Why Did They Do It

Picture in your mind a member of Heaven's Gate. Who do you see? A brainwashed devotee mumbling her prayers mindlessly. A weak-kneed follower who blindly follows Elder Jonathan's orders? A truthseeker who is so desperate to understand the meaning of life that she will accept an odd version replete with allusions to spaceships and UFOs?

These images of people who take part in nontraditional religious and social groups are unfair exaggerations. Although the word cult summons up thoughts of brainwashed automatons so intimidated by a charismatic leader that they can't stand up for their rights, this stereotype is naive and incomplete. Everyone's actions are controlled, in part, by social factors, and the actions of members of so-called cults require no reference to the "magical powers" of a leader or the "twisted" personalities of the followers.

What are these group-level processes? Informational influence occurs when other people provide us with information that we then use to make decisions and form opinions. If we spend years and years in the company of people who explain things in terms of UFOs and out-of-the-body experiences, we will in time begin to explain things in that way as well. Normative influence occurs when we tailor our actions to fit the social norms of the situation. We take such norms as "Do not tell lies" and "Help other people when they are in need" for granted, but some societies and some groups have different norms which are equally powerful and taken-for-granted. Normative influence accounts for the transmission of religious, economic, moral, political, and interpersonal beliefs across generations. Interpersonal influence is used in those rare instances when someone violates the group's norms. The individual who publicly violates a group's norm will likely meet with reproach or even be ostracized from the group.

These three factors--informational, normative, and interpersonal influence--explain nearly all social behaviors, including those exhibited by people in atypical religious groups. First, informational influence: Studies of cult members find that they typically rely on the group for answers to personally important questions. One member of a religious group describes his first meeting with a cult as: It was strange, but the intensity of the two days left me much clearer about why I had been so uncertain, and where I might head for the future; it was as if a haze had been lifted. I began to understand things that had made no sense before, why most people rushed around for no reason, without any lasting sense of purpose. I had a sense that I could look for direction to my friends in the One-World Crusade. (quoted in M. Gallanter, 1989, p. 61, Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion, Oxford University Press).

Second, normative influence: Members feel obligated to conform to group norms that encouraged friendliness, cooperation, and total acceptance of the principles of the group. Self-reports of conversions are very similar in that people begin as skeptics, recognizing that the ideas are possibly bizarre and "kooky." But over time they accept them as the their own. One writes: I "went along in all the activities because they were sincere people doing things for a good cause, even though sometimes it seemed silly." Eventually, though, he internalized the group's norms.

Third, interpersonal influence: Cult members won't take no for an answers. Such groups are often isolated, intensely cohesive, and led by an individual who brooks no disagreement. Nearly everyone recognizes that there is danger in "falling in" with the members of cult, for even though we believe that we are individualists who make up our own minds, we intuitively realize that such a group could change us from who were are now into one of "them." Studies of radical religious groups describe very similar dynamics across all the groups: intense cohesiveness, public statements of principles, pressure placed on anyone who dissents, ostracism from the group for disagreement, strong rewards for agreement with the group's ideals.

I am the first to admit that an explanation that stress normal, everyday sorts of determinants of behavior seems inadequate to explain such abnormal, unusual behavior as mass suicide. Yet the law of parsimony requires nothing more if this basic account is sufficient. Informational, normative, and interpersonal influence processes guide us constantly. In ambiguous situations, other people's actions provide us with the social proof we need to make our own choices. If it's OK for them, we assume it must be OK for us. And should we fail to match the expectations of those around us, they will be pleased to guide us back to the right path. We may feel the need to dehumanize the group for its actions by calling them crazy or hypothesizing weird social forces that constrained them, but in the end their actions stem from the same processes that guide the behavior of the accountant crunching numbers for a client, the gang member facing down a rival, the soldier readying for another patrol, or the frat boy drinking to heavily at keg party.

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