Found this well written article informative. Maybe others would like to see it also

http://www.exmormon.org/influence.htm

The letter writer says found helpful information (Stories have been left out to shorten this entry) on this website when talking the Mormon Missionaries, This letter is to Thank this website and to share his thoughts with others
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"What needs to be looked at is how our behavior can be influenced by others, creating a false faith. We need to understand concepts like social proof, herd mentality, hypnosis, commitment and consistency, common sense and paradigms." ...
(He refers to a true story from) a book by social psychologist Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., titled "Influence" (Quill). Influence is a study of compliance techniques and how and why people agree to things.) ...
He also mentions: "Since the physical evidence is lacking, the social evidence must be overwhelming. Every Mormon can look at the steady stream of new recruits and feel their own commitment is more validated. The principal of social proof makes it so. " ...
In the chapter titled "Commitment and Consistency," Cialdini states, "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision." In another part he says, "Indeed, we all fool ourselves from to time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided." ...
... What Cialdini has shown is that when people want and need to believe in something they hope will solve their problems, they will commit themselves to it. ...
A third concept needs to be better understood ... paradigm,
but few really understand how it affects our thinking.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn introduced the concept of a paradigm. Mr. Kuhn's premise was that the scientific community operates at any given time under a ruling set of beliefs and theories. This set of beliefs (or paradigm) is based on their previous findings and allows them to move forward and propose new theories, construct experiments and evaluate data within the framework of the paradigm. ...
Joel Arthur Barker's book "Paradigm" built on Kuhn's idea of paradigms and applied it to the business arena. It is an important concept in understanding the psychology as it relates to the Mormon church. Simply put a paradigm is a belief system that has a set of rules which support that system. ...

The Mormon Church ... They promote the use of social proof. Social proof is group hypnosis. The most susceptible victims of social proof are the young and the ignorant, ...
Church is in one aspect a business, and it is the nature of a business to perpetuate itself or it will die. Churches live by recruiting new converts. ...
I hope that this information will be healing and offer some explanation to those former Mormons still hurting. They overcame social and psychological pressures that were very real in order to leave the church. They accomplished a paradigm shift into a new way of life (or thinking) which is always difficult and requires adjustment. They came to new realizations based from factual information that simply would not fit into the church's old paradigm. They are to be praised. ...