This page describes some of the books which helped me write Cruelty and Brainwashing
(grouped by topic). They're the ones which stuck in my mind, though
there were many others! Links are to Amazon.co.uk or, for individuals,
to their home pages.
Three seminal early works on brainwashing are Edward Hunter's
journalistic Brainwashing
and Brain-washing in Red China,
and Robert Lifton's more scholarly Thought Reform
and the Psychology of Totalism.
Hunter's books are propaganda (he worked for the CIA), but they provide
a strong
sense of the
paranoid atmosphere of 1950s anti-Communist America.
Lifton's book, despite
its offputting
title, is an excellent, fascinating account of the Chinese Communists'
programmes of
thought reform. More recently, John Marks' The
Search for the Manchurian Candidate describes CIA
research
into mind control.
Cults and Social Psychology
Cults,
by Marc Galanter, is a psychological
analysis of cult behaviour, well worth reading, while John Ronson's Them
is a lighter look at extremists of various kinds. There are
many books about cults which focus on a particular cult or
personal experience; fewer attempt to compare or draw general
inferences.
For more on influence techniques, Influence,
by Robert
Cialdini, and Age
of Propaganda, by Pratkanis
and Aronson, are both very readable. For a psychologist's
investigation of group behaviour, see Ervin Staub,
The
Psychology of Good and Evil. For
social psychology in general, Hewstone and Stroebe's Introduction
to Social Psychology is a good
place to start. I used the 3rd edition for Brainwashing;
they're now onto a fourth.
Disgust
Disgust, that most fascinating and culturally-mediated of
feelings, has received much attention recently, after long neglect
relative to other negative emotions. This is mainly because of its role
in moral feelings and judgements, as notably proposed by Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt
and colleagues. William Miller's The
Anatomy of Disgust is one of
several useful summaries; another is Susan Miller's Disgust. For
background theory, I drew on Mary Douglas's great book Purity
and Danger.
Free
Will
Daniel
Dennett's Freedom
Evolves is a good, if
at times
fairly technical,
introduction to recent philosophical thinking on free will.
A selection
of classic essays on the subject (warning: very
technical) is
Free
Will,
edited by Robert Kane.
The analysis of free will in economic terms is
exemplified by George Ainslie's Breakdown
of Will,
which is also
technical in parts, but well worth the effort.
On the Rwandan genocide, an informative description of events
from a
concerned outsider's perspective is Romeo Dallaire's Shake
Hands with the Devil,
while Jean Hatzfeld's book A
Time for Machetes gives great
insight into the
perpetrators' minds.
David Buss's evolutionary psychology book The
Murderer Next Door deals with
more 'everyday' killing. I also learned much
from Roy Baumeister's Evil and Aaron
Beck's
Prisoners
of Hate.
Language and Cognition
Rather than standard works like Steven Pinker's The
Language Instinct,
I would choose to reread Terrence Deacon's excellent Symbolic
Species.
More recently, how about Daniel Everett's book on the Amazonian Piraha
people, Don't
Sleep, There are Snakes, which
challenges Chomsky? There's an
informative video about
Everett's work here.
The
Media
and Politics
Murray
Edelman's The
Politics of Misinformation and John
Street's
Mass
Media, Politics and Democracy are good
sources for more information about the
distorting
effects of mass communications. Isaiah Berlin's
'Two concepts of liberty' is a seminal essay on liberalism, a theme
elaborated
on to excellent effect by Brian Barry in Culture
and Equality.
For the other end of the
political spectrum, Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism is a classic
of the
field.
Neuroscience
To be honest I don't read neuroscience books as a rule; I read
journal articles. However, if you're after academic detail in book form
Cacioppo
and colleagues' Foundations
in Social Neuroscience
will keep you going for quite a while; it's a big tome.
Religion
and Science
Have
you read Richard Dawkins' The
God Delusion? If
you haven't, it may be a better use of your time to read one of
the many more nuanced books on religion available. Dawkins
writes beautifully on
evolution, but faith's well known capacity for rattling scientists into
substituting polemic for
argument and assertion for evidence has rarely been more obvious. For
alternatives, there's much of
interest in Karen
Armstrong's history
of
religious fundamentalist thinking, The
Battle for God, Malise
Ruthven's Fundamentalism and Rene
Girard's riveting classic Violence
and the Sacred.
The cognitive science of religion - work such as Bob
McCauley's Bringing
Ritual to Mind
- is a rapidly growing field with much of interest to say
about
why religion is so powerful and widespread; you may also like to read
Harvey Whitehouse's work on ritual Modes
of Religiosity. And of
course there's Daniel
Dennett's Breaking
the Spell, although
like other people I
feel he places too much weight on
game theory and memes.
References
Ainslie, G.
(2001), Breakdown of
Will. New York:
CambridgeUniversity
Press.
Arendt, H.
(1951), Totalitarianism.
New
York:
Harcourt, Brace and World.
Armstrong, K.
(2001), The Battle for
God: fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. London:
HarperCollins.
Barry, B.
(2001), Culture and
Equality: an egalitarian critique of
multiculturalism. Cambridge:
Polity.
Baumeister,
R.F. (2001), Evil: inside human violence
and cruelty. New York:
Owl Books.
Beck,
A.T. (1999), Prisoners of Hate: The
Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence. New York:
HarperCollins.
Berlin,
I. (1958/1969),
'Two concepts of
liberty'. In Four
Essays on Liberty.
New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 118-72 (reprinted in many other places).
Bourke,
J. (2000), An Intimate History of
Killing: face-to-face killing in twentieth-century warfare. London:
Granta.
Buss,
D.M. (2005), The Murderer Next Door: why
the mind Is designed to kill. New York:
Penguin.
Cacioppo, J.T., Berntson, G.G., Adolphs, R., et al., eds.
(2002), Foundations in
Social Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cialdini, R.B.
(2002), Influence:
science and practice, 4th edition. Needham Heights,
MA:
Allyn and Bacon.
Conroy,
J. (2001), Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary
People: the dynamics of torture. London:
Vision.
Dallaire,
R. (2004), Shake Hands with the Devil: the failure of
humanity in Rwanda.
London:
Arrow.
Dawkins, R. (2006), The
God Delusion. London, Bantam Press.
Deacon, T.W. (1997), The Symbolic
Species: the co-evolution of language and the human brain. London:
Allen
Lane.
Dennett,
D.C. (2006), Breaking
the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon. London, Allen
Lane.
Dennett,
D.C. (2003),
Freedom Evolves.
London:
Allen
Lane.
Douglas, M. (2002), Purity
and Danger. London: Routledge.
Edelman, M.
(2001), The
Politics of
Misinformation. New York:
CambridgeUniversity
Press.
Everett, D.L. (2008), Don't
Sleep, There Are Snakes: life and language in the Amazon jungle.
London: Profile.
Galanter, M. (1999),
Cults: faith,
healing, and coercion, 2nd edition. New York: OxfordUniversity
Press.
Gambetta,
D., ed. (2005), Making Sense of Suicide
Missions. New York:
OxfordUniversity
Press.
Girard, R. (trans. 2005), Violence and the Sacred,
trans. P. Gregory. London: Continuum.
Hatzfeld, J. (2005), A
Time for Machetes. The Rwandan genocide: the killers speak.
London, Serpent's Tail.
Hewstone, M. and Stroebe, W. (2001), Introduction
to Social Psychology, 3rd edition. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Hinton, A.L. (2002), Annihilating
Difference: the anthropology of genocide. Berkeley,
University of California Press.
Hinton, A.L. (2004), Why
Did They Kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide.
Berkeley, University of California Press.
Hunter, E.
(1951), Brain-washing
in Red China: the calculated destruction of men's
minds. New
York: Vanguard Press.
Hunter, E.
(1956/1959), Brainwashing:
the story of men who defied it. London:
World Distributors (Manchester).
Kane, R., ed.
(2002), Free Will.
Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lifton, R.J.
(1961), Thought Reform
and the Psychology of Totalism:
a study of "brainwashing" in China.
London:
Victor Gollancz.
Lifton, R.J. (2000), The
Nazi Doctors: medical killing and the psychology of genocide.
New York: Basic Books.
Marks, J.
(1977/1991), The
Search
for the "Manchurian Candidate". New York: W.W.
Norton.
McCauley, R.N. and Lawson, T. (2008), Bringing
Ritual to Mind: psychological foundations of cultural forms,
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
/!>