They're not hypnotists. They're just better at reading people than you are — and willing to use it.
I’m not a shy person. I’m outspoken. I’m a good bullshit artist because I’m confident, even when I don’t know everything about a topic. I know how to handle a room and command the attention when I have to as well. I want to say it comes with experience, but the psychology hunter in me knows better. My personality was built long before I was born. DNA only makes up roughly half of your personality. So, my childhood, my parents, my environment also built the characteristics I’m so fond of—and known for—today.
That’s why I’m so intrigued when people—with similar traits as me—are able to capture the attention of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people—but not necessarily for the good of society. In fact, these people—cult leaders, specifically—are portrayed as some magnetic, charismatic, unreachable higher power of a human.
But are they really?
I was never the type to fall for that. The again, that’s almost word for word what ex-members said before they did. Confidence is protective against some tactics, yes, but it can also be a major blind spot. People who trust their own judgment tend not to audit it. But for me, I question everything. Even myself. That’s the difference. The bullshit artist recognizes the performance precisely because I’m capable of it, and is humble enough to know capability cuts both ways.
I’m not a vulnerable person who can be easily manipulated either. I spent years studying criminology and psychology before I spent years writing stories about liars, and the thing that struck me in both fields is how mechanical manipulation actually is once you slow it down. It’s not magic. It’s pattern recognition, applied with total confidence and zero conscience.
Cult leaders don’t read a room for weakness. They read it for unmet needs and transition.
Margaret Singer, an American clinical psychologist, and one of the best known researchers on cults and coercive persuasion, put decades in interviewing ex-cult members. She found that most people who ended up in them weren’t especially damaged or gullible. They were your ordinary people at a crossroads: a breakup, a big move, a death, a job loss, a lonely college semester.
These grieving people don’t become targets because they’re stupid, but because grief and transition create a hunger for structure and belonging that a stable person simply doesn't have that day.
Campuses, grief groups, wellness retreats. The ‘reading the room’ starts with choosing the room. And cult recruiters lurk where those types of moments congregate.
Then they listen. The skilled ones will ask open questions and let people spill their wounds. What brought you here? What are you looking for out of this? Whatever the person offers to give up becomes the hook. The lonely person gets a friend. The aimless one gets absolution. The ambitious person gets status. The cult leader isn’t God, they’re more of a mirror, reflecting back exactly the things the other person is missing.
Cult leaders watch for small tells of compliance. Who laughs a little too early at their joke, who looks around to see how others react, who apologizes unnecessarily, who can’t tolerate silence. These are cheap, low-stake tests of deference. Then they try to escalate in small steps (the foot in the door effect), because someone who agrees to a minor request is statistically more likely to agree to a bigger one.
Once they've found the gap, the next move is intense attention, delivered fast.
Intense early attention shows who soaks it up and who gets suspicious. People who bloom under it get invested further. The ones who stay skeptical get dropped off and sidelined. The cult funnel only selects susceptibility.
The love bombing has less to do with affection than disorientation. Compliments thrown your way that feel oddly specific. Eye contact that lasts a little too long, portraying fascination, rather than taking it as awkwardness. Being remembered is how you really hook the person in—remembering their coffee order, their dog’s name, mundane details that make the person feel like they were heard.
Most of us calibrate trust slowly, in small earned increments. Love bombing skips the rational steps and floods the system, so by the time reason catches up, you already feel known. And once you feel known, walking away feels like abandoning someone rather than protecting yourself.
If you’re watching this happen from the outside, intensity arrives way before the information does. They know how you feel before they know who you are.
Cult leaders prioritize language.
What I mean by this is that every group that wants to control—hold onto people—eventually invents their own private language. Their own vocabulary. It’s these insider terms for certain phrases. This tactic does two things: it makes the group feel like a breath of fresh air—a discovery of some sort—rather than a decision to be there. And second, it makes the outside world, this includes the people who love you and are worried about you—sound illiterate by comparison.
Once you’re speaking a language your family doesn’t understand, explaining yourself to them becomes exhausting. That’s the whole point—isolation starts as friction. Separating you from the people who actually know you best.
Nobody joins a cult overnight.
They agree to ordinary things—a meeting, a ‘trial period’, keeping an open mind for a week. All these small steps feel harmless. You can stop whenever you want. You don’t have to go. You can ignore that text for the 8pm meeting. But behavioral psychology has known for decades that people justify their choices retroactively: once you’ve said yes to that small thing, you unconsciously start building a story where you’re the kind of person who says yes to this type of stuff. Saying no to the next ask now contradicts your own narrative.
This is the same mechanism good con artists use to normalize control a tiny inch at a time. They don’t have to get you all at once. You’re already in the swamp. There’s nowhere to go but under.
Eventually, almost every single cult starts yapping about them.
But who the hell is them? The media? The skeptics? Your family that ‘doesn’t know what’s best for you’? Your old life that’s ‘holding you back’?
It almost doesn’t matter, as long as they exist.
Remember high school? Two girls who couldn’t stand each other became inseparable the week they both decided Jessica was a snake. Nobody bonded over shared values. They bonded over shared contempt. A common target.
It really is quite a simple trick. A shared enemy hands people an identity without making them build one. And unlike Jessica, the cult’s enemy is the people who love you. Once your father or mother is them, leaving the group no longer means walking away. It means ‘crossing over to the other side’.
If you want data behind it, Muzafer Sherif’s 1954 Robbers Cave experiment is the classic. He split boys up at summer camp into two groups prior to knowing the other existed. Competition alone produced fierce loyalty and hostility toward the other side. The hostility only eased when the groups had to cooperate on shared goals, which is a nice contrast to the cult’s strategy of never letting that happen.
In plain terms: the leaders concoct an outside enemy, over and over and over.
People don’t join cults for the ideology.
Most members couldn’t accurately describe the ethos of the group they joined six months earlier. They joined for the feeling of stability—of certainty. For a leader who has answers and doesn’t say ‘I don’t know.’ A leader who doesn’t show the ordinary human indecisiveness the rest of us go through.
Confident answers are addictive. Even wrong ones. Cult leaders aren’t selling some new worldview. They’re selling relief from the exhausting life you are currently living. That relief is the drug.
I studied cult leaders, not because I’m planning to run a cult. I write fiction—thrillers, psychological suspense, anything with a manipulator at the center—so studying the habits of these con artists make my characters feel real on the page. But I also think, even if you’re not a writer, it’s still worth knowing how these manipulators operate. Especially in a world where things are so uncertain—we all eventually fall through the cracks. We go through loss, a bad year, a rough patch, and we become vulnerable. Again, not because we’re stupid, but because we’re tired. It’s those tiny moments we’re most human, and most recruitable.
I opened by telling you I’m confident, outspoken, and a pretty good bullshit artist. I was never the type to fall for it. But neither were all those members. The people most certain it could never happen to them are the ones who stop checking, and that’s exactly the opening a good manipulator is looking for. So yes, stay confident, stay how you are, but don’t forget to check yourself once in a while.
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**Margaret Singer’s work is debated, but the finding that recruits are ordinary people at a crossroads holds up across much of the research.
