International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 8 2025 2
the instructions from the experimenter anyway. In one
version, according to Milgram’s (1975) description,
[A]t 75 volts, the learner began to grunt and
groan. At 150 volts, he demanded to be let out
of the experiment. At 180 volts, he cried out that
he could no longer stand the pain.
At 300 volts, he ...[insists] he must be
freed (quoted in Stotland &Canon, 1972, 6).
This result supports an emerging central argument
for this analysis. In appropriate circumstances, people
behave in ways inconsistent with their true beliefs and
in ways that they cannot predict, such as when they
procrastinate or show irrational obedience to authority,
as in cults.
Ross (1988, 101-104) argued that this salience
attributed to disobedience is because there is an implicit
psychological contract between the teacher-participant
and the experimenter and that this contract does not
require a valid reason for terminating the shock. Thus,
the participant sees the cost of current disobedience as
very high and can only plan to disobey in the future if the
cost increases. The participant, that is, procrastinates.
Perhaps it is most relevant that the salience is probably
determined not so much by the level of shock the
subject administers but by the difference between the
current voltage and the voltage already administered.
One can see that with a sufficiently slow escalation of
commands, participants can be led to deliver higher
and higher levels of electric shock. They would not
have agreed to administer 450 volts at the start. While
assuming future disobedience, these participants
continue to increase the electric shock needed to
induce them to disobey later, a situation analogous to
cults where members are induced, over time, to act on
behalf of the leader.
The Milgram experiment shows that, when isolated in
a laboratory, individuals may exhibit unexpected and
disturbing behavior out of sheer obedience, powered
by a contract or identification with the experimenter
(Laurens &Ballot, 2021), provided that the demands
progress gradually. Outside the laboratory, in non-
isolated conditions, however, there is evidence that
such behavior occurs only when there is near unanimity
of opinion. In this respect, the most relevant evidence
unpleasant because the “here and now” costs are more
concrete and vivid, as they are immediately unpleasant
compared with vague future costs. This is true even
if the cost of procrastination is very high. Anyone
who decides to diet knows this (Sirois, 2017 Sirois &
Pychil, 2016). Similarly, we adjust our preferences to
desire goods we do not have or cannot easily access.
Elster (1984) used the example of “endogenous change
of preferences.” In one of Hans Christian Andersen’s
novels, a farmer goes to the market to sell or trade his
horse for a profit or something beneficial, but he goes
home with a basket of rotten apples. Along the way, the
farmer had traded the horse for a cow because he liked
it better than the horse, then the cow for a sheep, a
sheep for a goose, a goose for a hen, and finally the hen
for the basket of rotten apples. In other words, people
behave in inconsistent ways that they cannot predict,
indicating that the mind control versus free choice
dichotomy in groups ignores such fluidity in behavior.
In psychology, the relevance a subject or stimuli
assumes concerning a context is called salience. The
salience of an item is its state or quality of standing out
relative to neighboring items. This salience changes
according to the temporal perspective of the viewer
and can produce procrastination or a delay in more
beneficial responses (O’Donoghue &Rabin, 1999, pp.
103-124).
The area in which procrastination is likely to produce the
most damaging results is obedience to undue or abusive
authority, as is typically the case in cults (Singer, 2003).
Nothing explains this better than Milgram’s classic
obedience experiment. Social psychologist Stanley
Milgram (1975) recruited adult men to participate
in an experiment that was supposed to focus on the
effects of punishment on memory. The participants
were routinely assigned the role of teachers, while
an accomplice of the experimenter played the role of
a pupil who had to be punished with electric shocks
when he erred in recalling what was required of him.
The subjects were initially given low-voltage (15 volts)
shocks with doses increasing by 15 volts at a time up to
a maximum of 450. There are several versions of this
experiment, but in all versions, the “pupil” showed a
significant response to the shocks, and most of the time,
the participants revealed afterward that they did not
believe it was right to administer the shock but obeyed

ISSN: 2710-4028 DOI: https://doi.org/10.54208/0008 3
comes from a variant of Asch’s (1951, 177-190). well-
known experiment, Solomon Asch, showed that
participants who were asked to compare the length of
a line with a series of other lines of different lengths
gave a wrong answer in about 40% of cases if they were
preceded by accomplices of the experimenter who had
given deliberately wrong answers. The experimental
participants conformed to the answers of the others
even though they were obviously wrong, an effect
usually attributed to normative influence and the desire
not to break with social norms (Deutsch &Gerard,
1955).
However, in a variant of the experiment, Asch (1952)
found that even one accomplice who gave the right
answer among all the others who gave the wrong one
reduced the number of errors in the experimental
participants by two-thirds. This suggests that the
presence of like-minded people who confirm our
perceptions significantly increases the probability
of disobedience in situations such as Milgram’s
experiment. It could be inferred that obedience,
such as in Milgram’s research, can only occur in the
laboratory, where people are shielded from outside
information and influences. However, there are other
situations in which this can occur, namely in cults
or other similarly coercive environments. In groups
defined this way, closure to the outside world does not
presuppose physical delimitation. In his classic study
of thought reform in Maoist China, Robert Jay Lifton
(2012) indicated “milieu control” as a prerequisite for
social pressure and conformity, including in wider
society.
Cults and persuasion
A frequently published and cited author on cults
and persuasion is the sociologist of new religions,
Eileen Barker, who is associated, because of some of
her early research, with a strand of criticism of the
concept of “mind control.” Barker’s (1984) classic
study, The Making of a Moonie, was conducted on
Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, whose members
are commonly referred to as Moonies. Barker (1984)
found that of more than 1,000 people stopped on the
street who attended their first Moonie event (usually
a luncheon), about 33.3 percent went on to the next
workshop. About 10 percent said they would join, and
about 5 percent were still full members two years later.
Barker (1984) found this figure rather disappointing as it
showed that there is no such extraordinary mechanism
of persuasion, such as brainwashing. It suggests that the
followers are not manipulated as quickly or as much
as some stereotypes of cults might suggest. Barker’s
(1984) assessments are valid in refuting the hypothesis
of a specific and infallible technique for reconstructing
individuals. Such a conception is like that narrated in
the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate. In the
movie, a brainwashed Korean War hero had been
programmed—reconstructed, in the language of the
movie —to assassinate a candidate for the presidency
of the United States. This is seen as an unrealistic
conception of mind control, not only by the critics of
the concept (for example, Richardson and Introvigne,
2001) but even by proponents of mind manipulation
such as Lifton (2012), whose concept of thought
reform is something much more subtle and based on a
combination of coercion from the outside and an inner
exhortation that exploits a person’s feelings of guilt,
shame, and the need to belong (Kruglanski &Orehek,
2011). However, an analysis of the literature reveals
that a different conception of manipulation is possible,
one that sees mind control as a process of persuasion
that takes place precisely by selecting, in successive and
orderly steps, the most willing subjects and is carried
out on the final recruits, operating as indoctrination in
a psychological and relational context, which is by now
profoundly changed (Singer, 2003).
Joining the Moonies, for example, involves four
separate decisions. Potential recruits are first contacted
individually and invited to a two-day weekend
workshop. This workshop is followed by another
seven-day workshop, then a twelve-day workshop, and
finally, real membership. As in the Milgram experiment,
the decision is made in slow stages and through slight
deviations from the previous choice. This progression
is related to the progressive variation in the salience of
the options of obedience and disobedience, as will be
shown in the analysis of research that follows.
Galanter’s (1979) classic study demonstrates this gradual
restructuring of thinking towards commitment. In this
study, also of the Moonies, of the 104 guests in the first
two days of the workshop, 74 did not continue. Of the