How Cults Keep You Motivated

Cults are a type of organization and in this blog, I explore cults through the discipline of organizational psychology. This time I’m looking at how cults motivate their members. A powerful motivator often used in cults is fear. Fear of losing God’s approval, fear of being killed at Armageddon, fear of losing a relationship with friends and family and fear of being cast outside the good graces of the group itself, are just some of the ways this weapon is wielded. But in this piece, I will be exploring positive motivators. I want to explore how cults and high control groups use positive motivators to get their followers to devote their time, energy and material goods to a Group, and to do so apparently willingly, albeit through deception and lies.

In the literature motivation is often described as either endogenous or exogenous. Endogenous motivators are types of motivation that come from within the individual themselves such as good feelings, happiness, a sense of purpose and personal fulfilment. From now on I will use the more common language of internal or intrinsic motivators. Exogenous motivators are external to the individual such as financial reward and from now on I will describe these as external motivators.

One of the most well-known models about motivation is Herzberg’s model of motivation at work (Alshmemri, Shahwan-Akl and Maude, 2017). He describes a model that includes what he calls ‘hygiene factors’ and others that are true motivators. According to Herzberg, the absence of an individual hygiene factor would cause demotivation. These hygiene factors include salary, working conditions, company policies and job security. The theory says that these factors in themselves cannot be described as motivators, however their absence would cause dissatisfaction. This led to Herzberg’s insight that the factors that cause dissatisfaction are not the same as those that cause satisfaction.

According to Herzberg, true motivators include being able to gain a sense of achievement, recognition, being given responsibility, advancement and growth. You may have noticed that most of the true motivators could be described as being internal.

In my management training programmes I often recommend that its vital for a business to get the basics right. Ensure people are treated properly, paid appropriately and that conditions are good. A failure to do these basic things will likely lead to dissatisfaction and any attempt to motivate people through the true motivating factors is likely doomed to failure because these basics need to be handled first.

Once these hygiene factors are satisfied then the way is clear to introduce things like opportunity for progression or being given extra responsibility etc. However simply paying people properly and providing a decent working environment will be unlikely to truly motivate people and get them to go that extra mile.

Cults appear to confound this model entirely. In fact, they seem to take the model and turn it upon its head. Cults often treat people badly by any normal workplace standard. If the Group is physically separate from the rest of the community, living conditions can be poor and they may be pressured or forced into working long hours for little, or more commonly no pay. Even groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses whose members live in the community are expected to devote many hours of unpaid work to preaching, studying or working on building projects as well as being encouraged to pay into the upkeep of the group. Of course, cults are not the only type of group to use volunteer labour. Charities from animal welfare to health and homelessness charities use unpaid workers, although, depending upon the size of the charity, there are likely to be paid members of staff as well.

To be clear I am not putting all charities into the same bracket as cults, although of course many cults are registered charities, but they both appeal in a powerful way to internal motivators in ways businesses struggle to do. They do this by aligning personal values and desired outcomes with organizational goals. I have discussed before when looking at charismatic and transformational leadership how aligning personal goals and even a sense of identity with team goals can be a powerful motivator. For a charity this tends to happen naturally. For example, an individual might have a love of animals and feel very strongly about trying to help abandoned pets find homes. For a normal charity there is no need to manipulate or lie to an individual. A person has a desire to help, joining a pet sanctuary charity allows them to fulfil this desire, and the charity can complete its work — everyone wins.

Cults on the other hand will lie to and manipulate their members and potential recruits in order to get them involved in activity that was not previously aligned to their values and identity, hence the emphasis by the cult on changing the person. New recruits and current members are told to suppress their natural feelings, wants and desires, that the flesh is sinful and weak and that they must be vigilant to replace their natural sinful self with a new one — the cult’s.

Cults may actually offer much of what looks like true motivators. Personal growth is often one of the promises the Group offers. There may be opportunities for advancement within the organization, at least up to a point. Additionally, a sense of meaning and purpose, other classic intrinsic motivators, are also part of the offering and may be achieved by being part of the cult — at least for a time. A conclusion to draw from this is that cults are extremely competent at creating a sense of meaning and purpose, of offering personal growth and providing the promise to fulfil individual potential to such a degree that the normal rules don’t apply. Members will accept hardship, physical and mental strain for the promises they offer, so clear is the cult leader’s vision, and so convinced are they of the opportunity it offers them personally.

Another interesting model of motivation, when looking at cults as organizations, is called Expectancy Theory (Van Eerde & Thierry, 1996). According to Expectancy theory, developed by Victor Vroom, we calculate how much effort to put in based upon our perception of three factors:

· Expectancy that our effort will lead to an increase in performance

· Performance will lead to specific outcome — instrumentality

· We want the outcomes — valence

These three factors, expectancy, instrumentality and valence can be described in a very common-sense way. We are likely to put more effort into things that we think we can affect and that will lead to an outcome that we want. What do cults do to play on this tendency? Within a cultic environment, rewards are often sometime in the future, for example living forever in a paradise earth after God destroys all the non-believers at Armageddon. For a UFO based group it could be transforming the planet with the help of extra-terrestrials or leaving the planet in a spaceship. For a multi-level-marketing group it could be riches beyond the dreams of avarice or for a TM group reaching a certain level of transcendence. These rewards often sound fantastical and ridiculous to outsiders but to members are a powerful motivator to continue to perform in a way the leadership want them to. In order for the hoped-for reward to be a motivator the group must couple this reward with some sort of cult activity. This would normally be something useful to the group such as trying to recruit more people, building assets or servicing the leadership in some way. Whilst rhetorically the group may deny that the realisation of the reward can be achieved through works (necessary to maintain the line that as hopeless sinners, members cannot earn the reward) the link is clear. For instance, for Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s “do the preaching to show obedience to God. If you don’t, you will be blood-guilty and blood-guilty people will not get into the paradise”.

Staying with my old Group as an example, Jehovah’s Witness are encouraged to dream about the paradise. Over the years they have created colourful artwork in their publications of beautiful people enjoying luscious food, children playing safely with previously deadly wild animals, everyone with everlasting youth and perfect health. This world holds great valence for followers. A world of joy and happiness, without suffering, illness, death, with resurrected loved ones bursting out of their graves to embrace family members. The latest iteration of this material means followers now watch high quality movies of these scenes. These films appear to an outsider, as a representation of a bizarre world, where a formerly dead relative casually might pop around for dinner and talk of old times before the paradise. The use of such images and stories also increases levels of expectancy.

Whether through the use of highly produced movies, songs or oratory, cults need to create as clear a vision as possible for the reward or the positive outcome. This is because they require actions and behaviour in which it is unlikely the individual would normally engage. Few Jehovah’s Witnesses would choose to knock on their neighbours’ doors to talk religion or stand next to a literature cart for hours on end, in fact in my experience most dislike the activity. Few members of abusive communal cults would normally choose to be part of a house of women available for a narcissistic leader to satisfy his every desire. So in order for these groups to obtain the required behaviour, motivation is required.

This is where a cult needs to get a delicate balance right. On the one hand they need to keep the members down, keep them subservient and submissive, which is part of the power play that also contributes to the other powerful motivator we opened with — that of fear. On the other hand, they need to provide enough of a sense of instrumentality to let them believe that by their actions they can somehow do what is required to get their hands on the prize. The optimum place, from the cult’s perspective is to keep its members in a sort of motivational limbo — enough confidence that they can achieve the reward by remaining faithful whilst remaining unsure enough about their own righteousness so as to keep them compliant.

Leaving a cult, not only requires overcoming fear but also recognising positive motivational potential rewards for what they are, systematic and cynical deceit. My own journey out of a cultic group required that I see promises of living forever on a paradise earth, welcoming back dead loved ones and spending eternity learning about God and the Universe for the lie it always was, a promise cynically calculated to appeal to my most human desires to secure my labour and my money. Coming to terms with the shattering realisation that the prize was always just an illusion means finding new ways to find meaning in life — the subject for another piece.

Stephen Mather MBPsS is a Podcaster and Corporate Leadership and Management Trainer & Coach with a Bachelors Degree in Psychology and a Masters in Organizational Psychology. He was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and studies cults and high control groups.

Podcast Cult Hackers pod.link/1540824671

References

Alshmemri, M., Shahwan-Akl, L., & Maude, P. (2017). Herzberg’s two-factor theory. Life Science Journal, 14(5), 12–16.

Van Eerde, W., & Thierry, H. (1996). Vroom’s expectancy models and work-related criteria: A meta-analysis. Journal of applied psychology, 81(5), 575.