Recent calls to deprogram QAnon conspiracy followers are steeped in discredited notions about brainwashing. As popularly imagined, brainwashing is a coercive procedure that programs new long-term ...

After confronting the Vietnam War and the torture images of Abu Ghraib in his most recent films, Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris turns to a 1977 scandal involving North Carolina beauty ...

They also questioned the very idea that brainwashing and deprogramming were real phenomena. In one landmark study, Eileen Barker, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, spent close to seven ...