Dr. Robert J. Lifton's 8 Criteria for Thought Reform

1. Environmental Control - The purposeful limitation of all forms of communication with the outside world.
2. Mystical Manipulation - Extensive personal manipulation is used to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that they will appear to have arisen spontaneously.
3. The Demand for Purity - The world is sharply divided between pure and impure with the group in the role of ultimate judge. Normal urges and tendencies become sins, and shame is used to control.
4. Confession - Carried beyond its ordinary expressions to the point of becoming a cult itself. This enhances the group's hold upon the person and their guilt; is an act of symbolic self-surrender; is a means of maintaining a tone of total exposure; and makes it impossible to attain a reasonable balance between worth and humility.
5. The aura of Sacred Silence - Prohibiting any questioning of the basic dogma, the cult's laws, regulations and rules are absolute and must be followed.
6. Loading the language - Characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most complex of problems are compressed into brief, definitive sounding phrases, easily memorized and expressed.
7. Doctrine Over Persons - The value of an individual member is insignificant compared to the value of the group.
8. Dispensing of Existence - The cult environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be reorganized and those who possess no such right. The religious cult draws a sharp line between not only those who will or will not be saved but other individuals and groups who are not acceptable.

Source: Margaret Thaler Singer with Janja Lalich, "Cults in Our Midst", copyright 1995, John Wiley and Sons Inc., pp. 69-74

Dr. Margaret T. Singer's 6 Conditions for Thought Reform

1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step-by-step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group. The goal may be to make them deployable agents for the leadership, to get them to buy more courses, or get them to make a deeper commitment, depending on the leader's aim and desires.
2. Control the person's social and/or physical environment; especially control the person's time. Through various methods, new members are kept busy and led to think about the group and its content during as much of their waking time as possible.
3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person. This is accomplished by getting members away from the normal social support group for a period of time and into an environment where the majority of people are already group members. The members serve as models of the attitudes and behaviors of the group and speak an in-group language.
4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experience in such a ways as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person's former social identity. Manipulation of experiences can be accomplished through various methods of trance induction, including leaders using such techniques as paced speaking patterns, guided imagery, chanting, long prayer sessions or lectures, and lengthy mediation sessions.
5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group's ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group's beliefs, and compliance are rewarded while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, he or she is made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.
6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing. (Singer, 1995)

Source: Margaret Thaler Singer with Janja Lalich, "Cults in Our Midst", copyright 1995, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., pp. 64-69.