Gaslight (Anguishin Italian) is a 1944 film in which a husband (Charles Boyer) convinces his wife (Ingrid Bergman) that he is going crazy: from this title comes the term gaslightinga form of psychological manipulation that, according to a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, it functions as a maliciously oriented form of learning and, as such, can affect anyone.
Predictive machine tampered with. Researchers have tried for the first time to give a scientific explanation to the phenomenon, investigating how manipulators manage to make their victims doubt the reality around them. “When you trust or love someone, you expect them to behave in a certain way,” explains Willis Klein, coordinator of the study. This phenomenon in psychology is called minimization of the prediction error: that is, the idea that the brain predicts what will happen based on what it knows.
How it works. Let’s take an example: Anna, married to Marco for ten years, discovers that her husband is registered on a dating app. When she asks for explanations, he calls her crazy, claiming that it is not a dating app, but a social network, and that the fact that she immediately thought of an app of that type shows how much she doesn’t trust him and how their relationship isn’t going well.
The manipulator accuses the victim by overturning the facts, leading him to believe in an alternative reality – the one he desired: «I gaslighter they behave abnormally, in a surprising sense, and use this surprise to direct the learning of their victims.”
In addition to behaving in an unexpected way, the manipulator will make you believe that the fact that you feel surprised by his behavior (being registered on a dating app despite being married) has to do with your lucidity: by repeating it, the victim will convince himself that he is not lucid (and his brain prediction machine will have been thus tampered with).
Trusting the wrong people. The new explanation starts from the idea that we depend on others, particularly those close to us, to form our sense of reality. For this reason, anyone could be the victim of a manipulator: «There is not necessarily something that makes a person more likely to be a victim of gaslighting: It could happen to anyone who trusts the wrong person,” explains Klein.
This, he adds, however, does not exclude that future investigations reveal that some personal characteristics can influence a person’s susceptibility to gaslighting.
