How to Start a Cult
Here’s an entertaining and satirical video. Some of the things it mentions are pretty legit persuasion techniques, too.
How to Start a Cult
Here’s an entertaining and satirical video. Some of the things it mentions are pretty legit persuasion techniques, too.
Here’s a brief summary of an interesting psychology study. It looked at how scare tactics influenced people’s self-reported likelihood of changing their behavior. Intriguingly, an intense warning using scare tactics actually backfired for some participants, making them less likely to take the warning seriously and to say that they’d change their behavior. A more moderate warning, on the other hand, was more effective for some participants. The participants who had this counter-intuitive response to these warnings were distinguished by being high in “cognitive avoidance,” a personality difference.
The interesting implication here, then, is that this might apply to other types of warnings. For example, do extra-intense warnings by religious authorities about hellfire and brimstone actually backfire for some people? Could this make avoidant people more likely to approve of the behavior that the preacher is warning them about?
And, for us non-religious types, does this mean that if we try to warn people about the dangers of Christianity and religion, and we do it with too much intensity, could it actually backfire in some cases?
