Cult or No Cult, We've All Done It: Groupthink and the Machinery of Control

Part 1 of a 5-part series on cults, control, and the psychology of getting swept up.

I want to start with a confession that has nothing to do with a cult.

In June, for the first time in 53 years, the New York Knicks won the NBA championship. And for a few days, the whole city was one organism. Strangers hugging on the subway. Grown adults crying at a bar. And I'll be honest with you — a younger version of me, the 1999 version, would not have handled it "responsibly." If they'd won it back then, I'm out in the street. Times Square. Probably a burning bus somewhere in the story. The 2026 version of me stayed home and behaved. But here's the part that stuck with me: watching the footage — the crowds, the chaos, yeah, actual burning buses — not one second of it made me stop and think, what the hell is wrong with us?

It's like, deep down, I already knew. Because we as human beings have this genuinely crazy thing about us: get enough of us pointed in the same direction, and we will throw our values, our judgment, and sometimes our ethics right out the window — and it won't even feel weird while we're doing it.

That's the whole reason I'm writing this series. Not because cults are exotic and far away. Because the machinery that runs a cult is the same machinery that runs a championship riot, a "we're a family here" job, a church that closes ranks, a political rally, a group chat that turns on someone. Cult or no cult — we've all already done a version of this. And if we're honest about that, the scary stuff gets a lot less mysterious, and a lot more useful to understand.

The series: This is Part 1 of 5 — the how it works piece. From here we walk it into the places it does the most damage: professional life (Part 2), religious and spiritual groups (Part 3), and politics (Part 4). Then the hardest question of all in Part 5: the people who get swept up in this and do real harm — are they actually bad people, and do we owe them a second chance?

The good news first: this wiring is also how we heal

Before I make you paranoid about your own brain, let me be fair to it. The exact instinct a cult hijacks is one of the best things about being human.

When I was getting my master's in social work, I took a class in group therapy, and there's an idea at the center of it — call it all in one boat. You put a bunch of people in a room, no expert up front performing, and somewhere in the middle of it everyone has the same quiet realization: oh. We're all going through the same thing. That moment — the great group therapist Irvin Yalom called it universality — is one of the most healing things in the field. It's the engine under every support group that's ever worked, and a huge part of why AA works, even though plenty of people find AA too rigid. Get enough people to agree that a thing has meaning, and you can move all of them, together, somewhere they couldn't get alone.

So the herd instinct isn't the villain. It built every community you've ever loved. The problem is that a tool that powerful doesn't care who's holding it. The same force that gets a room full of strangers to heal each other can get a room full of people to do something none of them would do on their own. It comes down to who's steering, and what they want.

Which brings us to the dark version.

Groupthink and cults: the machinery of control

Here's where I stop riffing and hand you the research, because this is the part that actually protects you. Scientists have been taking this apart for decades, and the mechanisms are shockingly consistent. Once you can name them, you can feel them switching on.

We surrender our judgment to authority — further than we think. In Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments, ordinary people were told by a man in a lab coat to deliver what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to a stranger. Milgram guessed almost no one would go all the way. Sixty-five percent did. Not because they were sadists — because once we accept someone as the authority, Milgram argued, we slip into what he called an agentic state: we stop experiencing ourselves as the author of our own actions and start seeing ourselves as the instrument of someone else's will. That's not a cult thing. That's a human thing. Cults just install a permanent authority at the top and never let you out of that state.

Groups punish dissent without anyone giving the order. The psychologist Irving Janis studied how smart, well-meaning teams talk themselves into disasters, and named it groupthink. The symptoms are everywhere once you know them: an illusion of unanimity (silence gets read as agreement), self-censorship (you swallow the doubt so you don't rock the boat), and mindguards (members who quietly shield the group and its leader from any information that would cause a problem). Nobody has to threaten you. You police yourself, because being the one who breaks the spell feels dangerous — and socially, it is.

Good people switch off their own conscience. The real question is how ordinary, decent people end up doing indecent things. Psychologist Albert Bandura's answer is moral disengagement — a set of mental moves that let us act against our own values without the guilt catching up. We displace responsibility ("I was just following the leader"), diffuse it ("everyone was doing it"), sanitize it with euphemisms, and quietly dehumanize whoever's on the receiving end. It's the psychology of the burning bus, the office that manages someone out during a health crisis, the congregation that shuns the person who left. The conscience doesn't vanish. It gets talked out of the room.

And then there's engineered control. All of the above happens in normal life. A high-control group weaponizes it deliberately. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton catalogued the classic tools of coercive persuasion — things like milieu control (managing what information reaches you and who you're allowed to talk to), loading the language (insider jargon and "thought-terminating clichés" that shut a doubt down before it finishes), and a demand for purity that keeps you striving and never quite good enough. The modern shorthand for the same toolkit is Steven Hassan's BITE model: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control. When you see several running at once — your time and money managed, your outside sources discredited, a black-and-white worldview, and fear or guilt doing the enforcement — that's the line between a strong community and a controlling one.

That line, by the way, is the whole ballgame. As the scholars who study this put it in the standard definition, what makes a group "cultic" isn't weird beliefs — it's "unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control." You can believe almost anything and still be free. What matters is whether you can question it, and whether you can leave.

So how do you tell the difference?

Most of us will never join anything with a compound and a manifesto — but almost all of us have brushed up against the cult-ish. The job that called itself a family right up until you needed the family to have your back. The friend group organized entirely around one magnetic person whose moods set the weather. The relationship where you slowly noticed you'd stopped talking to your actual friends. The wellness or hustle or finance community where asking a real question got you quietly frozen out.

None of those are cults. But they run the same machinery — so the useful move isn't hunting for a label, it's asking a few honest questions about how the group treats your freedom. Can you ask a real question without being punished for it? In a healthy group, doubt is welcome; in a controlling one, doubt gets treated as a symptom. Are you still allowed a life outside it — your time, your money, your other relationships intact? Follow the structure up the ladder, too: if every road leads back to one person's ego, income, or immunity, you have your answer. And maybe the clearest tell of all is what happens to the people who leave — in a healthy group they get a hug and a "keep in touch"; in a controlling one they get erased, and everyone still inside quietly learns the lesson.

If any of that made your stomach drop, that's not a diagnosis. It's information. Sit with it.

Where this is going

Here's my promise for the rest of the series. We're not going to sit around gawking at the people on the documentary. We're going to follow this machinery into the three places it quietly runs the most lives:

• Part 2 — the professional world. The "cult-like" company, the founder worshiped like a prophet, the network that keeps you referring inside the family, and what all of it costs the people inside.
• Part 3 — religion and spirituality. Where devotion is supposed to live — and what happens when it gets pointed at a person instead of a principle.
• Part 4 — politics. The most socially acceptable groupthink there is, where "us versus them" is the product, and nobody at the top ever seems to take responsibility when it goes sideways.

And then Part 5, the one I care about most. Once you understand that this machinery runs on all of us — that ordinary, decent people get swept in and do things they'd never do alone — you have to ask the uncomfortable question. The people caught in it, the ones who followed and enabled and hurt others while they were inside: are they bad people? Or are they, like most of us, just human beings who got the herd instinct pointed in the wrong direction? And if it's the second one — do we owe them a second chance?

I've got thoughts on that one — a lot of them. We'll get there.