Between 1950 and 1953, Chinese forces holding American prisoners of war in Korea produced something that had eluded every interrogation service of the previous war: large numbers of ordinary soldiers who cooperated, informed on each other, made public statements against their own country, and in some cases appeared to believe what they were saying. The MIT social psychologist Edgar Schein went to interview them on their return, and what he found was almost entirely unlike the popular idea of brainwashing.
There was no drug, no hypnosis, and remarkably little torture in the cases that produced attitude change. The Chinese called their approach the lenient policy, and its central instrument was writing.
A prisoner would be asked to agree with something trivially true and impossible to argue with: that the United States is not perfect, or that unemployment exists in America. Nobody refuses that. He might then be asked to make a list of the ways in which America is not perfect, and to sign it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group, or to expand it into an essay for a camp competition with a small prize — cigarettes, a little extra food. The essays were then broadcast, or posted, or printed with the author's name in camp newspapers and sometimes back home.
Each step is small. Each step is a document in the prisoner's own handwriting, containing statements he cannot claim he did not make, produced under conditions mild enough that he cannot tell himself he had no choice.
Schein's analysis, and Festinger's dissonance theory arriving at the same time, explain the rest. A man who has written and signed and read aloud a critique of his own country is holding a behavior and a belief that do not fit. He cannot unwrite the essay. So the belief moves — not far, and not all at once, but far enough that the next request finds him closer than the last one did. The captors' most sophisticated decision was to keep the pressure below the level at which the prisoner could attribute his compliance to force. Beat a man and he will say anything, and afterwards he will know exactly why he said it. Give him a small voluntary concession and a cigarette, and he has no such alibi.
The Korean camps are in this guide as the cleanest documented case of commitment used as an instrument of state, but the procedure was not invented there and did not stay there. The intake ritual of coercive groups is structurally identical: an assessment form that asks you to write down your problems, a confession session, a written statement of goals, a public declaration in front of the group, a testimonial recorded on video. Each artifact is voluntary. Each artifact is yours. Each one makes leaving more expensive, because leaving now requires explaining the artifact.
Three properties make a commitment binding, and they are worth memorizing because they are the same three every time. It is written or recorded rather than spoken. It is public rather than private. And it appears to have been freely chosen, which usually means the pressure applied was carefully kept just below the level you would notice.
Anything that asks you to produce a durable record of a position you have not yet held for long is not gathering information. It is manufacturing a version of you that will be difficult to contradict later — most of all by you.
Defense: The Small Yes That Owns You: Interrupting Commitment Creep