Public psychology and the Cold War brainwashing scare

Abstract

In 1950, a new word ‘brainwashing’ entered the English language. Though its meaning was always ambiguous and continuously evolving, it captured various concerns about the future uses of psychology in warfare and domestic life and the potential for new technologies to control and manipulate human minds. Recent scholarship on what historians have called the ‘Cold War brainwashing scare’ has tended to treat brainwashing as a Cold War paranoia or fantasy that not only was never to be, but was never really supported by scientific research. Drawing on recent scholarship and my own research, this paper examines some of the interactions between experts and popular discourses on brainwashing. For many experts, the Cold War brainwashing scare offered an opportunity to engage the public with contemporary psychological theory and research. But it was by no means a discussion over which they had complete control. It will be argued that the popular debate about brainwashing was not only a question of dealing with scientific ‘facts‘, but existed in a more diverse imaginary concerned as much with present realities, as it was with future possibilities. Much in the same way that stories about artificial intelligence are reported today, discussions of techniques of brainwashing were often accompanied by speculation both wild and grounded about how new technology may be used in the future and by whom. This paper covers three examples: Korean War military psychiatrists, the popular theories of William Sargant and the field of experimental research known broadly as sensory deprivation. It concludes with some observations about current concerns about psychological manipulation in the digital age and the role psychology expertise plays in navigating these concerns.

The psychologist can hardly do anything without realising that for him the acquisition of knowledge opens up the most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and how they think and how they behave and how they feel

(Oppenheimer, 1956, p.128).

Or so said the great physicist Robert Oppenheimer when addressing attendees at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1955. Those who had gathered at the meeting may have felt this was somewhat rich coming from the mastermind of the atomic bomb. In 1955 the prospect of thermonuclear apocalypse was hardly laying lightly on the imaginations of many Americans, nor was the alternative of a perpetual stalemate of cold warfare, or in the words of George Orwell, a ‘peace that is no peace’ (Orwell, 1945). Nonetheless, Oppenheimer continued…

…as the corpus of psychology gains in certitude and subtlety and skill, I can see that the physicist’s pleas that what he discovers be used with humanity… will seem rather trivial compared to those which you will have to make and for which you will have to be responsible

(Oppenheimer, 1956, p.128).

Whilst Oppenheimer may have been attempting to deflect some of the flak directed at physicists in the early Cold War, his concerns about the future use of psychological research were hardly unique. As historians have shown, visions of psychological expertise used to manipulate, control or ‘brainwash’ the public were widespread in Cold War popular culture, prompting concern about the future uses and abuses of psychology. Undoubtedly, the roots of such concerns extend beyond the Cold War and can be traced alongside numerous 20th-century developments, including the growth of what the sociologist Nikolas Rose has labelled the ‘psy-disciplines’ and their influence, either real or imagined, on the rise of totalitarianism, the use of propaganda, mass media and mass culture¹. Yet, as several historians have argued, there were unique conditions of Cold Warfare that accentuated the moral panic about hidden psychological influencers (Carruthers, 2009; Dunne, 2013; Melley, 2011).

To begin with, the psy disciplines experienced a period of rapid growth mid-century in which they developed alliances within both government and industry. As the historian Ellen Herman argues in The Romance of American Psychology (1995), it was during the Second World War in particular that psychologists forged an alliance with the federal government by demonstrating how their expertise could be employed in the national interest to tackle a host of practical problems. These experts were called upon to decide how to recruit, strengthen morale, evaluate employee and public opinion, design propaganda campaigns and of course to conduct their primary service of treating mental health. As tensions between the communist and non-communist worlds compounded in the late 1940s and 1950s, the role of psychology in warfare was given renewed emphasis, as global leaders declared that the Cold War was not only a struggle for territory or military dominance, but also an ideological struggle. This point was made explicit by Dwight Eisenhower in a presidential campaign speech in 1952, when he stated that the aim of the Cold War was not ‘the conquering of territory or subjugation by force’, but rather to persuade the world to believe the truth (or at least an American version of it). Eisenhower continues, ‘the means we shall employ to spread this truth are often called ‘psychological’. Don’t be afraid of that term just because it’s a five-dollar, five-syllable word. ‘Psychological warfare’ is the struggle for the minds and wills of men’ (Stonor Saunders, 1999, p.148).

The Cold War ‘battle for the mind’² of course took various forms, but perhaps no word captured psychological warfare at its most sensational than ‘brainwashing’, a term first popularised by a journalist named Edward Hunter in a 1950 article for the Miami News (see also Holmes, 2017). Here and in later works, Hunter claimed that Chinese and Soviet secret police had developed powerful techniques for manipulating minds. Though it resonated with anti-communist sentiment at the time, brainwashing would perhaps never have gained so much traction if it wasn’t for a series of scandals involving collaboration between American prisoners of war (POWs) and their Chinese captors during the Korean War. In 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable and 35 other captured Air Force personnel publicly confessed to committing crimes of germ warfare against North Korea. Other accounts of POW collaboration, including making public anti-war and anti-McCarthy broadcasts, received widespread attention. Perhaps most controversially, after a long-awaited armistice deal was agreed in 1953 – one British and 21 American soldiers refused to be repatriated to their country of origin, choosing to relocate to communist China instead (Carruthers, 2009, pp.174–216; Pasley, 1955). The situation in North Korea led then director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, to declare that the communist enemy was waging a new form of ‘brain warfare’ in which the brain becomes something like a ‘phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it had no control’ (Killen, 2011, p.51).

If brainwashing started life as a term synonymous with paranoia about the growing global influence and imagined psychological arsenals of communist regimes, the concept was quickly inverted as a critique against multiple forms of domestic control, feeding into debates about the role of new media, parenting, advertising and big business³. Classic texts such as William Whyte’s The Organisation Man (1956) and Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders (1957) also warned about the increasingly pervasive role psychologists had to play in American life. In The Organization Man, Whyte lamented the use of psychological testing and profiling in corporate management, writing that whilst employers could demand superlative work in exchange of an employee’s salary, they ‘should not ask for his psyche as well’ (p.201). Packard’s Hidden Persuaders warned of the ways in which advertising gurus or ‘depth men’ used psychoanalytic theory to target consumer’s unconscious desires. During the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood too proved to be a popular stage for exploring such concerns. In perhaps the most iconic brainwashing film of its era, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing appears in various guises: A communist plot to brainwash an American POW, the constant presence of media and television, a belligerent McCarthy-like senator and an overbearing mother. It also tapped into postwar concerns about an emasculated generation of young American males (Carruthers, 1998).

Whilst many of the claims made about psychological warfare appear sensational in hindsight, they nonetheless had real world effects, not least within the human sciences, as military and government funding for research related to mind control pushed the objectives of mainstream psychology and psychiatry in various directions. In the 1950s and 1960s the US military and intelligence complex funded numerous leading researchers and research institutions in North America working with drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and other mindbending techniques (Lutz, 1997; McCoy, 2007). The most well-known and controversial example was the CIA’s MKULTRA project (Marks, 1978). A research programme, which in the words of its former director Sidney Gottlieb, aimed to ‘investigate whether and how it was possible to modify behaviour by covert means’ (Marks, 1978, p.57). What began as a relatively small covert investigation into techniques of interrogation, quickly expanded into a massive research and development effort involving drugs, hypnosis and various forms of physical and emotional deprivation. But, even for those most intimately connected with the project, the CIA’s attempt to ‘control human behaviour’ was largely seen as a failure. In 1977, one psychologist who worked on the programme testified in Congress stating that by the 1960s ‘it was at least proved to my satisfaction that brainwashing – so-called – as some kind of an esoteric device where drugs or mind altering kinds of conditions and so forth were used, did not exist.’ Gittinger even suggested he and his colleagues had been caught up in the panic surrounding brainwashing and that films such as the Manchurian Candidate had ‘made something impossible look plausible’ (US House, Select Committee on Intelligence, 1977, p.596). Despite such claims, numerous critics have argued nonetheless that MKULTRA research helped establish and justify regimes of so called ‘psychological torture’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ still in use today (Cobain, 2012; McCoy, 2006; see also Rejali, 2007).

Given its ambiguity and sci-fi aesthetic, Cold War scholars have often argued that the brainwashing panic was a popular fantasy, one which said more about various anxieties and insecurities in post war popular culture than it did about the reality of any serious psychological threats to the mind. In The Covert Sphere (2014), literary scholar Timothy Melley makes this point explicit when he describes brainwashing as a ‘strategic fiction’, shaped by popular fascination and speculation about the research and development capabilities of the covert state. Yet, even if many of the concerns about ‘brainwashing’ voiced during the Cold War appear unfounded today, psychologists and research scientists nonetheless played an important role in shaping public debates. Drawing on recent scholarship and my own research, this paper examines some of the interactions between experts and popular discourses on brainwashing. For many experts, the Cold War brainwashing scare offered an opportunity to engage the public with contemporary psychological theory and research, but it was by no means a discussion over which they had complete control. It will be argued that the popular debate about brainwashing was not only a question of dealing with scientific ‘facts’, but existed in a more diverse imaginary concerned as much with present realities as it was with future possibilities. Much in the same way that stories about artificial intelligence are reported today, discussions of techniques of brainwashing were often accompanied by speculation both wild and grounded about how new technology may be used in the future and by whom. This paper covers three examples: Korean War military psychiatrists, the physical psychiatry of William Sargant and the field of experimental research known broadly as sensory deprivation. It concludes with some observations about current concerns about psychological manipulation in the digital age and the role psychology expertise plays in navigating these concerns.

Investigating brainwashing in the Korean War

Following rumours of a mysterious new technique of ‘brainwashing’ – prompted first by Russian ‘show trials’ in the 1930s and 1940s and then by the Korean War POW scandal of the early 1950s – many leading minds in British and North American psychology were recruited to uncover information about what might be going on inside interrogation rooms behind the ‘Iron’ and ‘Bamboo’ Curtains. In the early 1950s, Lawrence Hinkle and Harrold Wolff were recruited by then CIA director Allen Dulles to carry out an extensive survey on the techniques used by communist state police for the extraction of information, indoctrination and the forceful elicitation of false confessions. An unclassified version of their findings on ‘communist methods of confession extraction’ was published in 1956. They concluded that methods of confession extraction used by the communist secret police were based on age-old techniques of psychological and physical torture, clarifying that ‘there is no reason to dignify these methods by surrounding them with an aura of scientific mystery or to denote them by terms such as ‘menticide’ or ‘brain washing’ which imply they are scientifically organised techniques of predictable effectiveness’ (Hinkle and Wolff, 1956, pp.609–610).

Hinkle & Wolff were also able to draw on the knowledge of 20 other psychiatrists and psychological warfare experts, a handful of whom had worked on an Air Force panel assembled to interview returning airmen held captive during the Korean War. Like Hinkle and Wolff, they sought to mollify the more lurid accounts of brainwashing reported in the media. Yet, at the same time, they discredited a stereotype perpetuated by several senior military doctors and journalists that the soldiers sent to fight in the Korean War were different from previous generations of American soldiers. Army psychiatrist William Mayer for example had described them as being weak, passive and hopelessly lacking in patriotic conscience (Mayer, 1956; Kinkead, 1959). As several scholars have pointed out, The Korean War POW scandal not only raised numerous questions about the expected levels of resistance inside the POW camps but also tapped into wider anxieties and culture wars concerning parenting, conformity, sexuality and race (Carruthers, 2009; Dunne, 2013; Robin, 2001). The military panels struck somewhere in the middle ground, arguing that although the indoctrination techniques used in the Korean War did not represent anything as new or dramatic to warrant the unhelpful term brainwashing, prolonged exposure to physical and psychological indoctrination techniques could lead to some breakdown of resistances and potential ideological persuasion. However, as historian Ron Robin points out, in their efforts to naturalise the POW behaviours, these experts also ‘swept aside a host of challenging social and political issues associated with the POW experience’ avoiding the ways in which race and class stratification in the army shaped POW behaviour (Robin, 2009, p.163).

Despite the attempts by these experts to temper the more spectacular claims about brainwashing, they themselves complained of struggling to gain authority over the public discourse on mind control. In 1962 Albert Biderman published a paper on ‘The Image of Brainwashing’ in Public Opinion Quarterly, lamenting how ‘the public meanings of the term have been determined largely by writings of journalists and autobiographies of victims, rather than by the research of scholars and scientists’ (1962, p.547). Biderman and his colleagues tried to distance themselves from the unnuanced, ‘unscientific’ and evocative term ‘brainwashing’, often placing it in scare quotes. Some of the work which emerged from these scholars, such as Robert Lifton’s description of ‘thought reform’ remain influential in discussions of coercive persuasion to this day (Lifton, 1961). Yet, Biderman felt that such depictions were too often evinced by the more sensational portrayals in the media. The scientific view, wrote Biderman, ‘is essentially a disenchanted view. It strips events of much of their human significance – the elements of terror, mystery, disgust, delight, etc., and leaves them, at most, merely interesting’ (Biderman, 1962).

Whilst it is true that the ‘disenchanted’ accounts provided by Biderman and his colleagues did not have the same journalistic appeal as more sensational accounts of brainwashing (such as those of William Sargant discussed below), Biden’s analysis also assumes that the public were concerned only with the facts about what happened inside the POW camps, rather than more complex questions about the future potential of psychological persuasion techniques and the kinds of research that might be being carried out behind closed doors. We know, for example, that at least some of those military psychiatrists – such as Harold Wolff and Louis Jolyon West – who had publicly dismissed the idea of scientific techniques used for brainwashing during the Korean War, were also involved with MKULTRA projects exploring potential mind control techniques (see Lemov, pp.188–221). As Melley points out, public fascination with brainwashing was stoked as much (if not more) by what could not be known about as it was by information that was available in the public domain. What he calls the ‘covert sphere’ provides an arena or cultural imaginary for ‘discussing and more to the point – fantasising’ about the activities of the covert state, providing an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy and speculation about the potentials and limits of powerful new technologies of mind.

A battle for the mind

One expert who certainly profited from a more sensational account of brainwashing was the British psychiatrist William Sargant. His 1957 book Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-washing sold over 200,000 copies in 10 years and received appraisals from Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and the Archbishop of Canterbury. In Battle for the Mind, Sargant offered a theory of brainwashing based on observations described in Ivan Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry (1944). He was particularly influenced by an anecdote described by Pavlov in which several of his experimental dogs narrowly escaped drowning during the Leningrad flood of 1924. Pavlov observed that after the incident the dogs appeared to lose or disrupt recently acquired conditioned reflexes. Sargant followed Pavlov in suggesting that extreme nervous excitement could result in inhibition of the brain’s cortex, causing a ‘rupture’ in previous conditioning. In Battle for the Mind, Sargant used this model of conversion to describe a diverse range of contemporary and historical situations of brainwashing and conversion, describing amongst other things, religious revivalism, police interrogation tactics, ideological conversion in Mao’s China, the mysterious allure of Grigori Rasputin and the possessive states of young people at Beatles concerts. Though he aimed to show that his theory could be applied to numerous historical cases of ‘conversion’, the book also implies that due to the longstanding Pavlovian tradition in Russian psychology, the Soviet Union may have developed and be using more advanced clinical techniques of brainwashing and mind control.

In The Covert Sphere, Melley points to Sargant’s work to support his claim that there was very little empirical evidence for brainwashing during the Cold War. Sargant, Melley writes, ‘based his analysis not on clinical cases but on distant historical summaries and contemporary literature – particularly the dystopian fiction of Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell.’ Whilst it is true that Sargant’s account is embellished with historical and fictional case studies, I have argued that Sargant’s theories of brainwashing complimented his own psychiatric practice. As head of psychiatry at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, Sargant became known in the 1950s as one of the most outspoken proponents of physical treatments in psychiatry pioneering what he called ‘modern’ therapeutics of drug abreaction, insulin coma, electroconvulsive therapy and shock. He argued that his therapeutics of shock worked in much the same way as his theories of brainwashing, displacing pathological conditioning that had become hardwired into the brain (Williams, 2018).

Today Sargant is remembered as a deeply controversial psychiatrist. There remain hundreds of patients who are testament to the suffering caused by the overzealous use of physical treatments in postwar psychiatry, and many who have testified to their own terrible experiences and long term suffering in the care of Sargant (Maw, 2009). He is also often noted for his connection to the Scottish-born psychiatrist Ewen Cameron who incorporated the use of sleep, electric shock and looped audio material in his ‘psychic driving’ experiments at McGill University in Montreal, a process which one newspaper described as ‘beneficial brainwashing’. Cameron’s research had been funded in part by the Human Ecology Fund, which in the 1970s was revealed to be a conduit for Mkultra funding. Whether Cameron was aware of the true source of this funding has been the subject of intense speculation, but as the historian Rebecca Lemov argues, Cameron would have likely pursued a similar research path with or without the support of the Human Ecology Fund (2011). Both Cameron and Sargant are widely regarded as relics of an age in which a combination of poor regulation and hubris about the viability of physical treatments were allowed to go unchecked. Their histories also show that the relationship between psychiatric practice and popular ideas of brainwashing often overlapped, and whilst works such as Sargant’s Battle for the Mind lent academic credence to the brainwashing idea, the popular interest in brainwashing also served to embolden and legitimise harmful psychiatric practice.

Sensory deprivation and experimental psychology

Historians and journalists have linked numerous fields of psychological research with military and government interest in brainwashing during the Cold War (Marks, 1977; McCoy, 2006). The field of sensory deprivation however was somewhat unique in the way its fate as a research discipline was shaped by the question of brainwashing and public fascination with it. The origins of the field have been traced to a secret meeting in a Montreal hotel in 1951. There, an international group of medically trained defence and intelligence officials – including representatives from the CIA, British Defence, the Canadian Defence Research Board and the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb – met to discuss recent reports about Soviet interrogation techniques. Whilst debating whether psychological research could shed light on such methods, Hebb suggested that the complete removal of sensory or perceptual stimulation might place someone ‘in such a position psychologically that they would be susceptible to implantation of new or different ideas’ (Cooper, 1986, Appendices 21, 6). Subsequently, Hebb received a grant from the Canadian Defence Research Board to mount the first scientific experiments in ‘perceptual isolation’ with human subjects.

In these experiments, volunteer subjects were placed in a completely ‘de-patterned’ environment consisting of white noise and homogenous lighting, with soft restrictions on their arms and body to limit movement and tactile sensation. After several hours, subjects reported experiencing unusual psychological effects, including hallucinations, bodily distortions, difficulty concentrating, and a variety of emotional states. Some of these were reported in academic journals. The McGill scientists claimed that the research showed that the human mind needed constant and varied stimulation from its environment to maintain proper functioning and pointed to several theoretical questions raised by the results (Heron, 1957). In their early publications, the researchers were not permitted to describe a further set of experiments in which subjects had to listen to a series of ‘propaganda’ recordings about paranormal phenomena to test whether the chamber could induce a suggestive state. Anecdotal evidence reported by the researchers suggested that the records had a significant persuasion effect. ‘A number of the experimental subjects,’ wrote Hebb, ‘unlike the controls, went to the library to borrow books on psychical research, mind-reading and so forth; there were spontaneous reports of being afraid of ghosts, late at night’ (Hebb, 1958, p.111). In another account, one of his students wrote that ‘one man even reported that he was trying to use telepathy as an aid to playing poker’ (Heron, 1961, p.16).

Though this element of the research was initially covert, the relationship between sensory deprivation and brainwashing was made public when then director of the National Institute of Mental Health Robert Felix testified before the US Senate about recent isolation studies being pursued at McGill and the NIMH. Felix began by explaining that these experiments would improve medicine’s understanding of the effects of isolation on bedridden or catatonic patients. But when asked whether this could be a form of brainwashing, he replied, ‘Yes, ma’am, it is.’ He went on to explain how, when stimulation is cut off so far as possible the mind becomes completely disoriented and disorganised. Once in this state, the isolated subject is open to new information and may change his beliefs. ‘Slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, he begins to incorporate this [information] into his thinking and it becomes like actual logical thinking because this is the only feed-in he gets.’ He continues, ‘I don’t care what their background is or how they have been indoctrinated. I am sure you can break anybody with this’ (Williams, 2019, p.93).

The day after the senate hearing an article entitled ‘Tank Test Linked to Brainwashing’ (1956) appeared in the New York Times and was subsequently picked up by other local and national papers. In Anglophone popular culture, an image took hold of SD as a semi-secretive, clinical, technological and reliable way of altering subjectivity. It featured in television shows such as CBC’s Twighlight Zone (1959), as a live experiment on the BBC’s ‘A Question of Science’ (1957) and the 1963 film The Mind Benders in which a group of Oxford scientists get caught up in a communist espionage plot.

Though such sensational depictions of sensory deprivation may have been far removed from the actual experiences of scientists and their subjects, researchers in the 1950s and 1960s were mostly unconcerned by the popular associations of sensory deprivation and brainwashing. Following Felix’s testimony in 1956, John Lilly wrote to Donald Hebb to apologise about how the story had been reported in the media saying ‘I find that they do assume that one does go nuts under these conditions, which, of course, is a lot of nonsense’. Hebb replied, advising Lilly to ‘relax, old boy’, that by and large the press do a good job and that if this research could have any protective value for those who might need it in the future, it was by ‘letting all the public know that it isn’t so fearsome, that they don’t go nuts and will recover’ (Williams, 2019, p.10). Yet, at other times, researchers such as Hebb clearly found it useful to acquiesce to the more sensational image of sensory deprivation.

It is one thing to hear that the Chinese are brainwashing their prisoners on the other side of the world; it is another to find, in your own laboratory, that merely taking away the usual sights, sounds and bodily contacts from a healthy university student for a few days can shake him, right down to the base… can disturb his capacity for critical judgment, making him eager to listen to and believe any sort of preposterous nonsense

(Hebb, 1958).

As the field matured in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers began to provide a more complicated picture than that which had been presented by the McGill results (Zubek, 1969). In particular, they sought to demonstrate that the effects of reduced stimuli were not inherently pathological and had potential therapeutic value in rest and relaxation. The effects of sensory deprivation they argued, were varied and dependent upon a complex ecology of interacting variables, not all of which could be brought under experimental control (Zuckerman, 1969). Nonetheless, researchers found little harm in courting the more sensational image of sensory deprivation to garner popular and scientific support for their work. As the cover of Princeton Jack Vernon’s Inside the Black Room (1966) made clear to his readers, questions raised by this research were ‘vital in a world concerned with space travel, solitary confinement and brain-washing.’

Though researchers may have found some benefit in associating their work with brainwashing in the 1950s and 1960s, by the early 1970s, the popular image of sensory deprivation as a science of brainwashing came to be far more problematic. Critics including the British Society for Responsibility in Science and Amnesty International suggested that this work was leading to the development of sophisticated methods of psychological torture being used by Western governments (Holmes, 2016). They pointed to the use of the ‘five techniques’ by the British Army in Northern Ireland where various sensory techniques were employed to distort and destabilise interrogatees (Shallice, 1972). By this time only few research scientists remained in the field of sensory deprivation. The most prominent of these was a former student of Donald Hebb’s named John Zubek, who had taken up perceptual deprivation research at the University of Manitoba. Zubek’s research became the subject of both external criticism from humanitarian groups as well as on-campus protests after it was revealed that much of its funding came from the Canadian Defence Research Board. Zubek, fell into depression and committed suicide in 1974 and his research lab at the University of Manitoba closed shortly after (Raz, 2013). Six years later, one of the few remaining researchers in isolation studies Peter Suedfeld, described the field’s fall from grace, writing simply the ‘appearance of the term ‘sensory deprivation’ may be enough to reduce the chances that a research proposal will be funded, a manuscript accepted for publication, …a comment accepted as relevant… or a thesis topic approved by a committee.’ Sued-feld suggested that researchers should drop the term ‘sensory deprivation’ altogether and suggested an alternative Restricted Environmental Stimulation or REST (Suedfeld, 1980). Despite Suedfeld’s efforts, it was clearly difficult to extricate sensory deprivation from its controversial past and its popular associations with research that was both covert and controversial. It is only recently that researchers have started to explore seriously again the potential positive effects of sensory deprivation through the practice of floatation therapy (Oaklander, 2015).

Conclusion

The stories presented here demonstrate some of the ways in which psy experts – whether by choice or circumstance – interacted with the public on questions of brainwashing. In the early 1950s, public interest in brainwashing offered psychologists opportunities to engage the public with current trends and ideas in psychology. But as scholarship in this area has shown, the question of brainwashing was not simply a question about communicating scientific facts, it involved navigating a series of unknowns about the present and future potential of psychology, exacerbated by public fascination and speculation about the activities of the Cold War security state. An extensive survey of the Cold War brainwashing scare from the perspective of public psychology is yet to be written, but this article has demonstrated some of the pitfalls involved when communicating ideas in an arena prone to sensationalism, especially when psychologists themselves may be targets of suspicion. Revisiting this history seems particularly important at a time when there is once again concern about hidden influences and not so hidden influencers online. Recent texts about manipulation in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal often echo the paranoid style of the writings on brainwashing from the Cold War, imagining the sophisticated and coordinated use of big data in the hands of states, shady political conglomerates and large corporations. The age of ‘digital psychopolitics’ writes the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, ‘facilitates intervention in the psyche, enabling influence on a pre-reflexive level’ (2017). In these narratives, the psychologist may not need be present; replaced instead by a sophisticated algorithm, possibly with learning capabilities of its own. However, psychologists and behavioural scientists no doubt have a role to play in helping the public navigate these concerns and the realities of the threats they pose. And perhaps here, the Cold War brainwashing scare has some lessons. Importantly, that engaging with the public on topics so morally fraught and ambiguous as psychological manipulation will always involve a degree of sensationalism, particularly when the potential uses and users of new technologies are unclear. And perhaps it is necessary to give space to a plurality of concerns and ideas. The Cold War brainwashing scare was after all, part of a far wider conversation about the psychology of influence, the construction of identity, personality and belief. Conversations which prompted discussions about power, democracy, and identity which reverberate to this day.