I was recently looking over Robert Jay Lifton's eight methods of thought reform. I know many here already are familiar with Lifton and his work, especially via Steve Hassan, on American Korean War POWs who were captured and forced by the Chinese to confess their crimes against communism.

I'm a little blown away that the American Sociological Association and the American Psychological Association have both basically stayed neutral or worse on the legitimacy of Lifton's work and other work on associated concepts of mind control. I thought there were more than enough behavioral experiments (such as the famous Stanford prison experiment of Philip Zimbardo) to confirm that many elements of thought control, mind control, coercive persuasion, mental programming, subliminal messages, brainwashing, thought reform, etc., were real enough. Pity that professional organizations professing goals of scientific status and truth can essentially be cowed by political and legal means. This is laughable to me.

Is the legal test that demonstrable fraud and deceit have to be shown to litigate harmful cults' activities? If someone paints a rosy picture of their organization, hiding the uglier parts of its past, someone else joins it based on the rosy message, but then finds out it was all a scam, that person may be so indoctrinated that they never find out the ugly history. They never have the choice to explore it or not. The organization might even command that they not investigate its past ("Not all truth is faith promoting."). And caveat emptor seems harsh in many of these instances: How many teens preyed on by Mormons and such groups even have the tools to adequately investigate the group in question. Admittedly, the Internet age makes debunking work easier, but I'm flummoxed that the courts won't even accept the concept of brainwashing as legally admissible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_control#Legal_issues.2C_the_APA_and_DIMPAC).

Maybe the Frye Standard of scientific legitimacy is too rigorous. Many accepted scientific theories started as controversial. Many formerly accepted scientific theories have been debunked. "The thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs" (Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923). What do you do though if the very professional organizations that give "confirmed by the profession" status to a concept are vulnerable to political and legal pressure? Scientology is famous for suing the pants off anyone who talks bad about the group. Mormons do fanatical amounts of PR to offer up an image of hyper-normalcy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
http://changingminds.org/techniques/conversion/lifton_thought_reform.htm