Brainwashing? Like ‘The Manchurian Candidate’?

Rebecca Lemov.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Nation & World
Brainwashing? Like ‘The Manchurian Candidate’?

More than vestige of Cold War, mind-control techniques remain with us in social media, cults, AI, elsewhere, new book argues

Liz Mineo

Harvard Staff Writer

June 16, 2025 7 min read

Brainwashing is often viewed as a Cold War relic — think ’60s films like “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The IPCRESS File.”

But Rebecca Lemov, professor of the history of science, argues in her recently released book “The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion” that it still persists. Elements of coercion and persuasion, components of mind and behavior control are used in cults, social media, AI, and even crypto culture, she said.

In this edited interview, Lemov talks about the history of brainwashing, why it endures, and how it works.

What is the common thread among brainwashing, mind control, and hyper-persuasion?

They’re all related. Brainwashing gets the most attention because it is the most dramatic and grabs headlines.

The concept attracted me 20 years ago when I set out to do my dissertation research. Having studied behavioral engineering, brainwashing seemed to me like the most extreme form of engineering someone to do something or think something different than what they might otherwise do.

Mind control is a synonym, but it has more of an emphasis on technology. I invented the word hyper-persuasion to describe a highly targeted set of techniques that can exist in our modern media environment. The common thread among them is one of coercion combined with persuasion.

You write that Korean War POWs in the early 1950s brought the concept of brainwashing home to the U.S. Did brainwashing exist before that?

Before the Korean War, there were incidents that certainly we could call brainwashing, going back to the ancient Greeks and certain cultic mysteries and transformations that were enacted in circumstances of coercion mixed with persuasion.

You could jump forward to the 1930s, to the “show trials” in Moscow where political enemies would be confessing to terrible crimes, or the 1940s, when Cardinal Mindszenty, a Hungarian war hero, who, after having been arrested and imprisoned by the communist police, confessed to crimes against the Hungarian people and the church. He didn’t seem like himself, and it seemed that something had been done to him.

Mindszenty later described that he had been subjected to sleep deprivation, had potentially been drugged, and he said this famous line, which came to represent brainwashing, “Without knowing what had happened to me, I had become a different person.”

With the Korean War, U.S. Air Force POWs came forward with confessions that they had dropped secret germ warfare over China and Korea, and they looked like Mindszenty had looked, in a sort of some hypnotic trance. All of this is depicted in the 1962 movie “The Manchurian Candidate.”

The crisis reached its peak when 21 U.S. POWs who had been held behind enemy lines declared that they would prefer not to return to the United States but rather stay in China. The then-CIA Director Allen Dulles declared that the soldiers had been converted against their will.

It was around this time that MKUltra, a secret CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, was funded.

The case of heiress Patricia Hearst, who was kidnapped and brainwashed by leftist radicals in the 1970s, renewed public interest in brainwashing. Was it in fact brainwashing?

In the trial of Patty Hearst, which was called the trial of the century in 1976, four major experts who testified on her behalf said that what had been done to her was also what had been done to the POWs in the Korean War.

“That’s the paradox of brainwashing. It hides itself in plain sight.”

People had a hard time believing she had been coerced into becoming a leftist radical because she was captured on camera robbing a bank with the guerrilla group that had abducted her, but she said, “I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs.” That’s the paradox of brainwashing. It hides itself in plain sight.

Some scholars argue that brainwashing doesn’t really exist, that it’s merely a hysterical response. In his book “The Captive Mind,” Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz writes that needing to accommodate your thoughts to coincide with a certain regime is to brainwash oneself. He describes how he ultimately couldn’t do it to himself, and that’s why he ended up leaving communist Poland.

In a sense, Patty Hearst, who was 19 when she was abducted and was subjected to physical abuse and indoctrination, couldn’t just pretend to be a soldier. She had to be one. And that’s brainwashing.

You argue in your book that social media, crypto, and other new technologies can produce some sort of mind control. How so?

Social media, AI companionship bots, and crypto, the culture of cryptocurrency investment, are digital environments that include a highly targeted form of emotional connectedness that often has a coercive element.

When we’re on social media, we’re constantly being exposed to messages and microenvironments, which resemble the process of brainwashing or mind control.

“When we’re on social media, we’re constantly being exposed to messages and microenvironments, which resemble the process of brainwashing or mind control.”

First, both start with a kind of ungrounding process or successive shocks. If you’re doom scrolling, you’re subjected to successive shocks, and there is a point of disorientation because we can feel overwhelmed by these algorithmically targeted pieces of information that we voluntarily expose ourselves to, but we can’t seem to stop.

Second is milieu control, which is the kind of siloing where you’re only getting controlled messages from certain sources.

That can result in what I call hyper-persuasion, which becomes a third form of brainwashing. What’s concerning is that these new technologies are targeted exactly for you. For example, AI chatbot companions may have your psychological makeup obtained from the internet or from information that you, and all of us, are giving away online.

You’ve been teaching a class on brainwashing for 20 years on and off. Why do you think students are interested in it?

There is a kind of fascination with brainwashing and mind control.

Some also may have some personal experience, like a relative was in a cult or sometimes even a personal relationship that was distressing to them. Sometimes they have questions about coercive control. How would one get into an abusive relationship? Or how do addictions feed into this? There is also a general fascination with cults.

Now students are more and more interested in social media and their use of targeted algorithms, and how the constant stream of trivial choices we all make may have a large effect.

Can anyone be susceptible to brainwashing?

There are studies of people who have been re-educated who describe that their guilt from childhood was capitalized on in the process of maybe being recruited into a cult.

We think that brainwashing has to do with being forced to believe something, or that it works at the level of cognition or ideas, but it works more at the level of emotions. This sort of tapping into the emotional layer is what we often don’t see — the way that they capitalize on unresolved trauma, which is unprocessed, extreme emotion.

“Being intelligent is not a protection against brainwashing.”

Being intelligent is not a protection against brainwashing. We shouldn’t think that only certain people are more susceptible to be brainwashed. You may think that you’re too sophisticated, but because brainwashing happens at the emotional level, there is no protection against it.

What I found helpful is to be aware of the process taking place at the emotional level. We’re getting cues all the time as we interact with social media, or with a group of people who maybe want to recruit us into their groups. It’s helpful to be mindful of the visceral cues and not simply the ideas.