Endovior comments on New study on choice blindness in moral positions - Less Wrong

73 Post author: nerfhammer 20 September 2012 06:14PM

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Comment author: Endovior 23 September 2012 05:50:28PM 4 points [-]

The trick: you need to spin it as something they'd like to do anyway... you can't just present it as a way to be cool and different, you need to tie it into an existing motivation. Making money is an easy one, because then you can come in with an MLM structure, and get your cultists to go recruiting for you. You don't even need to do much in the way of developing cultic materials; there's plenty of stuff designed to indoctrinate people in anti-rational pro-cult philosophies like "the law of attraction" that are written in a way so as to appear as guides for salespeople, so your prospective cultists will pay for and perform their own indoctrination voluntarily.

I was in such a cult myself; it's tremendously effective.

Comment author: ChristianKl 24 September 2012 09:55:31PM 3 points [-]

If you want to reach a person who feels lonely having a community of like minded people who accept the person can be enough. You don't necessarily need stuff like money.

Comment author: Endovior 25 September 2012 01:37:50PM 1 point [-]

Agreed. Emotional motivations make just as good a target as intellectual ones. If someone already feels lonely and isolated, then they have a generally exploitable motivation, making them a prime candidate for any sort of cult recruitment. That kind of isolation is just what cults look for in a recruit, and most try to create it intentionally, using whatever they can to cut their cultists off from any anti-cult influences in their lives.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 September 2012 02:16:56PM 4 points [-]

Emotional motivations make just as good a target as intellectual ones.

Agree, except I'd strengthen this to "a much better".