Profs & Pints Baltimore: The Power of Cults

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Power of Cults,” on how cults operate, recruit members, and get people to stay, with Mariah Wilkerson, adjunct professor of psychology at George Mason University.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating.]

Most people believe that they’d never join a cult, yet cults have existed for thousands of years and continue to pop up all over the world.

What makes people join cults and why is it so hard to leave them? Hear these and other questions about cults tackled by Mariah Wilkerson, a social psychologist with a deep interest in them.

Dr. Wilkerson will take you inside the psychology of cults, both demystifying them and busting common myths about them.

She’ll describe how cults grab people’s attention by co-opting religious doctrine or messaging around current social issues. Once people are drawn in, cults use simple, yet powerful, social psychological techniques to keep them from leaving, to take money or other resources away from them, and to even pressure them to commit horrendous crimes.

We’ll look at how cults recruit through positive reinforcement, love bombing, and charismatic leadership, and then control through cognitive dissonance and through deindividuation—the shedding of self-awareness and personal identity.

You’ll learn how cults cause people to undergo dramatic psychological changes that alter how they make sense of the world and interact with others. Dr. Wilkerson will shed light on why leaving a cult can be so difficult as well as what happens to someone psychologically once that person is out. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)