Keith Henson

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

Brigham Young had 47 children, and over 50 women as wives.

Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.

Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error.

Humans have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to changes in status.

Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

I much prefer the modern world.

Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.