In his weekly podcast, cultism expert Dr. Steven Hassan spoke with social psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Jay Van Bavel about conformity and groupthink, discussing how people can be brainwashed through "social media polarization, identity and psychological warfare."

Van Bavel said the world has been moving toward a more individualistic culture. He is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University whose research focuses on how group identity shapes behavior, and The Power of Us, the book he co-authored with Dominic Packer, draws on decades of that research to examine how group dynamics can produce both destructive conformity and positive cooperation.

"When people think about groups, they have a notion that groups lead us down dark pathways. And I mean that you study that they do and they can lead you to have a cult psychology and that could be a real cult, religious community — [it] could also be an organization," Van Bavel explained.

He pointed to an example involving Enron, the energy company that became one of the world's most dominant corporations before collapsing into bankruptcy in 2001. A Scottish professor described Enron as a kind of corporate cult with many of the same features that a religious cult might have. Van Bavel said that shows groups can have both positive and negative effects.

"What are the things you can do in groups to make them tip from kind of these dark influences to a more positive influence and that's the piece that is called norms. So once you identify with a group, you look around to people like you and to leaders in the group to figure out — how do I be a good group member? And if you see role modeling off of negative, nasty behavior or blind conformity or rationalization of terrible things you're doing, then you kind of can head down that direction," he explained.

He said the other path is to be part of a community that supports one another, lifts people up and values dissent.

"And we are just as capable of going in that direction. I would argue potentially even more capable," he added.

Van Bavel said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey last month that society urgently needs political leaders who can create healthy norms. Hassan said he saw Oprah react to that comment by making "a face," but he did not elaborate.

"But I'm out there, and I'm like, this guy's a malignant narcissist," Hassan said, criticizing President Donald Trump. Hassan, a licensed mental health counselor, has spent decades studying what he describes as undue influence, and his " Influence Watch" podcast frequently applies that framework to political movements. His criticism of Trump reflects a stance he has taken publicly for years — in 2017 he co-authored a book arguing that the former president's behavior fit patterns he had studied in cult leaders.

Dr. Hassan said what is missing in society today is an understanding that humans are "social beings. We want to think we're individuals. But, no, we're socialized from childhood, and we survive and thrive by our networks of healthy cooperative behavior. And that's what's missing now is this environment of psychological warfare that's trying to demoralize us and separate us and distrust experts, for example."

Hassan described the attack on experts and science as a kind of "military psychological warfare strategy." He said the MAGA movement does this by controlling access to information.

"This is something that you see in any really dysfunctional group is they try to cut you off from other sources of information, especially ones that are accurate. And to the extent that they do that, you become dependent on them, not just emotionally and socially, but cognitively about what is the state of the world and what to believe. And then once you have that, it's very hard to escape that. You get trapped in their universe," Van Bavel said.

He also said cults help people create explanations for events that do not fit their belief system. For example, if a cult predicts that aliens will arrive and they do not, members may invent the idea that the power of prayer prevented it. Van Bavel said he sees a similar pattern on the far right.

"So, like, go to Newsmax," said Van Bavel. "Something bad happens that doesn't align with your worldview, they come up with the rationalizations for you. And that's, I think, part of what they do, is a lot of times — it's not explicit misinformation. It's rationalizations for things that don't otherwise fit. That's what I thought about hyperpartisan news for a long time. I haven't really seen like that written up that way or analyzed that way, but it seems to me that that's partly what they're doing."