About Mind Control and the Psychological Balance of the Raelians

By Daniel Chabot, psychologist, professor of psychology (excerpt).
For several years, journalists have blithely stated that Rael abuses the credulity of weak and mentally impoverished people.
We will now examine two psychological aspects of mind control :
- mind control
- the weakness of mind and the psychological state of people who adhere to the Raelian religion.
We will begin with the second point.
The Psychological State of the Raelians
Very often, journalists and even so-called specialists in the phenomenon of “cults” tell us that Rael abuses people’s weakness of mind. According to them, those who join the Raelian Movement are morally fragile people, with significant emotional, intellectual and social deficiencies and who have suffered greatly in their lives, etc. In short, if we refer to all those who repeat this widespread cliché, Raelians are people suffering serious psychological deficiencies and who have fallen into the nets set for them by the evil guru.
Let’s make it clear right away: that people living in great loneliness in our society and people suffering certain emotional deficiencies can approach the Raelian Movement and find what they need emotionally is a phenomenon that exists.
It is therefore quite normal that people with emotional needs may find some comfort in it.
So, yes, there is a small percentage of people who join the Raelian Movement in a state of imbalance or psychological weakness, but this is true with EVERY religion..
When we hear about this phenomenon in the majority religions, people say with admiration that these have been saved from suicide or despair by their faith in Jesus. The public is even encouraged, to paraphrase our detractors, to move towards traditional religions in these moments of psychological imbalance, as is the case, for example, after a family tragedy or as it was definitively the case after the attacks of September 11. There are even some renowned scientific circles, such as this English hospital, that offer the care of a Catholic priest to incurable cancer patients. And then, everyone thinks it’s good… But, if minority religions provide the same social service, everyone shouts that this is an abuse on people who are out of balance… This is double standard that can only be explained by a value judgment on the belief. On one side, there are good traditional beliefs and on the other side, new ones, which are automatically dangerous.
However, there is something very peculiar about this type of visitor: either they remain in the ranks of what we call “the Raelians sympathizers” or, quite simply, they pass by and are no longer seen again. They obviously do not get involved in the organizational structure or, if they do, it is for a very short period of time after which they leave. There are two reasons why these people do not remain involved in the structure:
First, because this profile of individuals use to wander from organization to organization, from group to group. For example, I have given many evening classes in adult education throughout my career. Almost every time I taught a class, there were one, two or three students who fit exactly into this profile. They were attending night school because it felt good, they said. It allowed them to go out, break their loneliness, meet people, have fun, etc. Some were even encouraged to do so by a doctor, a social worker or someone significant to them. It was important for their psychological balance. However, since the main factors motivating their attendance at an evening class were not “academic”, if we can say so, these people often experience failure in the first exams and end up dropping out of it. My example is only the result of personal observations, but I would say that almost 100% of people who come to CEGEP for evening classes for the reasons listed above drop out before the end. Then, they either find something else to be entertained, or, unfortunately for them, they return to their loneliness.
A similar phenomenon occurs for a percentage of people who come to the Raelian Movement. As they go from group to group, they spend time with the Raelians and find, after a while, that it does not meet their aspirations, needs or beliefs; the primary reasons for coming to the Raelian Movement have only been partially fulfilled.
The other reason they do not stay, and which is probably more important than the first one, is because they do not have the psychological resources to stay in the Raelian Movement and assume all it includes. You need to have great psychological strength to show up at work, in your family, with friends and acquaintances with the symbol of infinity on your neck, and to say and defend with pride and confidence that you are a Raelian. This is exactly comparable to what can occur to any individual with interests or activities outside the social norm. Take, for example, homosexuals (and imagine how it could have been around thirty years ago). Imagine what it felt like when their sexual orientation was described as a sin, a mental illness, a deviance, a perversion, etc. Imagine the psychological suffering that thousands of people have experienced, buried in the silence of their intimate secret that no one could ever understand and even less accept. Imagine the intense discomfort every time they heard gross and contemptuous jokes about homosexuals. Imagine the incredible rejection they could have experienced with their school or work colleagues. No wonder so many have killed themselves and are still killing themselves. A recent study by Professor Michel Dorais of Laval University shows that the suicide rate is six to ten times higher among young homosexuals than among heterosexuals [4].
Yet, the difficulties faced by the Raelians in their communities are quite comparable to the difficulties experienced by homosexuals, but with a suicide rate of nearly zero. And that’s remarkable. To be openly perceived as a Raelian is to be increasingly exposed to disapproval from family, school and professional backgrounds, stigmatization, rejection and social isolation, verbal abuse, etc.
I can already hear the peddlers of clichés such as journalists repeating that the Raelians are paranoid and feel persecuted every time they are criticized. It would be interesting for a brave journalist to experience, for a few weeks, saying and displaying that he is a Raelian in his entourage, at work and in his family. Brigitte McCann and Chantal Poirier’s courage to have infiltrated the Raelian Movement for nine months is applauded. But did they have the same courage outside our organization? Did they have the audacity to pretend to be Raelians wherever they went, just to live the experience totally and to be able to talk about it? Did they tell their colleagues at Le Journal de Montréal that they had become Raelians? Did they wear their Raelian symbol around their necks all the time and everywhere? Of course not! On the contrary, they admited that every time they did public activities with the Raelians, they were afraid to meet someone they knew. This is probably why they went to New York to do a street diffusion. Away from people who might recognize them!
This explains why people who are weakest psychologically do not remain in the Raelian Movement.. A proportion can, of course, embrace the philosophy and foundations of the Raelian religion without necessarily displaying their choice. Many do, and this is more and more understandable, because one need to be strong to be a Raelian. One must develop enormous internal resources to live and be happy in the adversity suffered by the Raelians. Contrary to what is sometimes propagated, Raelians do not have a community to seek refuge in. Raelians have their own apartment or house, they work normally, they integrate into their environment; in short, they live normally in the society. We certainly can understand these religious groups who gather in community to live their spirituality freely without judgment and without adversity, but this is not the case with the Raelian Movement. That is why many people are interested in the Raelian philosophy, but they say they don’t have the strength to display it.
In fact, in Quebec, France, Switzerland and Belgium, there are at least ten to twenty times more “Raelians in spirit” than those officially listed in the organization’s files. An innumerable number of people gravitate around the Raelian Movement, visiting us occasionally, reminding us that they are Raelians in their hearts, but that for the moment they cannot get involved or show it outright. The “hard core” represented by the Raelian leaders, those who are regularly insulted on the street, those who are portrayed in the media as vulnerable people, manipulated by their guru, alien fools, clowns, weak-minded people, depressed people and even mentally ill people are on the contrary extremely strong and balanced. Those who have the courage to be Raelian and to display it are remarkable, while those who do not have this courage deserve all our compassion, indulgence and respect. Active members who have been involved for several years sometimes decide to leave the structure for a moment or to regain their strength. Frequently, these same people return after a few weeks, months or years. In addition, some people will often follow the seminars and join the structure several years after having discovered the Messages. The vast majority of them say they were not ready, that they had things to deal with on a personal level or that they did not have the strength to do so earlier.
But we will now return to the issue of the mental health of Raelians for now. Or rather, we will talk about the mental health of the general population as revealed by the World Health Organization (WHO):
« The WHO International Consortium for Psychiatric Epidemiology reviewed data on 30,000 people in seven countries – Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Turkey and United States of America. The researchers found that 48% of subjects in the United States experienced at least one mental illness during their lifetime compared to 40% in the Netherlands, 48% in Germany, 37% in Canada, 36% in Brazil, 20% in Mexico and 12% in Turkey [5].»
The proportions in France are most likely similar to those in the USA and Canada. This means that 2,600,000 people in Quebec and Switzerland, and 26 million in France, will have a mental disorder during their lifetime [6]. If we add to these figures intellectual disability, social maladjustment, parental incompetence, compulsive behaviour, self-destructive acts, and many other human problems not listed by mental health organizations, the great total of vulnerable and psychologically affected people represents a majority of the population.
These figures indicate something very simple. All these journalists and all those who believe that religious minorities, such as the Raelian Movement, only attract the weak in spirit and the mentally vulnerable must admit that they themselves are surrounded by people who show these types of psychological characteristics. There are some in their families, among their friends, among their colleagues at work. There are even some among those who call the Raelians weak-minded and depressed. Mental health problems do not therefore concern religious minorities. This problem concerns a majority of the so-called normal population!
I therefore have no problem with people talking about the mental health of the Raelians. But to do so, we must make sure we know the scope of the issue and, above all, we must understand that there is a risk of ending with one of the labels we are trying to put on others. I would also like to invite any independent and serious researcher to come and scientifically investigate this question in the Raelian Movement. There are tools available to seriously study this topic and to collect reliable data that would allow an objective comparison of the mental health status of the Raelians with that of the general population.
Mind Control

This is another flaw that afflicts the cults in general and the Raelians most specially. The Maitreya Rael is light-heartedly called a manipulator and the Raelians qualified of poor abused and manipulated victims.
We need to be very clear on the question. Either mind control simply does not exist, or it exists and is present everywhere: in politics, communication, advertising, sales, marketing, interpersonal relationships and… in the main religions. But, undoubtedly, if it exists, it is not exclusively reserved for the evil gurus of cults. What is surprising, and highly suspect, is that the term manipulative is generally reserved to qualify the leaders of religious minorities while the great religious leaders such as the Pope, the Bishops, the Dalai Lama, the Ayatollahs, the Rabbis, etc. are preserved from this qualifier. So we will now take a look at this phenomenon (unless it is simply an epiphenomenon… we will see).
First of all, we must say that the concepts of “indoctrination”, “mind control” and “brainwashing” are definitely not part of the scientific psychology’s vocabulary.. It is important to understand that these concepts have never been the subject of any controlled scientific studies and that the American Psychological Association (APA) stated in a memorandum filed with the California Supreme Court that the theories of mind control are “not accepted by the scientific community”, whether they are called “brainwashing”, “mind control” or “coercive persuasion” [7]. All these terms are exclusively used by pseudo-specialists in the field and also used by journalists and the general public who are merely repeating what they hear without going any further in their consideration of the matter. For them, mind control is at the heart of the problem with cults. Without mind control, one of them claims there can be no cult because, according to him, “mind control deprives the subject of any free will and any capacity for analysis, placing him in a situation of total receptivity to the speeches of manipulators [8].»
But, if mind control is not a proper concept of scientific psychology, , why is it so widely discussed and why is it given such importance and power?
First, the notions of indoctrination, mind control and brainwashing are articulated from phenomena that have been studied and widely disseminated in psychology. One of the articles most often cited on “anti-cult” websites refering to mind control is the one published in “La recherche” of September 1988 (n° 202), titled, “La psychologie de la soumission” (The psychology of submission), by Jean-Léon Beauvois,, professor of social psychology at the University of Grenoble, and Robert-Vincent Joulé, also professor of social psychology at the University of Provence [9]. What must be stressed here is that Beauvois and Joulé did not in any way address the problem of manipulation perpetrated by religious minorities, but focused more broadly on the problems of manipulation and influence that we face on a daily basis. The fundamental understanding that must be drawn from any serious author who has addressed the notion of social influence is that mind control, as we generally understand it, does not exist. What exists is the intervention that is carried out on external conditions to influence people’s behaviour. This is what marketing, advertising and political propaganda specialists do each and every day.
Therefore, what must be understood is that most mind control “theories” are articulated from an amalgam of concepts derived from very well-known social motivation theories and social psychology, such as:
- Obedience and submissiveness
- Conformism and conformity
- Persuasion and commitment techniques
The theory of obedience and submissiveness refers mainly to Stanley Milgram’s well-known experience [10]. People, recruited through a newspaper ad, were placed in a situation where they were asked to give electric shocks of varying intensities (from 15 to 450 volts) to subjects who were being asked to memorize words. In reality, the subjects who had to learn the word lists were actors and received no electric shock. Milgram wanted to see how many people would go as far as giving the maximum and fatal shock of 450 volts.
The theory of conformism, mainly studied by Solomon Asch [11], comes from an experiment in which the subjects were in the presence of accomplices of the experimenters, and each was asked to identify which of the lines presented on the screen was of the same length as the reference line. After some accurate evaluations, all of the accomplices began to give an erroneous answer. Asch wanted to know how many people would give the same type of answer as the rest of the group, even if the answer were obviously wrong.
Persuasion and commitment techniques, on the other hand, refer to any method designed to encourage individuals to consume a product or to adopt an attitude or behaviour. These techniques, which would take too long to describe here, are widely used in the fields of retail, marketing and advertising and their results are sometimes astronomical [12]. In particular, they refer to a softer version of the submission that they call “voluntary submission”.
These three theoretical fields are very often used as a reference to support the thesis of mind control by the “cult gurus”. This amalgam, it must be understood, is in fact a blatant mistake in the attribution of psychological phenomena that stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the theories in question. Three important things must be emphasized here.
First of all, the proportion of the population that belongs to a religious minority is very low. It is estimated at about 5.4% of the population [13]. As Alain Bouchard so rightly said, “We are therefore far from the destructive tidal wave against which a certain popular literature warns us.” According to studies reported by Bouchard, 75% of people who belong to a religious minority leave within three years and 85% of them say they have had a positive experience.
Secondly, the phenomena of obedience and submissiveness, conformism and persuasion apply to the majority of the population. It should be recalled that in Stanley Milgram’s experiment on submission to authority, 62% of subjects went up to 450 volts.
Another experiment involving the application of moral violence, rather than physical violence, showed that the obedience rate reached almost 92% of the subjects [14]. It should also be recalled that in Solomon Asch’s experiment on conformity, the results are similar to those of Milgram. In fact, one third of the subjects complied with the majority opinion and 76% complied at least once during the task. What is important to know from this experience is that the task was excessively simple. The person who was complying knew very well that he or she was giving the wrong answer. Finally, it should be recalled that persuasion and commitment techniques applied in different situations can lead to a substantial increase in the achievement of a behaviour [15].
A third point is that the two classic experiences of Milgram and Asch, as well as the massive applications of persuasion techniques and engagement in marketing and advertising, teach us that people who decide to join a religious minority, and especially who decide to openly display their choice, belong not to the majority of those who submit and conform, but to a minority who decide to go against the group as a whole.
Thus, knowingly deciding to change religion, to openly display our difference and face criticism, derogatory remarks and resist pressure from family, friends and society in general requires as much inner resources as those of the 32% of Milgram subjects who refused to give electric shock and the 24% of Asch subjects who refused to comply. Moreover, overcoming the sometimes virulent assault of public opinion conveyed by the media, with great prejudice and value judgments on the psychological balance of people who adhere to a minority religion, on their alleged personal vulnerability, on their weakness of mind and their lack of critical thinking, requires a lot of independence and non-conformism..It is so much easier to mechanically repeat the majority opinion than to assert contrary positions. The more cohesive the group, the more difficult it is to resist.
The results of the experiments on conformity tell us that it is easier to go against the evidence than to go against the judgment and opinion of others. Currently, negative opinions towards “cults” are so deeply rooted in popular opinion that people believe and repeat everything they say without questioning and even less nuancing these beliefs.
In short, resisting majority pressure is excessively healthy for the evolution of a society. As one philosopher said, “When everyone thinks the same way, you need to be wary.” We need to recall, reinforcing this, that Adolf Hitler was elected by a majority and that on August 2, 1934, he served as President and Chancellor and received the oath of loyalty from the military. A referendum approved this concentration of powers by 90% of the “yes” votes [16]! Do you realize how difficult it must have been for people to say they were against Hitler; to say they were against the concentration camps; that it was unacceptable and inhuman to massacre the Jews? History is filled with examples where the adoption of a one-way thinking within a population became extremely dangerous.It is probably not in vain that the resistance fighters and dissidents of all these totalitarian regimes preferred to flee rather than openly express their opposition. And please remember that we are talking here of a very small… minority!
Abuse and Financial Exploitation of the Followers
Adding to the accusations of manipulating the weak in spirit through vicious methods of persuasion, The Maitreya Rael is similarly accused of being an exploiter who extorts money from the pockets of his poor victims. Is it worth saying that any organization, from curling clubs to political organizations and major religions, requires financial contributions from its members; that any organization, association, political party and religion has membership (or a tithe), conducts fundraising campaigns, sells gadgets (books, magazines, t-shirts, buttons, caps, emblems, etc.), invites people to make donations during their activities, etc., but when it comes to religious minorities, people are outraged and denounce alleged abuses of power by the guru and raise the spectre of fraud? Speaking of fraud, is it necessary to recall all those made by the Church and by our elected politicians?
Once again, the Raelian Movement is singled out and criticized for asking its members to pay a membership fee. Once again, the biased way in which the question is addressed suggests that this practice is exclusive to religious minorities. Yet every organization do this without anybody saying that the Pope extorts money from the Catholics or the Dalai Lama from the Buddhists. When money issues concern the main traditional religions of the majority, no one dares objects, but when it concerns a minority, the leader is accused of “stealing from his followers”.
No radio or television host would make such accusations against the Archbishop of Montreal, the Chief Rabbi or the Dalai Lama if they participated in a television show. But for a new religious minority, it is allowed to do so.
Finally, we need to recall that, unlike the leaders of the great religions, The Maitreya Rael receives no salary from the Movement… and we also need to recall that financial participation in an organization, an association or a religion is a pure question of fundamental freedom. People can do whatever they want with their money, after paying their taxes.
* * *
What emerges from our argument, at this point, is diametrically opposed to the opinion of a majority of people who, like psychiatrists Pierre Mailloux and Jean-Marie Abgrall, and journalists like Richard Martineau, Franco Nuovo, Paul Arcand and many more, are endlessly repeating that members of religious minorities are “weak of mind people and depressive people manipulated and abused by their gurus”. The normalization of which members of religious minorities are accused actually applies to the members of the majority. So a question arises now: why do people comply so strongly with the majority? Or why is it so difficult to resist the pressure and influences of the majority?
We will first refer to the research conducted by Darley and Latané. They developed a series of experiments to test the effect of the presence of others as a factor in the decision to help. They found that if only one person is able to provide assistance to someone who needs it or to intervene to notify that a fire or an accident has just occurred, 85% of people will react positively. However, when the person is in the presence of another individual, 62% will intervene; and if there are four or more, the percentage drops to 31%. In some experiments, less than 10% of people intervene to notify of a potential hazard. Darley and Latané called this phenomenon «diffusion of responsibility [17]», which is defined as a division of the responsibility to perform an act of assistance into as many parts as there are witnesses to the situation requiring assistance. We will come back to this theory later on.
Another theory also helps us to understand the effect of the majority: the theory of cognitive consistency, developed by Fritz Heider [18]. This explains that every human being seeks to maintain internal coherence, by adopting, for example, an attitude that is in accordance with his or her beliefs.
Thus, for example, if people notice that they are adopting an opinion that differs from that of a person they like, or that they share an opinion similar to that of a person they do not like, they will tend to react to this internal incoherence. ,The state of discomfort caused by this type of situation will lead the person to change of attitude, either towards the person towards whom they disagree or towards their own opinion.
Thus, to restore internal coherence, or cognitive consistency, these people will have to evaluate the weight they give to their opinion and the weight they give to the person with whom they are in conflict. If the person who has an opinion different from their own is marginal, rejected or hated by the majority, added to the conformism of the people around them and the opinion of the majority of these people, their attitude will be more strongly influenced by this factor.
In Conclusion
So, let’s summarize. Not only is it false to claim that people who belong to religious minorities, and who assume their choice as much as any other choice in life, have characteristics of mental weakness or psychological vulnerability that leave them under the yoke of a guru who uses some mind control manoeuvres, but on the contrary, they show great strength of character, they have personal traits that allow them to go against the wave of political correctness and social pressure of the majority, and they have resources that allow them to face adversity, other people’s judgments and rejection from their relatives. They are non-conformists.
Moreover, the so-called mind control manoeuvres, which are highly suspect from an epistemological and empirical point of view, are not simply specific to religious minorities and their leaders, but if there are any, they have a much stronger impact on the majority. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to helping someone who is marginalized and abused by others, by the inability to distinguish a person’s ideas from the very person, and by being unable to admit that an individual may have interesting ideas without feeling the need to join the whole of them or the organization where they belong. In this way, we adopt “as a whole” positions that reject all of this person’s ideas, even if it means contradicting our own opinions and adopting attitudes that we used to condemn in a different context. Finally, and it must be reiterated, it is not minorities that should be wary, it is the majority.
When all these psychosocial mechanisms are in place and discriminatory behaviours take place, members of minorities, whether racial, sexual, political or religious, begin to be treated as sub-citizens and to be restricted in their rights. Unfortunately, this is what has always led societies to extreme acts, whose progression is insidious, as was the case in Nazi Germany, where anti-Semitic rumours were first spread, developing into an open propaganda against Jews, publishing anti-Semitic literature, adopting the “Nuremberg Laws” [19], the “Crystal Night” and concluding with the “Final Solution”.
We tend to consider this analogy as exaggerated. Yet, at the present time, it is permissible to adopt an anti-cult discourse without anyone protesting, to publish biased and completely impartial anti-cult books, to organize television shows inviting members of religious minorities to lynch them literally, to attack the physical integrity of a minority spiritual leader before a political representative who applauds the act and even to vote an anti-cult law [20]. What is the next step?
I wish to conclude with this excerpt of a text by Alain Bouchard that summarizes very well some of the issues described here:
“The reaction generated by the presence of new religions in Quebec is very interesting, it even reveals a specific social dynamic. Alain Bouchard (2001) showed how the model of the cult that emanates from newspaper articles seems to be issued from “urban legends”, these fictional stories that become socially plausible and which unconsciously express the concerns of the individuals who create and propagate them. These rumours are cathartic stories that provide the social group with an acceptable scenario to substitute an order for the dissonance generated by the evolution and destruction of the traditional patterns of socialization.
Stories about new religions thus become a means of saying that we no longer love the traditional religious institution and it is also a way of identifying a culprit for the family failure in the transmission of values. The typical scenario of the “stranger” and of the “kidnapping” is then repeated; the ogre of fables reappears under the mask of the cults. As in urban legends, the media coverage of new religions points to the concerns of an era and identifies a scapegoat for the anguish of a society.The cult threatens the future of the group (the young people) by turning them into the irrational, which is the inversion of the modern founding myth based on rationality and science. The cult is more than the other, it is finally the inversion of us. [21]
- [4] (See : http://membres.lycos.fr/mhchbv/suicide.htm)
- [5] See : http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2000/fr/cp2000-31.html
- [6] According to Statistics Canada, each year, 10.4% of the population suffers from significant mental disorders. See: Canadian Community Health Survey: Mental Health and Well-being, Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/Francais/030903/q030903a.htm
- [7] See : http://www.cesnur.org/testi/molko_brief.htm et http://www.cesnur.org/testi/lavage.htm
- [8]This is what the psychiatrist Jean-Marie Abgrall claims. See: http://www.psyvig.com/manipulation_mentale.php?uid=266ffdf09f592abb62049f708869405d
- [9] These two authors have also published other books on the subject, including: – R. V. Joule et J.- L. Beauvois, La psychologie de l’engagement, Pour La science, no 317, mars 2004 – R. V. Joule et J.- L. Beauvois, Petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2002. – R. V. Joule et J.- L. Beauvois, La soumission librement consentie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1998.
- [10] Milgram, S. (1964). Behavioral study of obedience, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378,
- [11] Asch, S.E. (1951) Study of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70, 416.
- [12] For an excellent summary, see: Cialdini, R.B. (2004) The Science of Persuasion, Scientific AmericanMind, special edition, 34(1),70-77.
- [13] See : Bouchard, A. Les « nouveaux mouvements religieux » et le phénomène des « sectes » http://www.erudit.org/livre/larouchej/2001/livrel4_div21.htm
- [14] This was the experience of Meeus and Raaijsmalkers (1986), reported in Bédard, L., Déziel, J & Lamarche, L. (1999) Introduction à psychologie sociale, ERPI
- [15] As an example, here is an experiment carried out by Nicolas Guégen, from the University of Bretagne-Sud, and Alexandre Pascual, from the University of Bordeaux: You wait for the bus. A stranger approaches you, “Excuse me, I just realized I forgot my wallet. I absolutely must take the bus. Can you help me out?” What do you do? You must admit that we do not easily respond to such requests on the street. In fact, only 11% of the people thus solicited agreed to help. However, it only takes very little for this percentage to increase. This time, the unknown person (an experimenter) was instructed, after making his request exactly as the first time, to add: “Of course, you are free to accept or decline.” With this additional little sentence, 44% of the people asked were accommodating. From R. V. Joule et J.- L. Beauvois, La psychologie de l’engagement, Pour La science, no 317, March 2004.
- [16] Source: http://lemondedelilly.chez.tiscali.fr/hitler.html
- [17] Darley, J.M., Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility. J Pers Soc Psychol; 8(4): 377-83.
- [18] See Vallerand, R.J. et Thill, E.E., (1993). Introduction à la psychologie de la motivation, Études Vivantes.
- [19] These laws restricted the rights of the Jews and ensured the racist character of the Nazi government “penetrated by the conviction that the purity of German blood is the condition for the preservation of the German people”, driven by the inflexible will to ensure the future of the German nation, the Reichstag unanimously adopted the following law: – Marriages between Jews and German blood or assimilated subjects are prohibited. – The extramarital relationship between Jews and German blood and assimilated subjects is prohibited. – It is forbidden for Jews to wear the German colours. – Violations of paragraph 1 shall be punishable by a term of imprisonment. Those in paragraph 2 shall be punishable by imprisonment or confinement.
- [20] The anti-cult law passed by France on May 30, 2001.
- [21] From: Bouchard, A., Les “nouveaux mouvements” et le phénomène des “sectes”: http://www.erudit.org/livre/larouchej/2001/livrel4_div21.htm