I didn’t realize I was in one until I left.
That’s the trick about cults. The people inside don’t experience themselves as being in a cult. They experience themselves as being awake, enlightened, part of something real while everyone else is asleep. The word cult is always something other people are part of. Never yourself.
But when I look back at the organizational dynamics of that group, I see something that cognitive psychologists call the architecture of groupthink. And it’s more common than you think. It doesn’t require robes or rituals or a charismatic leader in the literal sense.
It just requires the right psychological conditions.
Irving Janis discovered this in the 1970s by studying major government decisions. The Bay of Pigs invasion. The escalation in Vietnam. The Challenger disaster. Decisions made by intelligent, accomplished people that were catastrophically wrong. He kept finding the same pattern: a group so cohesive, so convinced of its own rightness, that it systematically ignored contradictory evidence.
He called it groupthink. But it looks a lot like cult psychology.
The first ingredient is isolation.
Not necessarily physical isolation, though that can happen. But informational isolation. The group talks to each other more than to outsiders. External perspectives become foreign. External critics become enemies. The worldview becomes internally reinforced.
Inside my group, we had all the language that made this feel intentional rather than accidental. We were “protecting our space.” We were “staying focused on the mission.” We were “not getting distracted by negativity from people who didn’t understand.”
What was actually happening was information control. Nothing as dramatic as burning books. Just gentle pressure to engage more with group content, group conversations, group frameworks of understanding. Until gradually, the only voice you heard was the voice of the group.
The second ingredient is ideological certainty.
The group develops a narrative about itself and the world. This narrative is usually binary. Us versus them. Enlightened versus asleep. Right versus wrong. There’s no room for nuance because nuance requires acknowledging that the other side might have a point.
Inside groups operating this way, I noticed that intelligent people would stop using their intelligence for actual thinking. Instead, they used it to construct more sophisticated justifications for what the group already believed. This isn’t cynical. They genuinely believed they were thinking critically. They were just thinking within a very small box.
The framework provided by the group became so comprehensive that it could explain away any contradictory evidence. Someone leaves the group? They were never truly committed. Evidence against the group’s core belief? It’s misinterpreted. Critics make good points? They’re psychologically damaged or threat-motivated.
The narrative is unfalsifiable. Which means it’s not actually a belief system. It’s a closed loop.
The third ingredient is role specialization.
In cult-like groups, people become defined by their function. The visionary. The administrator. The believer. The enforcer. Once these roles are established, people stop thinking as individuals and start thinking as their role.
I watched this with startling clarity. Good people would do unkind things because their role required it. The role was protecting them from moral responsibility. They weren’t being cruel as individuals. They were just executing the function their position demanded.
This role-based thinking is powerful because it removes personal conscience from decision-making. You’re not deciding whether this is right. You’re deciding whether this is consistent with your role.
The fourth ingredient is love bombing for loyalty, coldness for dissent.
The group is warm and inclusive to people who conform. Deeply, genuinely warm. People feel seen and valued in a way they rarely do in the outside world. This is intoxicating. It creates loyalty.
But the moment someone questions, the warmth shifts. Not necessarily to cruelty, but to a pointed coldness. The person becomes suspicious. They become evidence of external corruption. They become someone to be monitored or, if they won’t recant, removed.
This creates a psychological vise. The person knows that maintaining connection to the people they love requires maintaining belief in the system. So they suppress doubt. They rationalize. They perform belief even when belief is cracking.
The research on cult psychology shows that the most effective cults aren’t the ones with bizarre beliefs. They’re the ones with reasonable-sounding beliefs that gradually normalize increasingly unreasonable behavior. By the time you notice, you’ve already accepted a hundred smaller compromises.
This is why groupthink in organizations is so dangerous. It rarely announces itself as groupthink. It announces itself as team cohesion. Corporate culture. Shared mission. But underneath, the same dynamics are operating.
I’ve seen it in companies. A startup where dissenting opinions get labeled as not being a “culture fit.” A nonprofit where disagreement is treated as betrayal of the mission. A political campaign where questioning tactics gets you removed from the inner circle.
The scariest part is that it works. Groupthink is actually effective in the short term. Groups that suppress dissent make faster decisions. They move with more confidence. They feel more united. From the inside, it feels like strength.
It’s only when you step back that you see the cost.
The most intelligent minds inside groupthink-structured groups aren’t using their intelligence to solve problems. They’re using it to protect the group from reality. Every piece of contradictory evidence becomes a puzzle to be solved within the existing framework rather than evidence that the framework needs changing.
Breaking out requires something most people can’t access while inside: the ability to question the framework itself.
I only left because I had a moment of seeing it from outside. I spent time with people not in the group. And suddenly, things the group considered normal began looking strange. Claims the group made as fact started seeming doubtful. The warmth that had felt like love started feeling like manipulation.
But most people never get that outside perspective. They live their entire lives inside the reality the group has constructed, feeling like they’re the sane ones and everyone outside is crazy.
The irony is that groupthink thrives among people who believe they’re resisting groupthink. The more convinced you are that you think independently, the less you’re monitoring yourself for signs that you don’t.
Citation:
Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Houghton Mifflin.
Moscovici, S. (1980). Towards a theory of conversion behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 209-239.
Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1998). Twenty-five years of groupthink theory and research. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Performance, 73(2-3), 105-115.
Baron, R. S. (2005). So right it’s wrong: Groupthink and the ubiquitous nature of polarized group decision making. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 37, 219-253.