America's Most Prominent Cult Expert is a Conspiracy Theorist and a Hack
Steven Hassan has been America’s most prominent cult expert for decades. After briefly joining the Moonies cult, he reinvented himself as an anti-cult expert and eventually earned a PhD, writing a dissertation on his own model of cult mind control. He blogs for Psychology Today, appears on NPR programs as a cult expert, and is widely cited on cult-oriented web forums such as r/cults and is a favorite of exmormons, who cite Hassan as evidence that the LDS religion is a dangerous cult. Hassan is with liberal with his use of the cult label, lately claiming that supporters of Donald Trump are a cult, a claim that has gotten surprising sympathetic coverage in media outlets such as the Atlantic and Vanity Fair. Hassan presents “evidence” that Trump supporters or QAnon supporters are in a cult, arguing that his hypothesis is partially supported by similar dress among supporters (“only insofar as wearing tee shirts, hats, etc”) and by the fact that supporters might not get enough sleep at night (“only in so far as some believers are not getting 7-9 hours of sleep- pertains to everyone”).
But while Hassan is presented as a sober-minded expert on cults that cultivate outlandish beliefs, he himself promotes fringe conspiracy theories. Hassan boasts of his “his first peer-reviewed journal article in Ethics, Medicine and Public Health” on his website. In this article, Hassan warns without any substantiation, that human traffickers are using hypnosis to control sex and labor slaves. Fear of hypno-slavery is a recurring theme of Hassan’s work- he warns his listeners and readers to beware of neuro-linguistic programming that could control their minds. This fear seems misplaced since neuro-linguistic programming, a form of hypnosis, has never been shown to work and is commonly considered a pseudoscience.
Of course many experts have strange beliefs, but what’s perhaps strangest about Hassan is his efforts to legitimize his framework of cult mind control through graduate-study has directly undermined his own model but he does not seem to understand what his own research shows. Hassan’s framework for studying cults is his self-created BITE model of authoritarian control which posits that cults and other bad actors use mind control which operates along four dimensions: behavior control, information control, thought control, and emotional control. Hassan thinks harmful cults or movements tend to use all four techniques and this model can explain bad behavior outside of cults- such as abusive marriages.
In his dissertation, Hassan sets out to defend the BITE model and claims he does so. (Spoiler: he doesn’t.) He surveys 1,000 people and invites them to pick which of 110 different groups they may have belonged to in the past. For example, you could select that you belong or belonged to Al-Qaeda, that you were a surviving member of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, or belonged to a city council. He then asked respondents to answer over 100 different questions about what Hassan thinks are harmful cult practices and which are meant to measure the components of the BITE model. Many of these questions were essentially redundant, verging on identical. Here’s a selection of questions about the cults members used to belong to treated critical thinking.
Critical thinking was rejected.
Critical questions about the doctrine were punished.
People who ask critical questions about policy were punished.
Asking critical questions was viewed as rebellious.
Rational analysis was rejected
Hassan then finds that answers to different questions are highly correlated with each other, perhaps because there are only a handful of real topics, just asked about with slight differences in wording. He then uses a technique called factor analysis to see how many different dimensions are required to explain answers to his questions.
Factor analysis is a legitimate technique, broadly used. For example, if you look at members of Congress it’s obvious that positions on abortion, taxes, environmental policy, and immigration are closely correlated. You could use factor analysis to argue that these positions are driven by a single dimension- political ideology- instead of representing various different policy positions. Hassan does this for the BITE model and finds that the answers to all of his questions can be explained by “a single significant factor [which Hassan] called authoritarian control.” The problem with this is that Hassan wants us to accept a four-dimension BITE model while his own work shows that cult behavior can be explained by one dimension.
Even worse, Hassan has never shown that groups that score as dangerous according to his BITE model actually are bad for its members. For example, Hassan groups the LDS Church along with obvious cults but has never demonstrated that LDS membership is actually harmful by secular standards, perhaps because in general, LDS membership (and religious membership in general) is linked to better outcomes, such as better mental health.
Hassan, in his dissertation, worries that although research like his “could significantly change the justice system in the United States and countries throughout the world” for the better but “[p]owerful, wealthy forces who engage in undue influence” will try to suppress this secret knowledge. Potential malign actors named by that might try to keep Hassan and his allies from getting their due include the CIA (which Hassan reminds us backs MK-ULTRA mind control research), other government intelligence agencies, and even Trump-appointed federal judges!
A more likely reason why Hassan’s research might not revolutionize human society for the better might be that his research is garbage. His fringe views and shoddy research make him a poor “expert” that should not be promoted by media outlets nor treated as a reliable source for vulnerable people who are concerned about the harmful influence of cults in their lives or others.