Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan

These days there are too many people on social media proclaiming Trump has dementia when she says that all the facts are not available. Dr. Odenheimer is a geriatric neurologist and professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. She retired from academic medicine in 2017, keeps her medical license, and advocates for people with dementia and their caregivers. Dr. Odenheimer and I are colleagues in the Program in Psychiatry and the Law, a forensic think associated with Harvard Medical School. Like myself, she values truth telling and integrity. This commitment can get us both in conflict with others in our respective fields.She also cared for her own mother, who had dementia. We first spoke in 2022 about her fight against a false Alzheimer’s cure, in our earlier conversation⁵. This time we talked about the dementia misdiagnosis problems she has seen across her career.In this interview, we didn’t focus on Donald Trump. However, I thought it important to ask a forensic expert on dementia to come on my podcast again. This topic demands an expert knowing all the facts and doing her due diligence before tracking down a correct diagnosis.There are huge numbers of aging people who are being misdiagnosed and supplements and quack claims of treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia abound. Dementia misdiagnosis changes what happens to a person next: the medications they take, the independence they keep, and the care their family chooses.

Austrian filmmaker Friedrich “Fritz” Moser discusses his documentary, How to Build a Truth Engine. The film brings together investigative journalism, computer science, and neuroscience to examine our susceptibility to disinformation and what might help us resist it. The film was executive produced by George Clooney. Fritz initially set out to make a film about automating fact-checking. Could technology help investigators keep pace with the material circulating online? His work eventually brought him to Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury of UCLA and Prof. Tim Tangherlini of UC Berkeley and their research group developing StoryMiner, a system for analyzing narratives and the relationships within them. In the film, visualizations help make complicated connections among claims, people, and events easier to examine.The researchers also encouraged him to speak with neuroscientists. Finding errors in a story and understanding a person’s attachment to that story are different tasks. That distinction matters in my work. Someone may have built friendships, a sense of purpose, and part of their identity around a belief system. Presenting contradictory evidence can be important, but we also need to understand what reconsidering would mean for that person.Fritz’s original technology question grew into a much broader inquiry: Why are we susceptible to disinformation, and how can we become better equipped to evaluate it? This interview covers crucial insights and technologies what can help us navigate the psychological warfare that is being used on peoples around the world. A fascinating interview.

You want to help your family. Someone you trust offers an opportunity to earn extra income, work from home, and become financially independent. They introduce you to enthusiastic people who seem to share your values. Perhaps they attend your house of worship. Then you discover that making money requires recruiting other people. When the income fails to materialize, you are encouraged to buy more training, pay for coaching, and work on your lack of belief that you can become a millionaire by working part-time. By this point, questioning the opportunity may feel like questioning your friends, your faith, or your own ability to succeed.I have encountered these patterns for decades in my work with people harmed by commercial cults that do multi-level marketing (MLMs). Other varieties of commercial cults include trafficking and crypto. My guest on Cults, Culture & Coercion, Dr. William Keep, has spent decades examining the business practices behind them. I have known Bill for many years through our shared concern about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. A former business school dean at the College of New Jersey, he has helped attorneys and government investigators evaluate these operations. Our conversation explored how financial deception works, why it can be so difficult to recognize from inside, and what happens when businesses gain influence over the institutions meant to protect us.

Human beings want to make sense of chaos. We want explanations, patterns, and some sense that we know what is coming next. However, wanting an explanation does not necessarily mean wanting what is true and factual. That was one of the ideas that stood out to me during my conversation with Oxford professor Carissa Véliz. Her latest book Prophecy, Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future: From Ancient Oracles to AI covers the ethics of AI, privacy, and the ways power and influence shape technology and vice versa. Her work takes a much longer view of prediction by tracing the human desire to know the future from ancient oracles to algorithms. Véliz states that as human beings, we do not necessarily prefer what is true but rather what is familiar. So, when it comes to outsourcing more of our thinking to Large Language Models (LLMs) and possibly future artificial general intelligence (AGI) – defined as a hypothetical computer system that matches or exceeds human cognitive abilities across any domain – this is an important consideration. Prediction itself is not inherently bad; it's a core part of the scientific process. A hypothesis is a type of prediction itself. Within this process, we expect to observe something, but are open to it being challenged. This kind of prediction is something we carefully test, taking care that outside factors do not confuse the results and understand that it may not prove to be accurate or true. Yet, when it comes to predicting human behaviors and social dynamics, problems emerge. People are, inherently, impacted by predictions themselves, which can have an effect on future behavior, whereas something like a molecule or even the weather would not respond the same way.

Social identity, or how the portion of our identity we derive from participating in our social groups can expand our mind or limit our ability to embrace complexity and nuance. Why should this matter to someone who has never joined a cult? Because every one of us moves through families, workplaces, political communities, faiths, fandoms, and online networks. We are constantly being influenced, day in and day out, by every single person we meet.Social identity belongs at the center of a conversation about freedom of mind, connecting the intimate pressure to fit in with the public systems that reward some voices while punishing others.That tension guided my conversation with Jay Van Bavel, author of The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation and Promote Social Harmony. He is a professor of social psychology and director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation at New York University. The Power of Us explores how we experience the world and what shapes our perception day to day. It asks why disagreeing with others has become so difficult, and what has driven such a rise in hostility. But understanding is a key to navigating the polarization America and other countries are experiencing.