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).
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).
