Anecdotally Observed Cult Recruitment & Membership Patterns

Updated and enhanced 04-14-2021

The early stages of guru-pressured recruitment are often designed to be attractive to those who believe in the idea of "justice," "freedom of expression," "fairness," "rights" and such, on the fringes of what is now rapidly increasing political polarization.

Those who understand the codependent psychology of cult participation as well as the psychology of both substance and behavioral addiction (look up Edward Khantzian, George Koob, Harold Shaffer and Patrick Carnes, chop chop) can see the parallels, for sure. And those with scholastic understanding of cult dynamics and addiction can see an obvious skew toward "addicts" to behavioral processes (e.g.: "cause" addiction; sex, romance & relationship addiction; activity addiction; appearance addiction, exercise addiction, even attention -- or significance -- addiction) as well as substances in many cult populations. To wit:

1) The Asian-influenced (bogus Buddhist and Hindu, for the most part) meditation cults in the US in the '60s (e.g. SRF, ISKCON, Nicheren Shoshu and TM) were observably jam-packed full of hippies & neo-druggies looking to find another way to get "high." Since the 1970s, they have tended to overlap considerably with the typically meditation-grounded, pseudo-therapy cults like The Center for Feeling Therapy and The Newman Tendency. 

2) The evangelical / fundamentalist / charismatic, pseudo-Christian cults seem unusually populated with wannabe-covert sex, romance and relationship addicts as well as foodies (I saw a remarkable skew towards this in several Pentecostal churches (e.g. Assemblies of God, Calvary Chapel) over the course of several decades). 

3) The large-group awareness training and human potential cults (e.g. the CoS, est> Forum> Landmark, and Silva Mind Control) seem to have an unusual share of highly motivated, political cause addicts. Moreover, CoS and Landmark participants show up so often in county and state political party organizations for fund-raising and voter-motivation, it's hard to ignore the connection. 

If one lives in LA or San Francisco, one runs into a lot of persecuted LGTBQ people, idealistic liberals and bootstrap minorities in LGAT & HP cults. Whereas out in the boons, one runs into a lot of gun clubs and righteously whacko "Christians" (not really), pseudo-Libertarians, "sovereign citizens" and "tax victims."

LGAT & HP cults are also heavily skewed towards those who place a very high value on material achievement and recognition. Hence their decades-long popularity in the entertainment and media industries.

4) Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) cults tend to attract people interested in material achievement via wealth accumulation.

If interested in how The (recruitment & manipulation) Game is played, see...

The Typical Path of Cult Involvement

Cult Membership as an Addiction Process... and a Process Addiction

A 10-Level Pyramid Model & Psychodynamics of Cult Organization

Resources: 

Carnes, P.: Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, Minneapolis: Hazelden, 1989.

Carnes, P.: Don't Call it Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction, New York: Bantam, 1991.

Carnes, P.: The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1997. 

Khantzian, E. J.: The self-medication hypothesis of addictive disorders: Focus on heroin and cocaine dependence, in American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 142, 1985.

Khantzian, E.J.: The self medication hypothesis of substance use disorders: a reconsideration and recent applications, in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 4, No. 5, Jan-Feb 1997.

Koob, G.; Le Moal, M.: Drug addiction, dysregulation of reward, and allostasis, in Neuropsychopharmacology, Vol. 24, 2001.

Koob, G., Le Moal, M.: Plasticity of reward neurocircuitry and the ‘dark side’ of drug addiction, in National Neuroscientist, Vol. 8, 2005, doi:10.1038/nn1105-1442.

Koob, G.: A Role for Brain Stress Systems in Addiction, in Neuron, Vol. 59, No. 1, July 2008.

Koob, G.: Neurobiology of Addiction, in Focus, Vol. 9, December 2011.

Shaffer, H.; LaPlante, D., La Brie, R.; et al: Toward a Syndrome Model of Addiction: Multiple Expressions, Common Etiology; in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 12, 2004.

A Basic Cult Library 

Articles on Cult Dynamics, which includes several articles with exhaustive bibliographies on the psychology of cult dynamics

If anyone has better, large-population survey-based, statistical research on this topic, I'm all eyes and ears.