The Russian physiologist and Nobel Laureate Ivan Pavlov could be called the father of coercive persuasion science. When the Neva River in St Petersburg flooded in 1924, Pavlov gained unique insights into the effects of trauma on behaviour. The river inundated his canine lab and almost drowned his caged dogs. Pavlov observed that the dogs were not the same afterward – they forgot their learned behaviours, and the trauma changed their dispositions. Ever the experimentalist, Pavlov re-exposed one of his traumatised dogs to a trickle of water in the experimental chamber, which again disrupted the dog’s trained response. With his enormous patience and skill, Pavlov could condition a dog to respond to one specific note on the musical scale. The fact that trauma could disrupt such precise training seems to have fascinated him.
The Soviet leader Lenin was enchanted by the potential for Pavlov’s approach to be used to influence the Russian people. And the Soviet government provided financial support for a research institute with hundreds of staff. Pavlov observed that sudden stress immersion, sleep deprivation, isolation and methodical patience all contributed to the alteration of dogs’ behaviours.
Glimmerings of brainwashing surfaced during Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s; during the 1940s when wartime governments searched for drugs to speed interrogation; and in the early Cold War years when they raced to persuade enemies to defect. Throughout the 20th century, governments invested heavily in research on coercive persuasion. Government agencies, foundations and universities collaborated on extensive studies of the use of drugs to change behaviour or extract information. They also demonstrated that sensory deprivation and sleep restriction increased suggestibility. For example, in one line of research, subjects listened to persuasive audio recordings about a particular topic (such as the country Turkey, or parapsychology), and some of them did so while placed in a dark and quiet sensory-deprivation chamber. After their experiments were concluded, volunteers in the sensory-deprivation condition tended to show greater interest in the topics and, in some cases, greater influence from the recordings.
I wish I could say that all such studies used volunteers, but some experiments involving drugs were performed on unwitting victims. In the ‘midnight climax’ studyof the 1950s-’60s, CIA operatives rented an apartment on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco and hired prostitutes to slip LSD into their customers’ drinks to see if they would confide information more readily.