If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come up again and again.

Here’s my speculative attempt at categorizing harmful gurus based on their personalities, motivations, and persuasive styles (but not mental health conditions). Of course, not all harmful gurus are equally harmful (I’ll give a mix of very harmful and less harmful examples). My hope is that these categories may help you spot these patterns more easily:

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Type 1: Sociopathic Gurus – they strategically mix lies with truth to get your trust, promote a specific world view, and (eventually) extract value from you. Those who fail to spot their lies learn to trust them and may even see them as brave truth tellers. They lie to you knowingly and without remorse for personal gain.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Cherry picking: using selective (non-representative) examples that suggest the narrative they want you to believe.

• Paltering: making a series of true statements that purposely lead you to come to a false conclusion.

• Lie laundering: inserting key lies among a series of true statements so that the lies go unnoticed and they appear credible.

• Fabrication: they’re willing to completely make up things that very few people would ever blatantly lie about (such as inventing an experience they had with a specific person), leaving trusting people to assume they must be telling the truth.

Famous example:

Larry Ray

“Ray started a sex cult in which he presented himself to students as a former US Marine with training in psychological operations, as well as past work with the Central Intelligence Agency.[24] At first Ray ingratiated himself with his daughter’s friends, cooking dinners and ordering in delivery, and presenting himself as a father figure.”

A psychological examiner’s notes from the time said that Ray was “able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself, including a psychological interview with a forensic examiner, no matter how experienced that examiner may be. Mr. Ray is very good at what he does … [He] can be utterly charming, and one can be disarmed by his childlike simplicity and smile. But Mr. Ray is no child; he is a calculating, manipulative and hostile man.”

(source of these quotes: Wikipedia)

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Type 2: Narcissistic Gurus – they’re delusionally convinced of the vast superiority of their ideas and qualities, and do whatever they can to get others to pay attention to and admire them. People end up entranced by their charisma, grandiose vision, and (apparent) confidence. Their huge (but fragile) ego makes it hard for them to learn from (and likely to lash out in response to) valid criticism.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Self-aggrandizement: they tell you how impressive they are or how impressive their ideas are, and some find this convincing.

• Endorsement: they get others to talk up their brilliance and accomplishments, making their claims seem more believable (which are also sometimes mutual exchanges where they talk each other up).

• Obfuscation: using obscure words, ambiguous, smart-seeming remarks, and technical phrases that are hard to understand to seem brilliant and to deflect from having to actually defend their ideas from head-on critiques.

Famous example:

Benny Hinn (prosperity gospel preacher)

Quotes:

“Where in the Bible does it say I have to drive a Honda?”

“When you don’t give money, it shows that you have the devil’s nature”

“The Bible warns us clearly that we must not attack men of God no matter how sinful they may have become or wicked in our eyes.”

“Sow a big seed.  When you confess it, you are activating the supernatural forces of God”

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Type 3: Apophenic Gurus – they read signals into noise, often in paranoid ways. Even though their theories are usually wrong, they are often interesting, novel, or surprising, which gets people to pay attention and leaves some people captivated. They see tenuous connections as deeply meaningful and are rarely persuaded by logical critiques. Some of them tip into genuine psychotic detachment from reality.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Mystery: they present their ideas as involving a deep understanding of hidden relationships or secret knowledge, and leave the impression that if you just spend enough time consuming their content, you’ll come to grasp these important truths that few understand.

• Web of connections: they talk about a wide range of unrelated ideas and events in rapid succession and treat these as deeply connected, making it difficult to pin down their points and giving them an easy escape valve (by diverting to tangential topics they claim are related) when their perspectives are challenged.

• Just asking questions: they’ll point to things that seem weird or surprising or that aren’t well understood, and imply they have deep significance and support their worldview, even though their proper interpretation is unclear.

• Yes And-ing: incorporating other popular false theories and appealing world-views (such as perspectives of other gurus) into their network of ideas, making them even more appealing, fascinating and familiar seeming.

Famous example:

David Icke (conspiracy theorist)

Quotes:

“The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.”

“I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.”

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Type 4: Traumatized Gurus – due to being ostracized by a group or very painful life experiences, they’ve come to demonize a group of people or a set of ideas as the source of society’s ills. They’re on a mission to get others to demonize the same group or ideas. Their own pain and fear leads to black and white thinking and blocks their empathy.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Nutpicking: focusing on the most extreme (nutty) perspectives and people related to whatever it is they demonize to make it seem insane and dangerous.

• Catastrophizing on a slippery slope: claiming that some genuine problems related to a group or set of ideas are going to lead to a sequence of events with a cataclysmic or frightening outcome, causing their audience to fear that group or those ideas.

• Motte and bailey-ing: flip-flopping between reasonable criticisms and extreme conclusions based on those criticisms (which may depend on how emotionally disregulated they are at that moment, or what audience they are talking to), such that when their extreme conclusions are changed, they can easily retreat to “I was just saying that [reasonable criticism].”

Famous example:

Brigitte Gabriel

Her home was destroyed by Muslim militants when she was 10 years old, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel.

Quotes:

“The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil.. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no soul, they are dead set on killing and destruction.”

“Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” (according to the NYT).

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Note that here with this terminology I am not talking about diagnosing mental disorders – I’m talking about how these gurus think, their motivations, and their persuasive styles.

What’s the key difference between these categories? I’d say it’s that they all mislead their audiences, but for different reasons, based on different motivations, and with different levels of self-awareness.

Sociopathic Gurus often mislead on purpose, knowingly, to gain something.

Narcissistic Gurus often mislead due to their egos, and an inflated sense of their own importance and the superiority of their ideas.

Apophenic Gurus often mislead due to seeing false connections, and due to jumping to paranoid conclusions.

And Traumatized Gurus often mislead due to the way their beliefs were shaped by pain or fear, which has caused them to oversimplify, mischaracterize and demonize a particular group or set of ideas.

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Of course, not all gurus can be classified in these ways – some are idiosyncratic.

And, in practice, many gurus combine multiple elements from the above categories, especially the most harmful gurus – for instance, I think that Sociopathic + Narcissistic, and Narcissistic + Apophenic are common combinations among cult leaders in particular. Perhaps having multiple of these tendencies rather than just one (or even having all of these tendencies, though likely to different degrees) is common among the most popular such gurus.

The reason I’m proposing these categories, despite their porousness, is that I think they are useful for thinking about different personalities and tactics common among gurus.

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Here are some examples of what I think are mixed type harmful gurus and how I’d classify them using this framework based on what I know about them (of course, it’s hard to be certain of their true traits beyond their public portrayal of their traits):

• Andrew Tate: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “Andrew Tate once called his sexually explicit webcam business a ‘total scam’ and boasted on his website that he lured women in by getting them to fall in love with him.  The 36-year-old influencer also boasted on a podcast that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight and ‘got away with it.'” (NBC)

• Alex Jones (radio host): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru – “We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.” and “The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”.

• Elliot Rodger (mass murderer, became influential post-death): Traumatized + Narcissistic Guru – “All I have ever wanted was to love women, but their behavior has only earned my hatred. I want to have sex with them, and make them feel good, but they would be disgusted at the prospect. They have no sexual attraction towards me. It is such an injustice…Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence? I concluded that women are flawed.”

• L. Ron Hubbard: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!” (part of his “self-hypnosis”)

• Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate cult leader): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru

• Charles Manson (Manson Family cult leader): Sociopathic + Apophenic Guru – “Total paranoia is just total awareness.” and ” I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man; I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards.”

• Warren Jeffs (FLDS polygamous offshoot of Mormonism): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru

• Keith Raniere (NXIVM cult leader): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru

This piece was first written on March 4, 2026, and first appeared on my website on March 30, 2026.

After noticing a number of times that people’s feelings about formal credentials can differ dramatically and that this seems to impact their views on certain important topics, I’ve been working on defining a “credentialist” trait (or attitude).

In a nutshell, the non-credentialist/credentialist spectrum, as I’m defining it, captures how important a person thinks formal credentials are, as well as how they feel those credentials should influence who we should trust and who should express opinions (e.g., should only formalized experts comment on a topic, or is it good for non-experts to comment as well?)

I developed a 4-minute test to measure the trait, so if you’d like to find out if you are a “credentialist” or “non-credentialist” (which I define as being in the top or bottom 20th percentile of each trait) or find out your own credentialist score, you can take the test here:

https://programs.clearerthinking.org/credentialist_test.html

Here are simplified/extreme prototypes to illustrate the distinction (few people are as extreme as these prototypes):

*Credentialists* get annoyed when someone without the right credential is giving their opinion on a topic, are impressed by formal degrees (e.g. PhDs and MDs), do not like it when non-experts have their own personal theory about a topic, trust people a lot more when they have formal credentials, think its unlikely someone could get really good at a complex topic without formal training, think that non-experts should not contradict experts, would go to school to learn a topic if they wanted to get good at it, find it annoying if startup founders talk about disrupting industries they have not already worked in, tend to describe people in terms of their schooling and job history (rather than, for example, their personality), and trust the opinion’s of people a lot more if they went to an excellent college.

*Non-credentialists* think that it fine (or even good) to express opinions when you’re a non-expert, are not particularly impressed by formal degrees, don’t view degrees or certifications as a strong indicator of trust, think it’s fine (or even good) for non-experts to criticize the views of experts, are prone to teach themselves material rather than going to school for it, don’t mind startup founders attempting to disrupt industries from the outside, tend not to describe people in terms of their schooling and job history, and don’t view the quality of the college a person went to as a significant factor in whether to trust their opinions.

I measured the trait on a 0 to 1 scale, and on the 143 people I collected it for, it has a mean of 0.55 and a standard deviation of 0.16, with a pretty nice bell curve shape.

Interestingly, I found a very low correlation between credentialist scores and education [r=0.03], identifying as female [r=-0.04], and income [r=0.03], and little correlation with age [r=-.08]. This suggests that credentialist differences have little to do with demographic characteristics!

Furthermore, whether you are a credentialist does not even seem to have that much to do with whether you yourself have credentials, as responses to the question “I myself have substantial formal credentials” had a correlation of only about r=0.13 with the credentialist scores. It also has little to do with how ambitious people are, as responses to “I have highly ambitious goals for what I will achieve in my life” had a correlation of only r=0.07 to credentialist scores.

Of the 22 questions I tested people’s agreement on in order to measure the trait, the 2 most effective questions (in the sense that they correlate highly with the average of the other questions but don’t correlate very highly with each other) are:

Q1: It annoys me when someone without the right credential is giving their opinion on a topic (e.g., a non-doctor commenting about medicine or a non-accountant commenting on accounting)

[r=0.71 against the average of the other 21 questions]

and

Q2: I am very impressed by formal degrees (e.g., PhDs, MDs, JDs, etc.)

[r=0.54 against the average of the other 21 questions, yet a fairly low r=0.24 with respect to Q1]

The 22 questions I developed hang together nicely and point in generally the same direction. Basic factor analysis revealed only one main factor in the questions, and the question least correlated to the others still had a positive correlation of r=0.34 with the average of the other questions (which was “If I heard that someone had won a prize in their field, I would think very highly of it”).

Most people fall in the middle of this trait, of course (e.g., viewing credentials as at least somewhat positive but the lack of them not that negative), without an extreme viewpoint either way. However, here are some anonymized qualitative responses I collected from people at the tail ends of the spectrum:

Credentialists:

“I don’t respect people who don’t have formal credentials, and one of my biggest pet peeves is people–even really intelligent people–speaking about things they aren’t experts on. Just because someone is known, or even renowned in another field, doesn’t place their opinion on another topic anywhere above another non-educated person.”

“People with formal credentials have generally gone through a rigorous peer review process that demands a considerable depth of understanding and knowledge.”

“People who don’t have credentials have no business talking about things they know nothing about. That’s how misinformation gets spread, and misinformation is harmful to society as a whole.”

Non-credentialists:

“I think that people can have a valid voice no matter their level of formal schooling. The opposite also holds true: a degree is not necessarily representative of ability.”

“I feel that colleges have become scams. They are money sponges that make you pay for your own brainwashing. I value intelligence and how well-read someone is on a subject, and we don’t need a self-appointed team of left-wing experts to ‘allow’ us to do that for ourselves anymore. People with credentials have more money than sense and have been taught what NOT to think more than they have been taught HOW to think.”

“While I respect those who have worked to earn professional credentials, people who are self-taught oftentimes know much more about a subject than someone with an expensive degree.”

Note: designing this scale and writing this post is a very non-credentialist thing to do since I’m not a social scientist.

This piece was first written on July 21, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 10, 2025.

It could be the case that we almost always act for good reasons, and that our explanations accurately reflect these reasons. But let’s consider an alternative hypotheses. Let’s suppose that much of our decision-making is influenced by factors that seem like they should be irrelevant, but that affect us below the level of conscious awareness. In that case, our attempts to explain our own behavior would often be incomplete. We would attribute our decision to X, when in fact Y and Z were also factors, perhaps as important as X. But, since we would be unaware of Y and Z, it might seem to us like our explanation X was complete.

So how could one test this hypothesis, that people are frequently influenced by factors which they don’t notice are altering their decisions? One approach is as follows. Randomly divide a population of people into two groups, A and B, of roughly equal size. Put everyone from both groups into nearly identical situations, with the only difference being that the experience of people in A differs in a single respect from the experience of those in group B. Choose this difference to be one that participants are unlikely to believe could have a significant chance of changing their behavior, but which you as a researcher think could in fact alter behavior in a specific way. Now see if the behavior of people in group A differs strongly in the predicted way from the behavior of those in B. If it does, this is evidence that we sometimes act for reasons that we don’t understand, and that our self reports of why we act may be inaccurate or incomplete.

Many studies of this basic format have been conducted, some with quite disturbing results. Consider the following scenarios:

• An ordinary looking man comes up to you on the street and asks you for a dime. Take a moment to think of what factors would influence your decision as to whether to give him the money. Would you be influenced by how he is dressed? By whether he smiles? What behaviors could this person do to make it much more likely that you would comply?
• A stranger asks you on a date, or asks you to dance at a club. Presumably your decision of whether to agree might depend on how good-looking you think the person is. But what other, subtler factors, might influence your decision?

It turns out that a powerfully influential factor in these cases is whether the person gives you a brief touch on the upper arm when making their request. As Richard Wiseman notes in his book 59 seconds, researchers have consistently found effects from physical contact. In one such study, a person asking for a dime was 20% more likely to get the money when they asked with a quick touch than without. In another study, 1.5 times more women accepted an offer to dance when a touch was used than when it wasn’t (with the acceptance rate jumping from 43% to 65%). A third study found that when attractive men asked out women on the street, their success rate doubled from 10% to 20% when they used a brief touch. People would never say “I decided to go out with him because he touched me on the arm”, and yet, it seems that about half of the women in the “touch group” of this latter study would in fact not have accepted the date without that momentary touch. Presumably, few if any of the women realized this.

Another fertile source of insight into decision-making is the book Yes!, on the tactics of persuasion. Consider these scenarios:

• You are staying in a hotel and find a note that asks you to reuse your towels (as opposed to leaving them to be cleaned) in order to help protect the environment. You’d expect your level of devotion to environmental causes to influence whether you comply. But could it be the case that an alteration to the note could make your compliance much more likely? In one study, it was found that simply mentioning that the majority of people who stayed in your hotel room followed the request caused a 33% increase in people reusing towels. Yet, if these hotel guests were asked why they agreed to reuse their towels, it seems unlikely that many would say it was because other people did it too. We often subconsciously take cues from others which influence how we act.
• You get a phone call one day from a group conducting a study for a “public service publication”, and they would like you to participate. The person on the phone says that participation will involve “five or six men from our staff coming into your home some morning for about 2 hours to enumerate and classify all the household products that you have.” What simple trick could this organization use to substantially increase the chance that you will say yes? It was found that when homeowners were called three days before this request in order to give them a phone interview about their product use for the same publication, they were 2.4 times more likely to agree to the later, much more invasive request. Those who didn’t receive an earlier call agreed to allow the surveying men to come 22% of the time, compared to 53% of those who did receive an advance call. And yet, it seems unlikely that those people whose behavior was altered by the non-invasive phone survey would be aware that it was an essential ingredient in their decision. Agreeing to do something small can unwittingly make us far more willing to do a similar but much larger thing later on.
• You receive a survey in the mail, sent by a stranger, along with a typed request that you complete it. Presumably, if you find the survey topic interesting, you may be more likely to do so. But regardless of your interest level, what variable could the sender change to make you much more likely to fill it out? In one study it was found that if a handwritten sticky note was attached that requested the survey be completed, the chance that the survey was returned was more than doubled, from 36% to 75%. The slight increase in effort and personal touch of attaching a hand written sticky note made people substantially more likely to want to help out.

Do these sorts of effects only hold on unimportant choices? Let’s consider some decisions where money or lives are at stake.

• You are interviewing college students for a job. Presumably you will take into account their quantity of work experience and grade point average. And yet, in one study, total months of work experience and grade point average did not have a statistically significant effect on whether candidates were offered a job. What did have a significant positive effect was whether the candidates tried to ingratiate themselves with the interviewer (e.g. by conforming to the interviewers opinions and offering favors). We naturally want to hire people that we feel positively towards, even when we believe ourselves to be evaluating them on objective criteria.
• You want to buy a subscription to the economist. You can choose the web only version for $59, or for $125 get the print version which also includes web access. Which would you select, and why? Surely after the fact you would be able to explain why one would be more right for you than the other. But as Dan Ariely discusses in his book Predictably Irrational, when he conducted a study on this scenario he found that adding a third subscription option which nobody selected massively altered people’s behavior. If a $125 print only version is included as an option, which is similar to the $125 print-and-web option but strictly worse, the preferences of subjects switched from 32% favoring the print-and-web version to a whopping 84% preferring it. The latter group thought they were choosing for good reasons, but in fact many of them changed their minds due merely to the decoy option being offered. The decoy option was clearly worse than the print-and-web version, therefore making the latter look more compelling positive on a relative basis, even though no one wanted the decoy.
• It is your job to determine how many years someone should go to jail for illegally entering her neighbors apartment and stealing money and merchandise. Your judgement will be based on a description of the crime, as well as a photo of the criminal and routine demographic information about her. What factors do you think will alter your decision of how long a sentence you’d apply? When such a study was conducted on undergraduate students, it was found that when the photograph of the criminal was switched from an attractive woman to a substantially less attractive woman, the average prison sentence that the students assigned increased by a factor of 1.9, from 2.8 years in jail to 5.2 years. The average sentence that the less attractive photo produced was about equal to that of a control that was identical except that it included no photograph. Beauty and ugliness can substantially distort our perceptions of other people, even with regard to traits that have nothing to do with a person’s looks.
• You’re again given the task of determining the sentence that an accused criminal should receive based on details about their case. You’re also given the prosecutor’s sentencing demand, but you know this demand is random, because you determined it yourself by rolling a pair of dice and summing the values. Surely, the sentencing demand wouldn’t influence the sentence you would give. Right? In one such study, the sentences that lawyers gave in such a scenario were almost 1.5 times higher when their dice came up with high values than when the dice had low ones (the mean sentence rising from 5.3 months to 7.8 months). The values we assign to things can be substantially influenced by suggested “anchors”, even when we know intellectually that those anchors are irrelevant.
• You’re filling out a form and have the option to sign up as an organ donor. One might imagine that your sense of obligation to other people might come into play. But could the way the form is written have a large impact on this weighty decision? In one study, when people were presented with opt-out organ donation forms (or ones where a choice was forced) people said they would be willing to donate their organs at twice as high a rate compared to if they were presented with an opt-in form. Furthermore, it was found that out of a sample of 11 countries, all 4 countries that use an opt-in organ donation procedure had organ donation rates lower than all 7 countries with opt-out procedures. Yet, it seems unlikely that many people attribute their organ donation choices to whether or not they had to check a box. Sometimes the default or “standard” choice, can have a powerful effect on what we decide.

These studies, and the many others like them, raise serious questions about the extent to which we understand why we make the choices that we do. Seemingly irrelevant or unimportant information seems to powerfully alter our behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. Those influences that are subconscious are particularly pernicious, because their very nature prevents us from noticing how they affect us.

So the next time you think you know why you made a decision, don’t be so sure that the story you tell after is the actual story.