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Within days, some of the players become increasingly aggressive, violent, and sadistic.
Reflecting upon the findings of that study, two of its designers concluded that it
demonstrated the power of situations to overwhelm psychologically normal,
healthy people and to elicit from them unexpectedly cruel, yet ‗situationally
appropriate‘ behavior. In many instances during our study, the participants‘
behavior (and our own) directly contravened personal value systems and
deviated dramatically from past records of conduct. This behavior was elicited
by the social context and roles we created, and it had painful, even traumatic
consequences for the prisoners against whom it was directed (Haney and
Zimbardo 1998).
The analogy to what can happen when psychologically healthy and normal people become
involved in violent religions is obvious. After groups establish norms that condone violence,
and create social positions or roles to enact it (and often do so under their leaders‘
directions), many formerly nonviolent people will rise to the occasion and commit acts of
aggression or abuse. Although I do not wish to initiate a debate about the guilt or
vulnerability of persons involved in complex and often disturbing court cases, neither
Charles Manson‘s ‗girls‘ (Faith 2001:27-33, 88-90), Patty Hearst, nor the American Taliban
fighter, John Walker Lindh, had histories of violence until they became involved with violent
groups. For what it is worth, at Walker Lindh‘s sentencing hearing on October 4, 2001, he
reflected, ―‗...had I realized then what I know now ...I would never have joined them‘‖
(Cable News Network 2001).
Nothing better illustrates this ethic of learned, group-contextual violence than an
examination of key members of Aum Shinrikyo, who followed the orders of their guru,
Shoko Asahara, in a series of killings that culminated in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo
subway in March 1995. Summing up the kinds of young people who became involved with
Aum and its murderous practices, journalists David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall
concluded:
...many were students of the sciences or technical fields like engineering.
More than a few were otaku, Japan‘s version of computer nerds—techno-
freaks who spent their free time logged onto electronic networks and
amassing data of every type. They were inevitably described as quiet kids,
with little apparent interest in the outside world. They spent what free time
they had absorbed in their comics and their computers (Kaplan and Marshall
1996:26-27).
Nothing in their backgrounds would suggest that some of them would become killers and
chemical terrorists. The best explanation for their participation in violence is that they
devoted themselves to a leader, Asahara, whose aggressive paranoia about an apocalypse
played itself out through the organization that he built (Brackett 1996:98).
C. Group Alienation from Disaffected, Former Members: Stalking
While it remains true that a person who is alienated from a group may lash out violently in
an act of revenge, and a group may do the same toward a schismatic competitor, evidence
indicates that often when radicalized group members strike out against targets, those
targets are former members. In other words, apostates who now feel alienation from the
groups to which they had belonged may become targets of violence by the remaining
members who feel threatened by their defections, concerned about the knowledge that the
defectors may have about group operations, and worried about the complaints to civil
authorities that the defectors may be making. Even though these persons have left the
immediate membership of their former groups, the groups themselves still consider these

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people as legitimate targets for their social-control efforts through harassments and
retaliations.
We need not be reminded, for example, that a defector was among the first people killed on
the tarmac at Jonestown (Reiterman and Jacobs 1982:517-518, 530-531), and the first
victims of the Solar Temple deaths were a disaffected couple who had access to the leaders‘
secrets, along with their infant son (Hall with Schuyler and Trinh 2000:112, 139-140).
Former members of Ervil LeBarron‘s Church of the Firstborn (a fundamentalist Mormon
group) died in murders directed by the leader, some deaths even occurring after he was
dead (Chynoweth and Shapiro 1990:3-5, 148) and a vocal critic on the fringes of the
Kirtanananda branch of the Hare Krishnas was shot, stabbed, and had his head bashed in
(Hubner and Gruson 1988:18). Synanon sent out members of a ―goon squad‖ (i.e., a group
of thugs) to silence critics and defectors (Gerstel 1982:263-264 Mitchell, Mitchell, and
Ofshe 1980:168, 169-171, 180), and Aum Shinrikyo killed the elderly brother of a defector
in a failed interrogation to determine where his sister was (Brackett 1996:121-123 Kaplan
and Marshall 1996:227-229).
Scientology had a written policy in place (dated October 18, 1967), specifically applied to
troublesome former members and other critics, which stated that a member whom the
organization declared an ―enemy‖ was ―Fair game. May be deprived of property or injured
by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be
tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed‖ (Hubbard 1967). Its originator was Scientology‘s
founder, L. Ron Hubbard and when he cancelled the ―fair game‖ policy a year later, he did
so because ―[i]t causes bad public relations.‖ He added, however, that this supposed
cancellation actually ―does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling‖ of a person
attempting to hinder or harm Scientology (Hubbard 1968). During that and subsequent
years, Scientology appears to have applied the ―fair game‖ doctrine to numerous
troublesome defectors and critics (Breckenridge 1984a Hubbard 1968 Kent 2003).
Drawing another analogy to the family-violence literature, the manner in which some
groups attack former members parallels how some abusive former partners stalk their
estranged companions (Sheridan, Davies, and Boon 2001). Neither the abusive group
leaders nor the abusive former partners can stand the loss of power represented by the
defections—by persons formerly under their control but now ostensibly out from under it.
Among, for example, the different types of family abuse, ―they seem to be acts carried out
by abusers to compensate for their perceived lack of or loss of power” (Finkelhor 1983:19
[italics in original]). So, too, is it the same for types of abuse by some groups toward
persons who have left their flock. Moreover, some of the power that defectors can have over
leaders is "inside knowledge"—knowledge about life as a member that may reveal realities
that persons holding group power would prefer to keep quiet. Sometimes, therefore, group
leaders and/or members attempt retaliations to frighten and intimidate other times, they
kill. A strong predictor, therefore, about the danger posed by a religion is the manner in
which it deals with former members, especially ones who turn into critics.
IV. Intergroup Contributors to Religious Dangers
Somewhat cryptically, Roy (2000:398) states that ―feeling alienated from and persecuted by
other groups aid the development of violence.‖ Presumably because of that alienation,
[g]roup members are unable to enter into superordinate goals with people
from other groups. Superordinate goals require the cooperation of people
from different groups to accomplish a goal. Without superordinate goals,
conflict between groups can escalate (Roy 2000:398).
Although sociologists might dispute these statements as absolute truths—for example,
controversial ‗religious‘ groups have worked together on the superordinate goal of fighting