Cults or Community?
According to Young, cults typically have this type of clearly defined leader.
What is a charismatic leader?
This is the stereotypical pathway into cult membership and describes someone actively looking for something before encountering the group.
What is a seeker?
What is a monotropic attachment?
An innate bond formed with the child's biological caregiver, often their mother.
Cults may manipulate physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization using this famous model.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
This leader was responsible for the Children of God and communicated many of his teachings through the Mo Letters.
Who is David Berg?
Young uses this term for the shared belief that members are expected to accept as fundamentally true.
What is sacred assumption?
•The Revenge Seeker
•The Status Seeker
•The Identity Seeker
•The Thrill Seeker
This psychologist is associated with attachment theory and the idea that attachment serves a protective function.
John Bowlby
Goffman used this term for settings where similarly situated people are cut off from wider society and live an enclosed, formally administered life.
What is a total institution?
This cult used teenage girls as "Flirty Fishers."
Children of God/The Family International
A group requires members to increasingly sacrifice their individuality, cuts them off from outsiders, develops specialized language, and makes leaving extremely costly. Name two characteristics from Young's definition demonstrated here.
A seemingly independent organization recruits people without revealing its connection to the actual high-control group. This recruitment strategy is called_________.
Complete the relationship discussed in class: Fear + ______ = coercive persuasion.
What is isolation?
Hair, body size, body coverage, and underwear are the four domains discussed under this broader mechanism of control.
What is appearance control?
This 762-page Children of God publication documented the upbringing of Maria's son, Ricky Rodriguez.
What is the Book of Davidito?
How does Stein describe a cult?
Stein identifies three outcomes that can occur as loyalty and dependence increase during resocialization into a total ideology. Name and explain two.
What are anxious dependency, cognitive collapse, and having the group's agenda replace previous thinking?
Explain Bowlby's Attachment Theory and the four types of attachment styles.
1. Secure Attachment
2. Anxious Preoccupied Attachment
3. Avoidant or Dismissive Attachment
4. Disorganized Attachment (Main & Solomon)
Members are punished for displaying unhappiness, experience alternating periods of intense euphoria and fear, and are encouraged to dismiss distress through religious or spiritual explanations. These practices demonstrate this broader mechanism.
What is attitude control?
*I'll also accept spiritual bypassing.
Keely's experience in this contemporary high-control group was used to examine attachment processes and the relationship between fear, isolation, and belonging.
What is Twin Flames Universe?
Which definition of a cult do you prefer? Apply it to any group you believe to be a cult. Are there any fallacies or illogical assumptions?
Your choice!
It is common and easy for society to judge cult members. Are most unintelligent? Explain members of either a) Twin Flames Universe, b) Love Has Won, c) Children of God and vulnerability that kept them in the cult.
Hmmm.
A cult leader deliberately generates fear while simultaneously convincing followers that the leader is their only source of safety. This can create this attachment dynamic discussed in class.
What is coerced disorganized attachment?
Give an example of how the FLDS builds commitment and dependency among women and girls. *List 2-3 behaviors
Hmmmm...
Using any scholastic definition of a cult (i.e., Stein's or Young's), please explain whether your team thinks the Word of Faith Fellowship is a cult. Why or why not?