BRAINWASHING Edgar H Schein

31.months in some cases for the men once again to feel comfortable in close emotionalrelationships with others.An important corollary result was the impairment of judgment which resultedfrom the social-emotional isolation. If a POW could not comfortably discusshis daily affairs with others, seek advice, or consider the consequences ofactions he was contemplating, he was cut off from the most important source ofvalidation available to man --the opinions, beliefs, and knowledge of others.Much of the collaborative behavior of the POWs was unwitting or was based on verypoor foresight. They often were unaware how skilled the Communists were in usingpropaganda and were equally unaware how their behavior might be construed asdisloyal. The important point, however, is that collaborative behavior wasusually not motivated by disloyalty or opportunitism, but rather was the complexresultant of attempts to survive in an environment where standards for behaviorwere extrem'ely difficult to discern.Statistics on the amount of collaboration among captured Americans havevaried with the criterion that was applied all the way from 70 percent to 10percent of the POWs committing one or more acts of collaboration. These statisticsbecome meaningless if one considers the ambiguity of the criterion and thedifficulty the men had judging what was actually collaboration. What they doindicate,however, is that from the Chinese Communist point of view their effortsto produce propaganda must have seemed quite successful. On the other hand,the very small percentage of men who were to any degree swayed by the ideologicalmessage of the Communists must be considered a dramatic failure of their indoctrinationprogram.In managing the prison camps with a minimum of guards, the Communists werehighly successful. The isolation of the camps, the ready identifiability ofWesterners among the North Koreans, the social disorganization of the PCW group,