Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2005, Page 64
story of the little boy who asked his parents for a pony for Christmas. Christmas day
arrived, the presents were all unwrapped, but no pony. A while later, Mom and Dad noticed
that the boy was not in the house. They went to look for him and found him in the barn,
thrashing wildly around in a big pile of manure. They quickly pulled him out and asked him,
―What in the world were you doing?‖ He replied, ―Well, gosh, with all that manure I figured
there was sure to be a pony in there somewhere.‖ Unlike the little boy, I decided to
examine each proposition individually before concluding that there must be a pony among
them.
For a proposition to be a valid part of a critical argument, it must pass three tests: (1) It
must be a statement in disputational form that challenges something about the theory it is
criticizing. (2) It must be relevant to the stated theory that it is criticizing. (3) It must be
factually true (if a statement of fact) or logically true (if a statement of logic). Only if the
proposition passes all three of these tests can it make a contribution to the author‘s
argument. I subjected each of Anthony‘s ninety-eight propositions to these three tests.
There are eight logically possible outcomes to the combination of these tests. In table 1, I
list these possible outcomes and the number of propositions that fall within each category.
Table 1 Distribution of Anthony’s Propositions on Each Logically Possible
Combination of Tests
Disputational Form
Relevant to the
Stated Theory
Factually or
Logically Correct Frequency Count
No No No 7
Yes No No 23
No Yes No 14
Yes Yes No 27
No No Yes 11
Yes No Yes 5
No Yes Yes 11
Yes Yes Yes 0
Total 98
An examination of table 1 shows that some of Anthony‘s disputational propositions are
indeed relevant and that some are indeed correct. But, unfortunately for Anthony, none of
those that are relevant are correct, and none of those that are correct are relevant. This
refutation of all of Anthony‘s ninety-eight propositions, if it holds up to scrutiny, constitutes
a definitive refutation of his entire argument. I grant him that, as gestalt and holistic
philosophers have taught us, the whole may sometimes be greater than the sum of its
parts. But when the parts add up to zero, one must acknowledge that any gestalt multiplier
times zero still equals zero.
I have demonstrated here not that my theory is necessarily correct, but only that Anthony
has not succeeded in debunking it or even making a dent in it. Before I discuss each of
Anthony‘s propositions in turn, let me mention a few of the more representative fallacies
among them. I‘ll focus on three methodological errors that appear as persistent themes
across numerous of his propositions:
1. Inexact translation across paradigms
2. Incorrect mapping to a philosophical indeterminacy (free will)
3. Inappropriate application of legal standards to a scientific argument

Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2005, Page 65
Translation Across Paradigms
We social scientists work in a multipardigmatic discipline. Critical analysis across
paradigmatic boundaries is possible only to the extent that the critic is well versed, not only
in his own paradigm, but also in the paradigm the work he is criticizing uses.
I work within a traditional social-psychological paradigm and use concepts in the standard
way in which they are used in social psychology. Anthony works within a humanistic-
psychoanalytic paradigm, which uses some of the same concepts in a different way and also
uses many concepts that are not found in social psychology. Anthony is welcome to his
paradigm in his own work. But when he chooses to criticize the work of a social
psychologist, his attack appears only ridiculous if he doesn‘t first acquaint himself with the
vocabulary and assumptions prevalent in that discipline—unless, of course, his goal is to
attack the entire field of social psychology and its paradigm.
I‘ll give just one example here of how Anthony, by not understanding how social
psychologists construct theories of influence, veers off track in his criticism. Standard
practice in social psychology is to describe mechanisms of how influence is hypothesized to
flow from a target to a source. The elaboration likelihood model and the encoder-decoder
model are just two examples of these sorts of theories. Such theories do not discuss
individual differences in attitude or motivation that targets bring to the influence situation,
not because we are not interested in individual variation, but rather because we wish to use
our theories, once established, to study such individual variation. For example, the well-
known Asch effect in social psychology is a mechanism that describes how individuals are
pressured to conform to group norms. The Asch effect says nothing about individual
differences, but this mechanism has been used in many studies to identify the
characteristics of individuals who are immune to pressures to conform. A number of
Anthony‘s criticisms of my model are complaints that I do not consider individual differences
in pre-motivations to belong to cults. Nothing could be further from the truth. But I develop
a model of charismatic influence within cults that does not account for individual influences
precisely to enable studies to be constructed that might let us discover how the pre-
motivations of individuals cause them to react differently to the same influence process.
Anthony does not seem to understand this difference but instead draws erroneous
conclusions from the assumption that I am working within the same person-centered
(rather than mechanism-centered) paradigm within which he is working.
Mapping to a Philosophical Indeterminacy
Anthony makes one error so persistently that it runs through fully one-third of all his ninety-
eight propositions. This error is to assume that my theory asserts that the influence
mechanism I am describing involves the destruction of the target‘s free will. He calls this
―the involuntarism hypothesis,‖ and it is the cornerstone of much of his criticism of what he
considers the bogus nature of my attempts to theorize about social influence. In practice,
because the words voluntary, involuntary, voluntarism, or involuntarism appear nowhere in
my writing on this subject, Anthony argues instead that I somehow sneak this hypothesis in
the back door through a process that he calls ―tactical ambiguity.‖
It is true that various anticult writers, drawn mostly from the ranks of mental-health
professionals rather than the social sciences, have alleged that cults take away the free will
of their members, not realizing—or not caring—that the overthrow of free will is an
unfalsifiable (and therefore unscientific) phenomenon. It is also true that Anthony has in the
past successfully exposed the nonscientific nature of these cultic-loss-of-free-will
arguments. He senses correctly that if only he could map an isomorphism between my
theory and theirs, his work would be mostly done, and he could tar me with the same brush
he has used successfully in the past on these hapless clinicians (of whom Margaret Singer is
the most notorious example).