What is the scientific basis of successful brainwashing?

Imagine a society. Every member of the society is indoctrinated in different ways by

1. their parents,
2. the education system,
3. media and
4. friends.

One can think of this society as a collection of

1. idea senders (when people or media send their opinions on other people),
2. idea receivers (when a person gets a "signal" from someone else and believes it) and
3. repeaters (when a person believes an idea imposed on him or her by others and then starts to spread it, thinking that the idea is his/her own).

Let's assume there is some widespread view of the world.

One could build a story around a small group of people changing the dominant view of the world by

1. sending the right amount of signals (some new idea) to
2. the right people (those, who are most open to new ideas) and
3. in the right intensity.

I've been breaking my head, how one could estimate these things. Then, I thought that there must exist some literature on these topics since there were several examples when large numbers of people voluntarily (without any physical coercion) did things, which ran against their interests, such as

• the rise of the National Socialism in 1930es Germany (including the astonishing fact that many otherwise intelligent Germans bought the Nazi slogan along the lines of We need to defend our country, therefore we have to invade Russia),
• collapse of the Soviet Union without the resistance of its citizens (even though the majority of them were against it) and
• the 2004 Orange revolution in the Ukraine (lots of Ukrainians believed that the politicians, which came to power in 2004 would be less corrupt than their predecessors - from everything I know from Ukrainians, these hopes never materialized and the new rulers were more, not less corrupt than the old ones).

There were also experiments, which suggest that a group of people can be manipulated into a behaviour they wouldn't choose other wise (e. g. the Stanford Prison Experiment).

If I wanted to build a world, in which a small group of people imposes its views on the majority, what theoretical frameworks and/or books could I use as a starting point (to mak it more or less realistic) ?

posted almost 9 years ago

DP_‭

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