manipulating and controlling the information someone receives is a form of isolation. The less information a person has, the fewer options they have to choose from. This severely limits his critical thinking ability.
• Creating a state of existential dependence: This involves making someone believe that their existence depends entirely on someone else. Usually that person is some kind of leader. In practice, it means fully satisfying a person’s primary and secondary needs until he develops a complete dependence.
• Psychophysical Debilitation: Some types of physical debilitation are linked to psychological debilitation. This, in turn, leads to a weakened ability to resist persuasion techniques.

Emotional Techniques

Motivations are emotionally conditioned. So if you can influence people’s emotions, you can influence their motivations and their behavior.

• Emotional activation of pleasure:  to charm and treat someone well. People use this technique to draw others in and get their attention.
• Emotional activation of fear, guilt, and tension: Using rewards and punishment to elicit emotional responses such as fear, guilt, and tension. These emotions encourage dependence and submission.

Cognitive Techniques

These techniques are based on the two techniques we discussed above. A person who is physically weak and feels guilty is in a perfect position to be brainwashed.

• To disdain the critical thinking ability: the perpetrator shows the other why it is not smart to follow his own thoughts. This will make him want to suppress any thought he has.

• Use of deception and lies: distorting reality by hiding, lying, or deceiving information.
• Demanding submission: ensuring that a group idea is adhered to. Demand that the individual submit to what the group decides. In other words, develop conformity and submission.
• Group Identity:  Identity must be collective. As a result, individuals lose their personality and take over the identity of the group. This can cause individuals to lose distinctive features.
• Controlling the attention: Manipulating where someone’s attention goes means you can also force them to pay attention to your persuasion techniques.
• Language Control: Speaking in a controlling manner means limiting one’s freedom. Omitting certain words or phrases is one way to avoid specific questions or evaluation.

• Changing the source of authority: As soon as you break down someone’s principles of authority, you expose them to a totalitarian authority. As a result, this authority figure gets all the power. All others must submit to him.

Coercive Persuasion Techniques That Induce Dissociative States

Dissociation corresponds to states of trance that occur when an experience is intensified. These states lead to a temporary loss of consciousness and identity. They are more common in totalitarian environments.

These states of consciousness also make followers more vulnerable. As a result, it is easier to control them by limiting their options and reducing the chance of evaluating them.

You use coercive persuasion techniques or brainwashing when you manipulate someone’s environment to make them weaker. Cognitive and emotional persuasion changes the way a person thinks and feels. This eventually puts him in a state of trance, in which it is easier to talk to him.