The MeidasTouch Podcast
Thought Reform and Cyber Security: Where Cult Manipulation Techniques Meet Technology With Dustin Rozario Steinhagen, PhD
Mon, 23 Dec 2024
Dustin Rozario Steinhagen, PhD is a privacy expert who recently graduated with his doctorate degree in Cyber Defense from Dakota State University. His dissertation is titled “Defending the security of the mind: A mail survey of thought-reform literacy in South Dakota.” This quantitative analysis measured “what everyday people know about thought reform and psychologically manipulative groups.” One of the most powerful defenses a person can have against mind hacking is admitting they are vulnerable to it. After that, skills can be acquired and built upon to teach people how to protect themselves further. However, we mustn’t let our guard down when it comes to our brains and minds coming under attack. Like anti-virus software needing updates to protect against the latest cyber threats, our minds also require ongoing learning to maintain psychological security in addition to adequate rest, play, and sleep. Influences are also more challenging to detect, more frequent in occurrence, from multiple directions, and require vigilance when interacting with different levels of trusted or untrusted sources. Having trusted groups who respect personal privacy and have our best intentions in mind becomes extremely important in such an environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the significance of thought reform in cybersecurity?
Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of the Influence Continuum. I have a newly minted doctor as a guest today. I'm very, very excited to have with me Dr. Dustin Rosario-Steinhagen. He's a privacy expert. He just got your doctorate degree in cyber defense. You've published numerous times in privacy literature, including fields of privacy education and neuro privacy.
And we want to talk today about the topic of your dissertation research, which is titled Defending the Security of the Mind, a Male Survey of Thought Reform Literacy in South Dakota. And all I can say is I was very excited to learn about your doctoral research. I know you approached me to be on your committee, which I unfortunately was overcommitted in other ways.
I couldn't serve, but my dear friend and colleague John Atack did serve. John is an ex-Scientologist and a brilliant mind. unto himself. And it sounds like you're really doing cutting edge work. So I wanted to interview you, hear more about what you were interested in, how you got interested in this, its applications, and get more people, especially young people, interested in this topic.
So Dustin, Dr. Dustin, welcome to the Influence Continuum.
Thanks, Dr. Hassan. And first, I just want to say it's an honor to be on your show. I first caught wind of your research in 2019 when I was first researching what's out there in terms of malicious influence.
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Chapter 2: How did Dr. Dustin become interested in thought reform research?
And we'll get into the backstory of kind of how a cyber defense PhD got involved with thought reform research because it's very unintuitive and might even sound inappropriate without some context. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, please tell us. Sure. So in 2018, I was a senior at Cornell University in my undergrad program.
And the most important course I ever took in my life was this course called Computational Psychology. So the whole thesis of this course is that the brain is literally a type of computer and the mind is computation. And we don't have time to go through all the mechanics of that.
But the citation I would provide would be the professor's book, which is called Computing the Mind, How the Mind Really Works. The author's name? Dr. Shimon Edelman. Okay, thank you. In 2018, as your viewers and listeners might recall, that's when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the news in the spring, so right around the same time I was taking this course.
And, you know, that really opened my mind to, like, how much manipulation there is out there and how our personal data is used to, you know, politically manipulate us. And I mean, that's really just the tip of the iceberg, too. And I didn't realize how deep and broad this subject is until I really dug into the literature.
So may I interrupt you, Dustin, and just for my listeners who may need a refresher on Cambridge Analytica, and I know I think Christopher Wiley wrote a book about it. Tell our listeners just a bit about what that was about. Sure.
So Cambridge Analytica was, I think it's most properly termed, should be termed a psychological warfare firm. They were doing political manipulation using personal data in various countries prior to... essentially meddling in the 2016 presidential election in our country and then also the Brexit referendum in the UK.
So they got in big trouble and had to go back and they eventually went bankrupt because of this huge privacy scandal where they were essentially scraping thousands of data points from Facebook and then combining that with psychometrics analysis to target specific voters and sway the election in unethical ways.
You know, I mean, influence doesn't have to be inherently unethical, but the reason why it came into Analytica was wrong was because people's data was being scraped that they didn't consent to and that they didn't understand what was going on. It was on such a massive scale as well.
If I may add, there was a documentary, I believe, called The Great Hack for people who want more details about it. And my recollection, if I may add, is just that they got into Facebook and were doing questionnaires. and used the questionnaires to get to all the friends of the people who responded. I was in that hack.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from the Cambridge Analytica scandal?
know maybe it's like a medical emergency or they're stuck in an airport and they need money all of a sudden so then they have this cover story to extract money from the person who genuinely loves you know this this fake person and oftentimes romance scams succeed at draining a person's entire bank account it's actually it's one of the the worst types of scams that i'm aware of just in terms of the emotion that's how cults like to recruit these yeah it's very similar to recruit others right except it's online often so people you know fall in love with a projection
based on false information. And it's very, very nefarious and harmful and painful. And forgive me for adding one more thing, but just recently there was a young boy who fell in love with a chatbot on Character AI and killed himself because he wanted to be with this chatbot for eternity. Yeah, I saw that story in the news recently as well. Yeah. So let's go back to you.
So there you were, the brain is a computer, it can be hacked, Cambridge Analytica, and you're at Cornell going, okay, what do I want to do with my life?
Yeah, that's when I really decided to pursue a degree in cybersecurity. Because I'm not sure exactly how I first heard, but cybersecurity professionals, many of them deal with, we call it social engineering in the field. I'm not sure why we call it social engineering, because most other fields will call it psychological manipulation, malicious influence. I think there's better terms for it.
But be that as it may, a lot of the literature in the cybersecurity field, you'll see the phrase social engineering. Yeah. I was aware of social engineering and I started reading books and I really got interested. I started kind of falling in love with learning about social psychology and privacy too.
The privacy connection is from Cambridge Analytica and just realizing that there's this intimate connection between people losing their privacy and their vulnerability to influence. The more data you have on someone, the easier you can control and manipulate them and deceive them.
Right. And to state the obvious, America does not have any data privacy laws in place. So all of these companies are taking our data, putting them on the dark web, right? So we have thousands of pieces of information about our choices on some dark cloud somewhere that some bad actor could potentially buy and use. Is that right?
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Chapter 4: How does psychological manipulation relate to personal data privacy?
We do have some privacy protections, but they're quite inadequate. And I mean, just as a comparison, over in the European Union, they have something called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. So that covers all contexts, and it has very robust protections for privacy. Here in America, we don't have a federal law like that.
We have some federal laws and many state laws, and it's uncomprehensive, so that there are some protections in place, but definitely not enough. And again, Cambridge Analytica was kind of proof of that.
Right. So tell us more about how you went about the study, what you were hoping to, you know, with science, you were always trying to do research that's cutting edge, that moves the boulder a little bit further up the mountain, right? So tell us about your process.
Yeah, so after, and again, like a large part of coming up with your initial idea for research is just reading what's out there currently. So actually, I read your book, Combating Cold Mind Control. That was actually the first book on thought reform and destructive cults that I had read.
And that's when I really realized this is, thought reform that is, is the most serious security and privacy threat that we have. It has the potential to destroy all humans through nuclear war, like the Aum Shinrikyo case study.
That's the Japanese sarin gas apocalyptic conspiracy cult that issued sarin gas, killed and injured many Japanese people. My mentor, Robert J. Lifton, who wrote the seminal book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, did a book called Destroying the World to Save It about apocalyptic cults and featured the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
Yeah, and so there's that connection where, I mean, that's kind of the most extreme negative consequence of unmitigated thought reform. But even just the smaller things, too, it's reading the different types of exploitation that's out there. Like, for example, psychological warfare. I mentioned romance scams, the other types of scams, but...
When I was learning about all of those, it really seemed like thought reform and the consequences it has for the people that are affected by it, really, it seems to be one of the worst things that can happen to a person. And it's because it covers so many different contexts. It covers domestic abuse, human trafficking, terrorism, and so many more contexts.
So I really wanted to do a study that would help push the envelope in thought reform research, especially since I learned that it was so underappreciated by social scientists. And I think our colleague A-Tech has said that it's almost a neglected research field. So I was learning as much as I could about thought reform.
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Chapter 5: What were the main findings of Dr. Dustin's survey on thought reform?
And two-thirds, so 66%, selected that it was possible. And I just found this very interesting because, well, first of all, we didn't have any, from a broad geographic population, that is, we didn't have any statistics about what people believe of their own vulnerability to thought reform. So, I mean, two-thirds of people were humble. I think that's hopeful, actually.
I thought it was going to be a lot less. I thought more people would assume that they were immune.
Yeah, well, folks like me from big cities have ideas about Dakota and South Dakota and stuff. So I think it's really fascinating, frankly. I'll just comment that it is the biggest vulnerability to think that you're invulnerable. to being deceived and manipulated. It's like, oh my God. And it's amazing when I talk to people who say, no, it would never happen to me. And then I ask them questions.
And they're like, oh, actually, I... did fall for someone who was a narcissist, then they did hurt me, and I did have this boss. But people walk around thinking they're too smart.
Yeah, the optimism bias and several other cognitive biases work against us for that. I was going to say that In terms of the humility, the most interesting statistical finding of my survey was that there was a positive correlation between those who were humble and getting higher scores on the test.
For the people who are methodologists or researchers, the exact correlation was 0.251, which corresponds to a low to moderate positive correlation. And I guess just to put it in plain English, if the respondents in my survey that were humble knew more about thought reform and cults than those who assumed that they were immune. And I think this is a very... I mean, it's a...
We just didn't have data about this prior to my dissertation that there would even be a relation between these two variables at all. And this really coincides with what is stated in the thought reform literature, like you just alluded to a few minutes ago, that you know, if you assume you're immune, then you're vulnerable.
And assuming that a person's knowledge is correlated with how protective they are, then this study actually gives quantitative evidence for this theory that humility is protective.
Right. And I have a question because I didn't read your dissertation, forgive me, yet. But did you ask any questions if people had children?
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Chapter 6: What demographic factors influence susceptibility to psychological manipulation?
And then the second distractor was that they were highly charismatic people who can influence people with little effort. And that was 27% of the respondents who selected that. So it was very close.
You call them distractors?
Yeah, a distractor in a survey. So mine was a knowledge survey. So there's a single correct answer. So a distractor is one of the false. Got it. Or false options in a multiple choice question. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I guess I can't just assume everyone knows what I'm talking about.
No, you're teaching me because I'm not an expert in cyber education and social engineering. So please, that's partly why I wanted to have you on the show. Yeah.
So I guess with this question that I just mentioned, there was a lot of people who thought that the core element of a cult leader is the charisma or the fact that they have compelling ideologies, which those are often things that are in place, but that's not what defines a cult leader. What defines it is the psychopathology where they're abusing people.
And that distinguishes them from benign leaders. Okay, so the third question I want to talk about was about legal protection. So this is another one of my favorite questions. And I know you wrote your whole dissertation on legal protections and thought reform and covered that in your lit review.
So this question asked, what legal protections currently exist to protect against psychological manipulation in America? So 7% of people selected the wrong answer that it's a federal crime. 12% selected the distractor that it was a state crime in some states, but not all of them. 4% thought it was a state crime in all 50 states.
And 65% selected the correct answer that there are almost no legal protections in America against thought reform. And that's very impressive, right? Two thirds of people understood that, oh, yeah, psychological manipulation, it's a problem, but our legislators aren't doing anything about it.
So people do understand what's going on in terms of the current legal landscape and how they they're left to protect themselves. You know, I thought that the awareness about this would be a lot less. So again, I was very impressed with this question.
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Chapter 7: How can education serve as a defensive control against manipulation?
My dissertation is openly available on ProQuest. So people can just search my name and anyone can get a copy for free if they want to look at the rest of the questions.
And we're going to do a blog based on this and link it directly to it. So it'll be in my sub stack. And... So I am wondering, now that you've completed this, and I know how much work goes into doing a doctorate, what do you want to see happen? Like, talk about your personal curiousness. future research goals and then what you would like to see the field do more of.
Yeah, I guess the first thing that comes to mind is I really hope that I won't remain the only cybersecurity and privacy expert that covers this important topic. When I was doing my literature review, I saw that there was a master's student who wrote a thesis on psychological warfare.
So that was about the closest I came to seeing something related to thought reform among my colleagues in the field. So that's the first thing I would say. But thought reform is a multidisciplinary subject. So it doesn't just belong to the cybersecurity and privacy field. It doesn't just belong to social psychology.
I just hope that it, you know, it raises awareness and really encourages other researchers in other fields, you know, not even just my own, you know, expertise, but in other fields that, you know, they can cover this, this topic. You know, you can be the first one. You know, I'm not aware of any other cybersecurity PhDs who have covered this. Yeah.
Yeah, I'll add clinical as a therapist that there's vast numbers of people in need of specialized counseling. But the other big thing is public health. There's a whole discipline, master's and PhD level for public health. And I see this as a public health emergency. Yeah. This is a mind virus. Coming back to your original comments about the brain is a computing device and the mind can get hacked.
So that speaks to the need for inoculation programs for all people to at least have some filters. And I offer my influence continuum and bite model just as one one model, but then doing training for clinicians, educators, media, politicians, policymakers, and then what do we do with people coming out of the rabbit hole who are going like, what happened to me?
Because they need to be reintegrated back into the world and society. Yeah.
Yeah, and kind of what you're suggesting is there's so much work that can be done. And when I think of this through the lens of research, I mean, there's thousands of research ideas and thousands of things that haven't been researched yet. Even just considering the overlap between security and thought reform, but also thought reform more generally.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of the survey findings for future research?
And one of Lifton's eight criteria from 61 was the cult of confession, which not all cults formally get people together and have people stand up and confess all their sins. But the idea is there's no privacy.
that the group owns and knows everything about your past and can use that information if you get out of line or to punish you or... Yeah, that connects to the blackmail harm, which can really... I mean, again, then blackmail can be used to limit people's autonomy because... Absolutely.
Yep.
Yeah. So... I wish you could get a huge grant and get a whole bunch of students, and I would love to see an evaluation done on propaganda videos. In particular, this morning I was reading a Rolling Stone article about how RFK Jr., who's been selected by Trump to head the Health and Human Services, that he admitted funding the plandemic. video and anti-vax videos.
And I've talked to people who got converted to QAnon because of watching those, just from watching it. And for me, when I watched it, it seemed hypnotic at places. It had people pretending, you know, who asserted an expertise they didn't have. And typically with propaganda, you say something true, you say another thing that's true, and then you slip in something that's unverifiable.
And then you go back to something that's true, and then you put something in that's outrageous. But then you put something in that's true, and you're like sandwiching in these false beliefs at such a fast rate that consciously people don't have time to—unless you're pausing the video and looking it up— It's just coming in.
So I'd love to see something like that done for a doctoral dissertation to analyze.
Yeah, and I guess what I would say in terms of how security and privacy professionals can help with that is we're really specialists in developing, researching, and deploying security and privacy controls. That's one thing we focus on in the entire field is what are the tools and techniques we can use to mitigate risk? And we call them control libraries and frameworks.
So you need to have categories of what these tools and techniques are, and then specific implementation ideas and technologies that you can use. So we need these frameworks for psychosecurity and psychoprivacy. So we would have lists of controls that we could put in place for mitigating propaganda, for example, the example that you were just talking about.
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