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Thought Reform and Cyber Security: Where Cult Manipulation Techniques Meet Technology With Dustin Rozario Steinhagen, PhD
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- [00:02]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
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- [00:27]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
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Dr. Stephen Hassan
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- [01:19]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
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- [02:22]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hasson with another episode of the Influence Continuum. I have a newly minted doctor as a guest today. I'm very, very excited to have with me Dr. Dustin Rosario Steinhagen is a privacy expert. You just got your doctorate degree in cyber defense. You published numerous times in privacy literature including fields of privacy, education and neuroprivacy. And we want to talk today about the topic of your dissertation research which is titled Defending the Security of the Mind a Mail survey of Thought Reform literacy in South Dakota. And all I can say is I was very excited to learn about your doctoral research. I know you approached me to be on your committee, which I unfortunately was over committed in other ways I couldn't serve. But my dear friend and colleague John Atak did serve. John is an ex Scientologist and a brilliant mind unto himself. And it sounds like you're really doing cutting edge work. So I wanted to interview you, hear more about what you were interested in, how you got interested in this, its applications, and get more people, especially young people, interested in this topic. So, Dr. Dustin, welcome to the Influence Continuum.
- [03:59]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Thanks, Dr. Hassan. And first, I just want to say it's an honor to be on your show. I first caught wind of your research in 2019 when I was first researching what's out there in terms of malicious influence. And we'll get into the backstory of kind of how A cyber defense PhD got involved with thought reform research because it's very unintuitive and might even sound inappropriate without some context.
- [04:23]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah, please tell us. Sure.
- [04:25]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
So in 2018, I was a senior at Cornell University in my undergrad program, and the most important course I ever took in my life was this course called Computational Psychology. So the whole thesis of this course is that the brain is literally a type of computer and the mind is computation. And we don't have time to go through all the mechanics of that. But the citation I would provide would be the professor's book, which is called Computing the Mind, how the Bind really Works. The author's name, Dr. Shimon Edelman.
- [04:57]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Okay, thank you.
- [05:01]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Essentially, also in 2018, as your viewers and listeners might recall, that's when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the news in the spring. So right around the same time I was taking this course, and that really opened my mind to, like, how much manipulation there is out there and how our personal data is used to politically manipulate us. That's really just the tip of the iceberg too. And I didn't realize how deep and broad this subject is until I really dug into the literature.
- [05:34]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So may I interrupt you, Justin? And just for my listeners who may need a refresher on Cambridge Analytica, and I know, I think Christopher Wiley wrote a book about it. Tell our listeners just the a bit about what that was about.
- [05:50]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Sure. So Cambridge Analytica was, I think it's most properly termed, should be termed, a psychological warfare firm. They were doing political manipulation using personal data in various countries prior to essentially meddling in the 2016 presidential election in our country, and then also the Brexit referendum in the uk. So they got in big trouble and had to go bankrupt. And they eventually went bankrupt because of this huge privacy scandal where they were essentially scraping thousands of data points from Facebook and then combining that with psychometrics analysis to target specific voters and sway the election in unethical ways. I mean, influence doesn't have to be inherently unethical. But the reason why Cambridge Analytica was wrong was because people's data was being scraped that they didn't consent to and that they didn't understand what was going on. And it was on such a massive scale as well.
- [06:49]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
If I may add, there was a documentary, I believe, called the Great Hack for people who want more details about it. And my recollection, if I may add, is just that they got into Facebook and were doing questionnaires and used the questionnaires to get to all the friends of the people who responded. I was in that hack. I got a notification from Facebook that my data was scraped and all of my followers. So I was very displeased. So thanks for sharing that. So that happened, and you were like.
- [07:27]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Wow, the brain is a computer. But it's not just a computer, it's a vulnerable computer, and it's routinely hacked. So then, I mean, I'll just be honest, I got really scared. And it wasn't just Cambridge Analytica I learned about during 2018. I also learned about romance scams, which are a very sophisticated type of scam where a hacker will convince someone to fall in love with them. So it's like an online dating situation usually, but it's a false Persona. So this person has genuine feelings of affection and love for this fake Persona. And then there's this cover story of maybe it's like a medical emergency or they're stuck in an airport and they need money all of a sudden. So then they have this cover story to extract money from the person who genuinely loves this fake person. And oftentimes, romance scams succeed at draining a person's entire bank account. It's one of the worst types of scams that I'm aware of, just in terms of the emotional damage.
- [08:21]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Cults like to recruit. It's very similar to recruit others.
- [08:25]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Right.
- [08:25]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Except it's online often, so people fall in love with a projection based on false information. And it's very, very nefarious and harmful and painful, and forgive me for adding one more thing, but just recently, there was a young boy who fell in love with a chatbot on character AI and killed himself because he wanted to be with this chatbot for eternity.
- [08:55]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, yeah, I saw that story in the news recently as well.
- [08:58]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah. So let's go back to you. So there you were. The brain is a computer. It can be hacked. Cambridge Analytica. And you're at Cornell going, okay, what do I want to do with my life?
- [09:11]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. And that's when I really decided to pursue a degree in cybersecurity, because I'm not sure exactly how I first heard. But cybersecurity professionals, many of them deal with. We call it social engineering in the field. I'm not sure why we call it social engineering, because most other fields will call it psychological manipulation, malicious influence. I think there's better terms for it. But be that as it may, a lot of the literature in the cybersecurity field, you'll see the phrase social engineering. So I was aware of social engineering, and I started reading books. I really got interested. I started kind of falling in love with learning about social psychology and privacy, too. The privacy connection is from Cambridge Analytica. And just realizing that there's this intimate connection between people losing their privacy and their vulnerability to influence. The more data you have on someone, the easier you can control and manipulate them and deceive them.
- [10:05]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Right. And to state the obvious, America does not have any data privacy laws in place. So all of these companies are taking our data, putting them on the dark web. Right. So we have thousands of pieces of information about our choices on some dark cloud somewhere that some bad actor could potentially buy and use, is that right?
- [10:31]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
We do have some privacy protections, but they're quite inadequate. And I mean, just as a comparison, over in the European Union, they have something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or gdpr. So that covers all contexts, and it has very robust protections for privacy. Here in America, we don't have a federal law like that. We have some federal laws and many state laws, and it's unfortunate, uncomprehensive, so that there are some protections in place, but definitely not enough. And again, Cambridge Analytica was kind of proof of that.
- [11:03]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Right. So tell us more about how you went about the study, what you were hoping to. With science, you are always trying to do research that's cutting edge, that moves the boulder a little bit further up the mountain. So tell us about your process.
- [11:21]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. And again, a large part of coming up with your initial idea for research is just reading what's out there currently. So, actually, I read your book Combating Cold Mind Control. That was actually the first book on thought reform and destructive Cults that I had read. And that's when I really realized this is thought reform. That is, is the most serious security and privacy threat that we have, has the potential to destroy all humans through nuclear war, like the Auction Rickyo case study. And even if we don't, there's a.
- [11:53]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Japanese sarin gas apocalyptic conspiracy cult that issued sarin gas killed and injured many Japanese. And my mentor Robert J. Lifton, who wrote the seminal book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, did a book called Destroying the World to Save it about apocalyptic cults and featured the Aum Shinri culture.
- [12:19]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, so there's that connection where, I mean, that's kind of the most extreme negative consequence of unmitigated thought reform. But even just the smaller things too. Reading the different types of exploitation that's out there, like for example, psychological warfare. I mentioned romance scams, the other types of scams. But when I was learning about all those, it really seemed like thought reform and the consequences it has for the people that are affected by it really seems to be one of the worst things that can happen to a person. And it's because it covers so many different contexts. It covers domestic abuse, human trafficking, terrorism, and so many more contexts. So I really wanted to do a study that would help push the envelope in thought reform research, especially since I learned that it was so under underappreciated by social scientists. And I think our colleague ATAC has said that it's almost a neglected research field. So I was learning as much as I could about thought reform and I realized that one of the best, we call them defensive controls in the security and privacy field. So a defensive control is a technique or tool you put in place to reduce risk. So education awareness about thought reform is a defensive control. And it really, and I know you and many other experts really are huge fans of this idea of education and awareness. So that seems like the best area for me to do my work in. I wanted to make a big difference. So the main idea of my survey is that I wanted to quantitatively measure how much people knew about psychological manipulation and psychologically manipulative groups. So psychologically manipulative groups is, is a term that's pretty much synonymous with destructive cults. And it's the less controversial descriptor. So that was the term that I led with rather than cults, because that can be. Especially because I was surveying laypeople. I just wanted to make sure that. To reduce bias.
- [14:21]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Right, so how did you find your respondees?
- [14:27]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Just so this was a mail survey. And what I did is I purchased a comprehensive mailing address list. So the state that I studied was South Dakota. So South Dakota is a pretty rural state here in the United States. And it wasn't too expensive. It was within my budget, that is, to purchase a whole list of physical addresses. So then I could randomly sample that physical address list and essentially get statistics that would represent all of South Dakota. That was the idea.
- [14:56]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So you were doing snail mail surveys?
- [14:59]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yep. And the reason for that, it had the best coverage of the population. You choose your survey type based on the population that you're studying, so it would cover the population better and allow me to get more accurate statistics. So I guess that's a little ironic, you know, a cybersecurity student using snail mail, and there's a higher rate of response for a mail survey compared to something like email or telephone. You typically see higher response.
- [15:26]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So do you live in South Dakota?
- [15:28]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
I did, yeah. I was a student employee of my university, Dakota State University, for four years. It was. I ended up finishing my. My PhD program after my work contract ended. So I moved to Iowa, which is where I'm currently located.
- [15:44]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Okay, good. So please continue. So tell us about what you asked and what the results were.
- [15:50]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
And, yeah, so in collaboration with several thought reform experts, I developed a curriculum of 47 questions to ask the South Dakotan laypeople. So each question was weighted equally. So that means that 47 was the max score on the test. And I had 147 respondents, so that was the sample size. And the scores that I saw were between 1, so a single point correct, and 46. So no one got a perfect score. No one completely flunked it with a score of 0. And the weighted average score was between 37 and 39. So it's approximately equal to a C plus or a B if this was a grade school test.
- [16:32]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Okay.
- [16:33]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Okay. So then to get to some of the individual questions, please. This is my favorite statistic of the entire survey. So it was a humility question. So essentially asking people if they believe they're vulnerable to psychological manipulation. So the question stem was, do you believe you could be lured into a psychologically manipulative group or relationship so they could answer, yes, it is possible, or no, it is not possible. 31% of my respondents said it's not possible, so they assumed that they were immune, and 2/3. So 66% selected that it was possible. And I just found this very interesting because. Well, first of all, we didn't have any, like, from a broad geographic population that is, we didn't have any statistics about what people believe of their own vulnerability to thought reform. So, I mean, 2/3 of people were humble. I think that's hopeful. Actually. I thought it was going to be a lot less. I thought more people would assume that they were immune.
- [17:30]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah, well, folks like me from big cities have ideas about Dakota and South Dakota and stuff, so I think it's really fascinating, frankly. I'll just comment that it is the biggest vulnerability. Ability to think that you're invulnerable to being deceived, manipulated. It's like, oh, my God. And it's amazing when I talk to people who say, no, it would never happen to me, and then I ask some questions and they're like, oh, actually I did fall for someone who was a narcissist and they did, you know, hurt me and I did have this boss. But they. But people walk around thinking they're. They're too smart.
- [18:17]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. The optimism bias and several other cognitive biases work against us for that. I was going to say continue. Yeah, that in terms of the humility, the most interesting statistical finding of my survey was that there was a positive correlation between those who were humble and getting higher scores on the test. So for the people who are methodologists or researchers, the Exact correlation was 0.251, which corresponds to a low to moderate positive correlation. And I guess, just to put it in plain English, if the respondents in my survey that were humble knew more about thought reform and cults than those who assumed that they were immune. And I think this is a very. I mean, it's. We just didn't have data about this prior to my dissertation that there would even be a relation between these two variables at all. And this really coincides with what is stated in the thought reform literature. Like you just alluded to a few minutes ago, that if you assume you're immune, then you're vulnerable. And assuming that a person's knowledge is correlated with how protected they are, then this study actually gives quantitative evidence for. For this theory that humility is protective.
- [19:40]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Right. And I have a question because I didn't read your dissertation. Forgive me yet, but did you ask any questions if people had children?
- [19:51]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
I did not. Yeah. And I can talk about the other demographic variables. I didn't study all the demographic variables. I know it would have been interesting to study political affiliation or religious beliefs. I just wanted to keep the. That could have harmed response rates because those are more sensitive questions along with asking about people's children as well, that might have harmed response rates. So I just wanted to keep it with kind of the bread and butter demographics. So I studied educational attainment, age, biological sex, something called subjective social status, which is similar to socioeconomic status, but instead of asking for a person's income, you directly ask them about their social class. So whether they're poor, working class, middle class, or affluent, and race and ethnicity. So there was these five other demographic variables. And I ran a multiple regression analysis, and first I would just caveat, pretty low sample size, so that could have affected things. But I did not find any statistically significant correlations between any of these five demographic variables and people's knowledge. And that's also consistent with what's said in the literature that a person's background really doesn't influence their susceptibility to cult recruitment. You know, you can come from, you know, it affects the poor and rich alike, so to speak.
- [21:08]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
I would argue, though, in this day and age that bad actors want wealthy people and influencers so they'll target them over somebody who is not knowledgeable, educated, well situated, you know, so I think there's a. There's a targeting piece that may be at play.
- [21:29]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Right. And I guess my thing wasn't a quantitative measure of a person's exact vulnerability, just their knowledge. But assuming those variables are related, the last thing I want to say about general or the general idea of my survey is that I found two thought reform deniers is what I called them. So these were the people that answered. Well, rewinding a little bit. Some of the distractors of the questions in my survey were like, psychological manipulation doesn't exist, or we don't know how it would work because it doesn't exist. So I included those distractors because from my literature review I realized that I think you and others have stated that many people deny that thought reform, brainwashing, mind control even exist at all. And I want these people, if I did find them, to be able to answer my survey in good faith. So I'm really glad I kept those distractors in the survey because I did find two people who. And they were consistent with it too. They didn't just answer it once they went through the whole survey and said it doesn't. Manipulation doesn't exist. Zero people are being psychologically manipulated in the world. That was one of the questions in the survey. So that were one of the answers. So these people do exist, the deniers? I hadn't personally met one, but it's just interesting to think, and that's really important. Sorry, go ahead.
- [22:42]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
No, I apologize. I told you I didn't want to interrupt and talk too much.
- [22:49]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
No, it's okay.
- [22:50]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
You know, it's the. Anyway, please continue.
- [22:54]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
It's really important for future researchers in this field to make sure that they keep those types of distractors in the curriculum so that they can catch these deniers and we can continue to estimate what the proportion is in the population. Again, my sample size was so small that it's hard to know if it's just like the 1 to 2%, which the 2 out of 147 respondents, or if it could be higher because of non response. Maybe there's a higher proportion of people that I didn't catch, but future research will have to discover that.
- [23:26]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah, I will add just that there are cult apologists who are paid sociologists of religion who go out of their way to say there's no such thing as brainwashing and mind control or cults, and want people to call religious cults new religious movements instead. So there's that element. Just as Big Tobacco had deniers that smoking caused cancer and fossil fuel companies do that too. But then there are people in cults who really don't believe that they've been brainwashed. Like I was in the Moonies. I was like, no, definitely not. So anyway, please continue.
- [24:14]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, and I guess because if you consider like denying the existence of thought reform and then just assuming that you're immune to it, denying that it exists is probably far worse for a person's vulnerability than acknowledging that it exists, but then falsely believing that, you know, the not me myth that Margaret Singer mentioned. So it's kind of three categories of people that I found in my survey. Deniers, People who thought they were immune to them, people who were humble. So we don't have time to cover every single question in my survey, but I kind of picked four individual questions that I thought you would find particularly interesting and then we can talk over.
- [24:55]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Great.
- [24:56]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
All right. So one of the questions I asked was about the extent of influence or what influence is possible. So which components of the mind can be influenced? So the first distractor was just beliefs and behaviors which 5% of people selected. Then it accumulated. So if a person selected the second answer, it would be beliefs, behaviors plus thoughts and emotions. So that was an additional 24%. So a total of 29% thought it was either just beliefs and behaviors or plus thoughts and emotions. So I would just mention that's kind of the four components of your bite model. So 24% acknowledged just the byte components. I've taught a social engineering class in the past. And one thing I emphasize with my students is that although it's easy just to think of the bite components, the extent of influence is so much more than that. You can implant false memories, altered states of consciousness, and other things as well. So the third distractor was memories and use of language as the fifth and sixth things that can additionally be. I manipulated her influence. So that was an additional 5%. Now, what surprised me was that 59% of my respondents selected the correct answer, which was it was those prior six things plus a person's core identity and personality. I really thought this was going to be less. I was not expecting 59% to say that, oh, yeah, identity and personality can be manipulated as well. So I was very impressed with my respondents that. Because that is, you know, the definition of thought reform. It's really focused on identity manipulation. So the fact that these. These laypeople understood that identity can be changed, you know, that that's. It's hopeful that. That they can protect themselves.
- [26:42]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Very much so. And when the public, you know, describes, my son is different. He came back one weekend and he's a different person. Like, they're recognizing there's an identity shift that took place.
- [26:57]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
So, yeah, okay. So that was the first question I wanted to talk about. The next one was talking about cult leaders. So the question stem went something like, which of the following describes all leaders of psychologically manipulative groups? So it was really getting the respondent to select the core characteristic of what makes a cult leader or the type of person who becomes a cult leader, I should say. So the correct answer was that cult leaders are abusive people who have learned manipulation techniques. So 42% of my respondents selected that correct answer. And two of the distractors were selected by a lot of people. So the first distractor was that they were intelligent people with compelling ideologies, which was 30% of the respondents. And then the second distractor was that they were highly charismatic people who can influence people with little effort. And that was 27% of the respondents who selected that. So it was very close.
- [27:52]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
You call them distractors.
- [27:54]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yep. A distractor in a survey, like a. So mine was a knowledge survey. So there's a single correct answer. So a distractor is one of the false.
- [28:02]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Got it.
- [28:03]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Or false options in a multiple choice question. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I guess I can't just assume everyone knows what I'm talking about.
- [28:12]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
No, you're teaching me because I'm not an expert in cyber education and social engineering, so, please. That's partly why I Wanted to have you on the show.
- [28:23]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. So I guess with this question that I just mentioned, there was a lot of people who thought that the core element of a cult leader is the charisma or the fact that they have compelling ideologies, which those are often things that are in place. But that's not what defines a cult leader. What defines it is the psychopathology where they're abusing people and that distinguishes them from benign leaders. Okay, so the third question that I want to talk about was about legal protection. So this is another one of my favorite questions, and I know you wrote your whole dissertation on legal protections and thought reform, covered that in your lit review. So this question asked what legal protections currently exist to protect against psychological manipulation in America. So 7% of people selected the wrong answer that it's a federal crime. 12% selected the distractor, that it was a state crime in some states, but not all of them. 4% thought it was a state crime in all 50 states. And 65% selected the correct answer that there are almost no legal protections in America against thought reform. Wow, that's very impressive. Right. Two thirds of people understood that. Oh, yeah, psychological manipulation, it's a problem, but our legislators aren't doing anything about it. So people do understand what's going on in terms of the current legal landscape and how they're left to protect themselves. I thought that awareness about this would be a lot less so. Again, I was very impressed with this question that so many people got.
- [30:01]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
It is impressive, but I can't help but comment, Dustin, that I've been attacked by being called brainwashed by Soros and the Libtards. So they think that it exists. Only the other side that's critical of Trump is getting it. So it's confusing for most people.
- [30:34]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, I guess just having a basic awareness that psychological manipulation exists doesn't mean that a person's aware of how to detect it. Right. Or fully appreciates that it can exist on both sides of the political aisle or all the different contexts.
- [30:47]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Right.
- [30:48]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah.
- [30:49]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Good.
- [30:50]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Okay, then the last question I wanted to cover was, and this was actually the hardest question on the entire survey in terms of the proportion of people that got it incorrect. So it was which type of person is most commonly recruited into a psychologically manipulative group? And the first distractor was people of low intelligence. So only 3% of people selected that. So that's good. 27% selected the correct answer that it's the normal and ordinary. So only a fourth of my respondents got this one correct. The majority, which was 57%, said it was the needy independent. And I'll just stop right here to talk kind of why this is a common misconception. People who are recruited into psychological manipulative groups do become median dependent. But what many people don't realize is that they probably didn't start out having a dependent personality disorder. It's pretty rare in the population. So the overwhelming majority of people that are recruited into these cults have a change. Again, it's that change in their personality. And Alexandra Steen's book Terry Love and Brainwashing is incredible at explaining that. It's about attachment. So people develop the trauma bond or the disorganized attachment as they're getting recruited and while they're in the cultic milieu.
- [32:06]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah.
- [32:07]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
So that's why they appear needy independent. So again.
- [32:11]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah, go ahead.
- [32:13]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. So that's why this was probably the most difficult question is people because, you know, because it's partially correct, you know, that or it seems partially correct, at least that they have the right idea. I should say that they. That these call members are needy independent oftentimes. But they got the reasoning wrong. It wasn't a predisposing factor into the recruitment. That was more about deception.
- [32:37]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Exactly. I was just going to comment. Alexandra Steen is a social psychologist in the UK and wrote this very good book and connected the dots with attachment disorder. And the other piece is just that it's a dissociative disorder. The Mooney Steve was dependent. It was a child personality that was going to follow the father figure, whatever he said or did. And the real me would absolutely never do that.
- [33:10]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. So it's not a shortcoming of the person's authentic personality.
- [33:15]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Exactly.
- [33:16]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
All right. And then the last distractor for this question was that the mentally unstable misconception. So only 3% of people selected that one as well. So the most common misconception was the median dependent. So very, very interesting. And again, there's many. I only covered four of the 47 questions. My dissertation is openly available on ProQuest, so people can just search my name and anyone can get a copy for free if they want to look at the rest of the questions.
- [33:47]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
And we're going to do a blog based on this and link it directly to it. So it'll be in my substack. So I am wondering, now that you've completed this, and I know how much work goes into doing a doctorate, what do you want to see happen? Talk about your personal, curious future research goals and then what you would like to See the field. Do more of, please.
- [34:20]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, I guess the first thing that comes to mind is I really hope that I won't remain the only cybersecurity and privacy expert that covers this important topic. When I was doing my literature review, I saw that there was a master student who wrote a thesis on psychological warfare. So that was about the closest I came to seeing something related to thought reform among my colleagues in the field. So that's the first thing I would say. But thought reform is a multidisciplinary subject, so it doesn't just belong to the cybersecurity and privacy field, it doesn't just belong to social psychology. So I just hope that it raises awareness and really encourages other researchers in other fields, not even just my own expertise, but in other fields that they can cover this topic. You can be the first one. I'm not aware of any other cybersecurity PhDs who have covered this.
- [35:18]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah, I'll add clinical, as a therapist, that there's vast numbers of people in need of specialized counseling. But the other big thing is public health. There's a whole discipline, master's and and PhD level for public health. And I see this as a public health emergency. This is a mind virus. Coming back to your original comments about. The brain is a computing device and the mind can get hacked. So that speaks to the need for inoculation programs for all people to at least have some filters. And I offer my influence, continuum and bite model, just as one model, but then doing training for clinicians, educators, media, politicians, policymakers, and then what do we do with people coming out of the rabbit hole who are going like, what happened to me? Because they need to be reintegrated back into the world and society.
- [36:28]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, kind of what you're suggesting is there's so much work that can be done. And when I think of this through the lens of research, I mean, there's thousands of research ideas and thousands of things that haven't been researched yet, even just considering the overlap between security and thought reform, but also thought reform more generally, because as I alluded to earlier, it's an understudied discipline. And that's part of the reason why it's unmitigated in society, largely. So any amount of light that we can shed on this as researchers will be good. I do want to share with your audience several research ideas. I'm one researcher. It would be great if I could, throughout the course of my career, do all of these, write research papers on all of these. But I'm just one Guy, one person. I like competition in this field because it helps everyone. This isn't about personally bettering myself. This is about protecting humanity, protecting the security and privacy of our minds. So I want people to pursue these research ideas. So hopefully I can give some research ideas here. The first thing, and this is probably the most obvious future work related to the survey that we were just talking about is this is one state in the United States. We need these surveys in all 49 states and plus the territories and internationally. And the beautiful thing about this is that once we get multiple states, then we can do comparison studies and eventually if we get enough, we can do a meta analysis and really start to understand what the current state of public awareness about thought reform and cults really is. Because we're in the dark right now. We really don't know. And it's pretty ludicrous to me as a security professional. We're constantly measuring whether people are aware of phishing scams, for example. We're constantly testing people. But why are we not doing this for the thing that literally ruins people's lives and drains their bank accounts and their minds get hijacked? This is the paradigm of influence talking about thaw reform. It's the paradigm of influence that causes people to get involved with human trafficking.
- [38:32]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Exactly.
- [38:33]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
That's so much more devastating than a phone scam or an email scam. Why are we focusing more on those things than this other paradigm of influence that does so much more damage in society? So I really think we need to ramp up education awareness research in this area. Kind of related to that too, is literacy studies in specific professions. So do a literacy study among licensed mental health professionals. Are they aware of style reform? Do they know the best practices for, you know, for, for counseling, you know, you know, former cult members, even identifying.
- [39:13]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Whether a client has a background they don't know? That's why I did an online course for them.
- [39:20]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. So, and again, you could have specialized curricula for mental health professionals, clergy, you know, law enforcement, medical, doctors. I mean, the list goes on and on. And you had mentioned some earlier too about the specific professions and fields that probably need more of an awareness about this issue than just kind of the layperson friendly curriculum that I developed or curriculum that I developed. So we'll need specialized curriculum. And again, that's across so many different fields that a single researcher can't do that. So we need more people to get involved. And then I got some other ideas in terms of fully integrating security and privacy research with defending the mind. So for example, I like the term psychosecurity, psychoprivacy. So mind security, mind privacy. I'm not even sure if they appear in the literature, but we need definitions. So what does it mean for someone's mind to be secure? What does it mean to defend the privacy of the mind? And I don't have answers to these questions. And this is very foundational philosophical work. It might sound unimportant, but until we fully define these things, we won't know what we're looking for and whether we've succeeded. So I kind of really put the. I kind of jumped the gun a little bit with my research because I don't think we have the full theoretical foundation yet for integrating security and thought reform or defending the mind in general. But that would have been a lot harder of work than. Than my dissertation idea.
- [40:58]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah. Dissertation committees always want you to chunk it down to something that's actually finishable within a reasonable amount of time. Because people have these start out with grandiose ideas and they're like, that'll take 20 years. And do something simple. Yeah, do something that you can afford that's just incrementally moving, moving the ball down the thing. I was going to comment on Law Professor Nita Farahani's work on cognitive security. She's been talking about all of these AirPods and virtual reality things and who's going to own the data from all of these instruments that are being collected and put in the cloud. There's nothing on that. And then I'll add that there's graduate student to be, Matthew Bywater, who's been talking about wanting to create a freedom of the mind, human right, that would be more comprehensive, that looks at bite model stuff and the subcomponents of that as well. But as you were talking, Dustin, I was thinking about China and Xi and just how authoritarian the whole country is and how they won't allow other cults to exist there, but the whole society is a cult and they have surveillance and AI for almost everything. So what are your thoughts about that as a future since it's so powerful?
- [42:42]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. Well, this might be related to the idea of surveillance capitalism, which. Yeah, sadly, I have not read that book yet, but kind of the idea that. Well, let me say this. Privacy is a requirement for having an individual identity and for exercising autonomy.
- [42:59]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So say that again. That's really important.
- [43:02]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Privacy is essential for having autonomy and having an individual identity. So if you look at totalitarian systems, they'll strip people of their privacy. And one thing I want to mention in this interview is that a very important paper was written by Daniel Solov in 2006 called a taxonomy of Privacy. So in that it's a law paper, he explained that there's 16 different ways to harm privacy. And I'll just give a few examples, surveillance and interrogation. So passively or actively gathering information from people with any privacy harm, it's dependent on context. So in certain contexts it's wrong. But other privacy harms include blackmail distortion, which is like spreading rumors about people, spreading false information about other people to ruin the reputation. Decisional interference is robbing someone of their autonomy. So that's literally a privacy harm. And I won't go through the whole list, but if you look at these 16 privacy harms, I think that you'd find most or probably all of them in most thought reform environments. So when you mentioned China taking away people's autonomy, there's the social credit system, where all this data is being aggregated about people and being used to make decisions about whether they get certain rights or privileges or not. So I think this could really be a benchmark of determining how free a society is. It's looking at the privacy protections and how many privacy harms are being perpetuated in a society. And privacy is a human right too. I know you've incorporated human rights into your work and that's enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights.
- [44:50]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
And one of Lifton's eight criteria from 61 was the cult of confession, which not all cults formally get people together and have people stand up and confess all their sins. But the idea is there's no privacy, that the group owns and knows everything about your past and can use that information if you get out of line or to punish you.
- [45:18]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, that connects to the blackmail harm, which can really. I mean, again then blackmail can be used to limit people's autonomy.
- [45:26]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Absolutely. Yep.
- [45:29]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah.
- [45:30]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So I wish you could get a huge grant and get a whole bunch of students. And I would love to see an evaluation done on propaganda videos. In particular, this morning I was reading a Rolling Stone article about how RFK Jr, who's been selected by Trump to head the Health and Human Services, that he admitted funding the plandemic video and anti vax videos. And I've talked to people who got converted to QAnon because of watching those, just from watching it. And for me, when I watched it, it seemed hypnotic. At places it had people pretending who asserted an expertise they didn't have. And typically with propaganda, you say something true, you say another thing that's True. And then you slip in something that's unverifiable, and then you go back to something that's true, and then you put something in that's outrageous, but then you put something in that's true, and you're sandwiching in these false beliefs at such a fast rate that consciously people don't have time. Unless you're pausing the video and looking it up. It's just coming in. So I'd love to see something like that done for a doctoral dissertation to analyze.
- [47:18]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. And I guess what I would say in terms of how security and privacy professionals can help with that is we're really specialists in developing, researching, and deploying security and privacy controls. That's one thing we focus on in the entire field is what are the tools and techniques we can use to mitigate risk? And we need. We call them control libraries and frameworks. So you need to have categories of what these tools and techniques are and then specific implementation ideas and technologies that you can use. So we need these frameworks for psychosecurity and psycho privacy. So we would have lists of controls that we could put in place for mitigating propaganda, for example, the example that you were just talking about. But I feel like in the social psychology field, they do talk about defense. For example, there's inoculation theory, which has applications for defending people against propaganda. And I guess for your listeners, if they're not familiar with inoculation theory, that's when you present a weakened form of influence to someone to help protect them against something similar. So you could do it for like gang recruitment or. Yeah, propaganda videos, et cetera. So. So that's one.
- [48:27]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Testimonies of former members can serve that function to a certain extent. Have them tell their story of the step by step and where they. Where they got tricked or where they got manipulated.
- [48:40]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, so I guess where I was going with that is that social psychologists do study defensive controls, but they might not be developing comprehensive frameworks in a way that security and privacy professionals naturally, that's how we naturally think. We want these broad frameworks that we can share with people so that they can have kind of a menu of different things that they can implement to protect themselves. We typically focus on organizations, but in terms of psychosecurity and psycho privacy, maybe it's. I don't know if that's mainly something that would happen at the organization or. I mean, definitely the societal level, but it's also a personal issue. A person has to put in place controls for themselves and their loved ones. So it's more personal than giving your.
- [49:26]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Underage kid a smartphone, not letting them have a computer in their bedroom, and having it in the living room where you can monitor their use, and all kinds of interesting things. Can I ask you about AI agents? Because we're very aware that these are just trillions of dollars are being poured into this area. But there doesn't seem to be any ethical frameworks. It's just more like, how do you get more time and attention on the person signing up or whatever.
- [50:06]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, this kind of connects back to what I was alluding to earlier, that we don't have sufficient privacy laws in our country. So that would help the situation because if they're comprehensive privacy laws, they can cover all contexts. So that's one thing I would recommend. I'm not an expert on AI policy or AI ethics. I do have a personal interest in. In AI. I use ChatGPT personally. I think it's a wonderful technology. Of course, many risks associated with the development of AI and the one thing I would recommend to anyone who's using these chatbots is just treat them like you would. If you're interacting with a person, a person can lie to you or give you false information. The AI chatbot often does the same. So just be. It was indispensable for helping me prepare my data analysis for my dissertation. Actually, it does well of teaching code, and that's one of the best applications for it. Because if the code doesn't work, you know it right away. But asking about other things is more risky. Right, because it can give you false information which you might not know right away whether it's false or not.
- [51:16]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
It's a large language model that it's working off of. And Wikipedia is rife with bad information in the field of cults and brainwashing and mind control. So they hallucinate, they make up stuff, but it's because it's being fed junk.
- [51:39]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, actually, this is a great research idea too. The intersection of these large language models and cult education. What if we developed a curriculum for ChatGPT and then asked it questions about what is thought reform, or how would you define it? Or what type of person's recruited into a cult. And see, does it give out the right answers, you know, or does it give out false information? So I'm not aware of any studies that have done that.
- [52:06]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yeah, I've done, I've experimented a little bit and then I abandoned it because I just don't have the funds or the time. But I. I paid for a bot from MIT AI lab affiliations and I uploaded 2 million words of my writings and my lectures and my courses and everything else. So instead of it drawing upon the general information of the world, it just had Steve Hasson's expertise on the subject. And I was thinking that it would be a great tool for people to come to my website and ask questions and such, but even that was not to a level that I felt comfortable using and stopped paying the $100 a month because it was getting expensive to pay for that.
- [53:05]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah, well, it's definitely a research field that should be picked up by. By people because using AI to spread the word about educating people and inoculating the public, if there can be a beneficial application of that, we should be utilizing it.
- [53:22]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So are you teaching now? What are you doing? Are you working for a private firm? Whether you're.
- [53:29]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
I'm currently resting after the dissertation. You know, it's a five year long journey.
- [53:34]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Yes.
- [53:34]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Currently figuring out what in terms of employment and what I want to do. I guess what I would say is I will be pursuing more federal reform research heading into the future. I don't have any specific projects going on right now. Again, I'm kind of in a resting phase.
- [53:51]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
Well, I'll publicly invite you. I'm a Fielding fellow. That's where I did my dissertation, my doctoral work at Fielding Graduate University. And that gives me access to grants and Fielding will get a big chunk of it, but it's a nonprofit and we could get grants. So I'm extending a freedom of mind handshake to you if you want to do something together. Maybe it's a matter of just thinking what next? And writing a grant proposal and submitting it.
- [54:29]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
No, I definitely appreciate that. Yeah. And because this is probably no mystery to most of your listeners, but thought reform is a controversial issue and topic. I won't go into too much detail, but it was hard to pursue it as a dissertation topic because there's a lot of red. I mean, there's red tape and research for universities in general, but there's a lot of skepticism about whether it was an appropriate topic for several reasons. That's all I'll say, though. But. So getting grants for something like that through traditional channels might be quite difficult because.
- [55:04]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
I don't think so. No, I mean, there was, but when I did my lit review, I was shocked, and I shouldn't have been, but I was just shocked at how much these sociologists of religion who were advancing the no such thing as brainwashing and no such thing as thought reform and no such thing existed in the literature. But what's shifting in the years since I finished my dissertation in 2020 is there's more former members who are mental health professionals and pursuing advanced degrees, doing articles and research studies. And it's so obvious that people are believing the earth is flat or there are green reptiles or that just. So it's not just conspiracy theories, but they're actual cults, online cults. So I don't think it'll be hard to get a grant if it's something you're interested in. And I don't think it's controversial. I think people who are doing mind control don't want the public to be informed, so they may try to sabotage or censorship. But science needs to advance, even if there are those in power that say, no, no, no, we can't go there. So as we're wrapping up. Any other points you'd like to share with my listeners?
- [56:39]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
What I like to talk about when I wrap up an interview like this is that it's important to maintain. Hopefully, you know, thought reform is. I mean, it's a traumatizing subject to deal with. I mean, to think about, you know, just inherently, you know, thinking about human beings abusing each other and kind of in the wake of our most recent election here in our country, you know, and Donald Trump returning to office, there's probably a lot of people feeling hopeless or, you know, despairing about the future of our country. And, you know, the totalitarians want us to lose hope. So the most major thing we can do to resist is to maintain hope. Yeah.
- [57:18]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
And I'll add, to have community in real life with real people that, you know, and trust and lean on each other and, you know, be in nature, listen to music, go dancing, play with animals that you love, you know, puppies and cats and whatever, your kids. And do things that bring us back to the human experience.
- [57:44]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. Taking care of yourself and the people around you in pets. Those are all. I like to frame those. They are forms of resistance against the totalitarian influences because they want us to be miserable. So we take care of ourselves, maintain hope. That's my. Yeah.
- [58:00]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
And a lot of people are learning not to be on their fricking phone for 10 hours a day and certainly not to be up all night, because sleep is critical for our immune system and for our brain to reset. So to really learn, you know, hygiene. Mind hygiene.
- [58:18]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
Yeah. Limiting social media use or even deleting social media apps. Actually, in the wake of Cambridge Analytic, I deleted my Facebook. That's how disturbed I was. But I do very, very much limit and believe in limiting social media use because you hear about these teenagers that spend like six, seven, eight hours a day on social media and you know that's not healthy, you know. Right.
- [58:40]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
So yeah, make real friends in the real world. So. Dustin Steinhagen, thank you so much. Defending the Security of the Mind, A Male Survey of Thought Reform, Literacy in South Dakota, newly minted PhD and Cyber X Ray. Thank you so much.
- [59:02]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
It's been a pleasure. Dr. Hassan.
- [59:08]
Dr. Stephen Hassan
That'S it for today's episode of the Influence Continuum. I've been your host, Dr. Stephen Hasson. Theme music for the podcast is by Nasser Malik. To keep up to date with me and happenings that I think are important, please visit my website@freedomofmind.com there you'll find in depth articles about cults, mind control and other relevant topics. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram ultexpert. If you want to develop a comprehensive understanding of these topics, I highly recommend my books Combating Cult Mind Control, Freedom of Mind and the Cult of Trump. In that order. These books are a culmination of 45 plus years of experience and will really help you grasp the complex web of undo influence. I have also launched a new nine hour online course for anyone interested in a deep dive into issues related to recovering from undue influence in all forms. While this course is designed for clinicians, everyone can benefit. Remember, love is stronger than mind control. And thanks for listening.
- [60:35]
Dr. Dustin Steinhagen
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