Power, ritual, and identity - A cognitive study of conversion to the Unification Church

We revisit the sociological discussion around coercive conversion to the worldview of religious or political organization, building from the historical example of the Unification Church. Using the neurocomputational framework of Active Inference, we demonstrate that (in line with the current sociological consensus) there is no plausible mechanism by which organizations may erase human agency through “mind control” or “brainwashing”, for lack of a clear separation between external/social and internal/cognitive processes. However, we consider the many processes by which the Unification Church produces a material and social environment which robustly aligns the agency of members with its goals and organizational norms, giving special attention to the organization of members’ experience in Unification Church seminars and its cognitive effects. On this basis, we conceptualize identity capture as social control through the production of a rigid sense of self-identity thoroughly embedded in the social context set by an organization or elite group, which acts to structure one’s engagement with the world. Finally, we use the framework developed here to offer some considerations about the historical development of social power, and the mechanisms by which ritual has plausibly set the stage for the emergence of large scale social organization.