Thought Reform and Cyber Security: Where Cult Manipulation Techniques Meet Technology With Dustin Rozario Steinhagen, PhD
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What is the significance of thought reform in cybersecurity?
Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of the Influence Continuum. I have a newly minted doctor as a guest today. I'm very, very excited to have with me Dr. Dustin Rosario-Steinhagen. He's a privacy expert. He just got your doctorate degree in cyber defense. You've published numerous times in privacy literature, including fields of privacy education and neuro privacy. And we want to talk today about the topic of your dissertation research, which is titled Defending the Security of the Mind, a Male Survey of Thought Reform Literacy in South Dakota. And all I can say is I was very excited to learn about your doctoral research. I know you approached me to be on your committee, which I unfortunately was overcommitted in other ways.
I couldn't serve, but my dear friend and colleague John Atack did serve. John is an ex-Scientologist and a brilliant mind. unto himself. And it sounds like you're really doing cutting edge work. So I wanted to interview you, hear more about what you were interested in, how you got interested in this, its applications, and get more people, especially young people, interested in this topic. So Dustin, Dr. Dustin, welcome to the Influence Continuum.
Thanks, Dr. Hassan. And first, I just want to say it's an honor to be on your show. I first caught wind of your research in 2019 when I was first researching what's out there in terms of malicious influence.
How did Dr. Dustin become interested in thought reform research?
And we'll get into the backstory of kind of how a cyber defense PhD got involved with thought reform research because it's very unintuitive and might even sound inappropriate without some context. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, please tell us. Sure. So in 2018, I was a senior at Cornell University in my undergrad program. And the most important course I ever took in my life was this course called Computational Psychology. So the whole thesis of this course is that the brain is literally a type of computer and the mind is computation. And we don't have time to go through all the mechanics of that. But the citation I would provide would be the professor's book, which is called Computing the Mind, How the Mind Really Works. The author's name? Dr. Shimon Edelman. Okay, thank you. In 2018, as your viewers and listeners might recall, that's when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the news in the spring, so right around the same time I was taking this course.
And, you know, that really opened my mind to, like, how much manipulation there is out there and how our personal data is used to, you know, politically manipulate us. And I mean, that's really just the tip of the iceberg, too. And I didn't realize how deep and broad this subject is until I really dug into the literature.
So may I interrupt you, Dustin, and just for my listeners who may need a refresher on Cambridge Analytica, and I know I think Christopher Wiley wrote a book about it. Tell our listeners just a bit about what that was about. Sure.
So Cambridge Analytica was, I think it's most properly termed, should be termed a psychological warfare firm. They were doing political manipulation using personal data in various countries prior to... essentially meddling in the 2016 presidential election in our country and then also the Brexit referendum in the UK. So they got in big trouble and had to go back and they eventually went bankrupt because of this huge privacy scandal where they were essentially scraping thousands of data points from Facebook and then combining that with psychometrics analysis to target specific voters and sway the election in unethical ways. You know, I mean, influence doesn't have to be inherently unethical, but the reason why it came into Analytica was wrong was because people's data was being scraped that they didn't consent to and that they didn't understand what was going on. It was on such a massive scale as well.
If I may add, there was a documentary, I believe, called The Great Hack for people who want more details about it. And my recollection, if I may add, is just that they got into Facebook and were doing questionnaires. and used the questionnaires to get to all the friends of the people who responded. I was in that hack.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the significance of thought reform in cybersecurity?
0:03–1:51
2
How did Dr. Dustin become interested in thought reform research?
1:51–5:42
3
What lessons can we learn from the Cambridge Analytica scandal?
5:42–8:11
4
How does psychological manipulation relate to personal data privacy?
8:11–14:39
5
What were the main findings of Dr. Dustin's survey on thought reform?
14:39–25:20
6
What demographic factors influence susceptibility to psychological manipulation?
25:20–31:17
7
How can education serve as a defensive control against manipulation?
31:17–42:31
8
What are the implications of the survey findings for future research?
42:31–58:13
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The MeidasTouch Podcast
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