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The term brainwashing first came into public currency in the U.S. during the Korean War in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs appeared to defect to the Communists after becoming prisoners of war. Brainwashing consisted of the methodology used by the Chinese communists to attempt to cause deep and permanent behavioral changes in their own people, to do the same thing to foreigners imprisoned within the boundaries of China itself, and to disrupt the ability of prisoners of war to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment. Although the use of brainwashing on U.N. prisoners during the Korean War produced some propaganda benefits, its main utility to the Chinese army was that it significantly altered the number of prisoners that could be controlled by one guard, freeing other Chinese soldiers to go to the battlefield. In later times the term "brainwashing" came to be applied to other methods of coercive persuasion and even to the effective use of ordinary propaganda. The term "brainwashing" has often been used to explain some methodologies for the religious conversion of inductees to new religious movements including cults.
'Brainwashing' is a loaded term, suggesting nefarious intent and grotesque methods, with more currency in the public mind than in psychology. Brainwashing generally amounts to little more than a combination of persuasion and attitude change, propaganda and coercion.
Two studies of the Korean War defections by Robert Lifton and Edgar ScheinSchein (born 1928), a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management has had a notable mark on the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. He is generally cr concluded that brainwashing was transient in its effect when used on United_NationsFlag of the United Nations The United Nations or UN is an international organization made up of states. Almost all countries are members. It was established in San Francisco on October 24, 1945, following the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, DC, b prisoners of war. They found that the Chinese did not engage in any systematic re-education of prisoners, but generally used their techniques of coercive persuasion to disrupt the ability of the prisoners to organize to maintain their morale and to try to escape. The Chinese were, however, able to get some of the prisoners to make anti-American statements by placing the prisoners under harsh conditions of deprivationDeprivation Deprivation, according to the The American HeritageŽ Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, is 1. The act or an instance of depriving; loss. The condition of being deprived; privation. A removal of rank or office. and then by offering them more comfortable situations such as better sleeping quarters, better food, warmer clothes or blankets. Nevertheless, the psychiatrists noted that even these measures of coercion were quite ineffective at changing basic attitudes for most people. In essence, the prisoners did not actually adopt Communist beliefs. Rather, many of them behaved as though they did in order to avoid the plausible threat of extreme physical abuse. Moreover, the few prisoners who were influenced by Communist indoctrination were believed to have done so as a result of the confluence of the coercive persuasion, and the motives and personality characteristics of the prisoners that already existed before imprisonment.