How Cults Exploit Social Instincts to Recruit Members and Establish Undue Influence
- Rachel Oblak, LCMHC
- Jun 27
- 8 min read
People who have never been in a cultic group frequently ask, “Why would someone subject themselves to that level of control and abuse?”
While the answer is far too complicated to be attributed to just one reason, a large portion of it relates to the collective instincts with which we’re all born. As social beings, we’re wired for belonging to and participating in a group. This instinct can manifest in wonderful ways such as love, community, and the capacity to create and build things together that individuals on their own couldn’t. But it can also manifest in ways that are destructive or toxic.
Below, I detail some of the ways that cults and other extremist groups may exploit the collective instincts to hijack our desire to belong, establish a monoculture of influence, and capitalize on the human tendency towards conformity and obedience. I conclude with some ways that people can protect themselves better with this knowledge.
How Cults Hijack the Instinct to Belong
Cults often lure people in through a multi-part process, the first of which involves making someone want to belong. This first stage is often heavily flavored with love-bombing, a tactic whereby someone showers another with intense displays of affection and attention, sometimes even gifts or flattery, in a way that fosters a quick attachment. Cultic group members will put on an extreme show to demonstrate how amazing their groups is, projecting the message, “Look at how good we are. Look at how happy we are. Look at how enlightened we are. Look at how loving we are. You can have this too.”
Anyone can be susceptible to love bombing, but some of the most vulnerable people are lonely people. We need human connection in the same way we need food and water. If we don't have access to a healthy sense of connection through loved ones or community, we become vulnerable to seeking it in unhealthy places the same way someone who hasn't eaten in days will eventually stop being picky about the source. People with strong, nourishing relationships have something to counterbalance the recruitment effort. They have other connections that keep them anchored. Lonely people don't have that counterweight, which means when someone finally offers them the experience of being seen and accepted, they're far more likely to be swept away on the tide of their own hunger.
Loneliness doesn’t have to mean not having connections at all. Carl Jung said, “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” For those that feel like important aspects of themselves are unacceptable or unseen to the significant people in their lives, that loneliness of being around people while disconnected from them can make them especially at risk to the love-bombing techniques of a cult. When we lack a sense that we are loved and seen, where we find people that seem to “get us,” we will naturally want to stay.
The tricky thing is that many cults aren't hiding that they want to change someone, even while love bombing them. They hide the extent to which they'll try to change someone, and they may hide the methods. But part of the appeal is the promise that you'll become more like how the cult members appear (happier, healthier, more enlightened, more pure). They can offer total acceptance of the outsider-becoming-insider because they don't care how messy someone's life was before. In fact, the worse the better. Few things make a group look better than an impressive conversion story along the lines of, "My life was so empty and meaningless and destructive before this group saved me."
In this way, cults prey on both the desire to be accepted fully and the desire to change. The parts of ourselves we've learned are unwelcome elsewhere—the sense that we're different, the ways we hunger to be special and good, the shame we carry about who we've been—become a targe for cults. A cult offers to see precisely those things that makes someone feel like a stranger in their own life and a path beyond them. It doesn't feel like being recruited. It feels like being fully embraced.
And that's what makes the next stage so effective. Once someone has experienced that level of acceptance—once they've tasted what it feels like to be fully seen and offered a path toward becoming someone better—they'll do a great deal to keep it. Which is exactly when the group begins to tighten the circle.
Isolation: How Cults Create a Monoculture of Influence
Part of the way that cults get such intense influence over a person is by establishing a monoculture, where all sources of information and influence point in the same direction.
There are a number of ways that cults can do this, the first and most obvious of which is literally isolating an individual for an extended period of time. Sometimes that is only initially, such as inviting that person on a retreat where they will be disconnected from their normal life and surrounded by enthusiastic members of the group. Other times, it means an indefinite form of isolation such as moving into a compound or group home situation where the person is expected to primarily live with, work with, and spend time with the group, eschewing the outer world.
At other times, people aren’t isolated in the literal sense, but they do become isolated in the relational, informational, and emotional sense. The group may encourage or demand a level of dedication to group activities that reduces the amount of time someone can spend with non-group members or in non-group-related activities and hobbies. Groups can also create a fear of being contaminated in some way by non-group members, inducing people to pull back from their relationships with non-members who are seen as toxic or bad in some way.
Increasingly, building a monoculture doesn't require active effort at all. As people turn to social media for both connection and information, the platforms themselves can do the isolating. Social media algorithms are designed to optimize engagement, which means they feed you more of what you already respond to. For someone who has started engaging with an extremist group's content, the algorithm starts to build an echo-chamber for them, curating an information environment where the group's worldview is reinforced from every direction while dissenting perspectives gradually disappear from view. The person may still technically have access to the outside world, but their informational world has narrowed to a silo.
Conformity and Control: How Cults Normalize Extremism
Once the desire to belong has been hijacked and the monoculture sufficiently established, cultic groups are in a prime position to begin exerting both overt and covert influence over new members. Pressure is put on the individual to change things about themselves, often under the guise of becoming more enlightened or pure or better in some fashion. Where the new recruit may have initially been drawn in because they felt fully embraced, eventually they find themselves making further and further modifications to themselves in their quest to get back to that intoxicating acceptance.
This is where the erosion of critical thinking and ethics can happen without someone even realizing it’s happening. We are imbued with a powerful drive to fit in with our “tribe.” What those around us normalize, we have a tendency to begin to accept and believe ourselves. This can look mild, such as the way that friends will share catch phrases or mannerisms. But in a closed environment where the pressure is constant and the outside perspective is gone, that same instinct scales. Small compromises become the new normal, and each one makes the next one easier to accept. At the level of groupthink, it can derail entire decision-making bodies. At its worst, it can lead to atrocities, such as the Manson murders, Jonestown, or the more recent Zizians (who are a good example of the way that radicalization and isolation can begin in online chats, not just in physical communes).
This conformity instinct is ultimately what cults are trying to harness because they can get members to do all sorts of things, from giving their savings over to the group to abusing other members or allowing others to abuse them to harming or conning outsiders.
What makes this especially insidious is the way cults turn being isolated from the larger world into a form of specialness while framing conformity to the group as proof of goodness. Because cults evoke the sense that they have access to a truth or knowledge that those outside the group lack, they can convey the sense that their rejection or isolation from the rest of the world is proof of how special they are and how evil or ignorant everyone else is, making it easy to justify what the group does in service to its mission while projecting their shadow onto others.
For the person who has always felt like a black sheep in their family or community, a group that tells them their exile is actually election—proof of being chosen—offers to turn that wound of loneliness into gold while simultaneously increasing the power the group holds over the person. Ultimately, the self the group welcomes is a smaller version of that person, shaped to the group's norms and goals. The person is offered belonging in exchange for the very individuality that made them lonely to begin with.
Protecting Yourself from Cult Recruitment
You can't turn off the instinct to belong, and you shouldn't want to. But you can learn to recognize when it's at risk of being exploited. You can take active steps to reduce your susceptibility to a cultic group hijacking your social instincts in four important ways.
Don't ignore loneliness. If Jung was right that loneliness comes from being unable to communicate the things that matter most to you, then the antidote isn't just being around more people—it's having relationships where you can actually be yourself. Take active steps to build connections where you can be seen in the fullness of who you are, not just the acceptable parts. That takes courage and vulnerability, but it's one of the best protections you have. The loneliness that cults exploit isn't solved by filling a room. It's solved by being known.
Resist monocultures. Pay attention to your information environment. If your social media feed, your friend group, and your news sources are all saying the same thing, that's worth questioning because a monoculture of influence is where critical thinking goes to die. Actively seek out perspectives that challenge your own. Read things that make you think, even if they make you uncomfortable. Like a muscle, your capacity for independent thought needs to be exercised to remain fit.
Build relationships across different contexts. When all of your connections exist within a single group—one community, one workplace, one belief system—losing the group means losing everything. That's exactly the leverage cults depend on. A diversity of relationships means no single group holds the power to be your entire world and makes it harder for that monoculture to develop. Focus on building multiple pools of connection, with at least some of them off-line and in the physical world.
Watch for the slow boil. Check in with yourself periodically. Are you doing things, believing things, or tolerating things that the version of you from a year or so ago wouldn't have? Growth is normal. But if the changes all point in the direction of a single group's expectations, and if questioning those changes feels dangerous or disloyal, that's a signal worth paying attention to.
If someone you love is already involved in a group that concerns you, my post on what to do when a loved one joins a cult offers practical guidance on how to stay connected without pushing them further in.
