Gaslighting

Hypatia, 2021

In what sense does one doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first order and second order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause a hearer to doubt her interpretive abilities without doubting the accuracy of her concept. The latter occurs when there is disagreement over which concept should be used in a context, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause a hearer to doubt her interpretive abilities in virtue of doubting the accuracy of her concept. Many cases of second order gaslighting are unintentional: its occurrence often depends on contingent environmental facts. I end the paper by focusing on the distinctive epistemic injustices of second order gaslighting: (1) metalinguistic deprivation, (2) conceptual obscuration, and (3) perspectival subversion. I show how each reliably have sequelae in terms of psychological and practical control.

Andrew D. Spear, 2019

Miranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20). Gaslighting, where one agent seeks to gain control over another by undermining the other’s conception of herself as an independent locus of judgment and deliberation, would thus seem to be a paradigm example. Yet, in the most thorough analysis of gaslighting to date (Abramson, K. 2014. “Turning up the lights on gaslighting.” Philosophical Perspectives 28, Ethics: 1–30), the idea that gaslighting has crucial epistemic dimensions is rather roundly rejected on grounds that gaslighting works by means of a strategy of assertion and manipulation that is not properly understood in epistemic terms. I argue that Abramson’s focus on the gaslighter and on the moral wrongness of his actions leads her to downplay ways in which gaslighters nevertheless deploy genuinely epistemic strategies, and to devote less attention to the standpoint and reasoning processes of the victim, for whom the experience of gaslighting has substantial and essential epistemic features. Taking these features into account reveals that all gaslighting has epistemic dimensions and helps to clarify what resistance to gaslighting might look like.

Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2021

Secondary microaggressions refer to the ways in which people of historically dominant groups negate the realities of people of marginalized groups. Gaslighting describes the act of manipulating others to doubt themselves or question their own sanity; people confronted for committing microaggressions deny the existence of their biases, often convincing the targets of microaggressions to question their own perceptions. ‘Splaining (derived from mansplaining/Whitesplaining) is an act in which a person of a dominant group speaks for or provides rationale to people of marginalized groups about topics related to oppression or inequity. Victim blaming refers to assigning fault to people who experience violence or wrongdoing and is used as a tool to discredit people of marginalized groups who speak out against microaggressions or any injustices. Finally, abandonment and neglect refer to a bystander’s failure to address or acknowledge microaggressions. Although these terms are commonly known ...

Paige L. Sweet, 2019

Gaslighting—a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel “crazy,” creating a “surreal” interpersonal environment—has captured public attention. Despite the popularity of the term, sociologists have ignored gaslighting, leaving it to be theorized by psychologists. However, this article argues that gaslighting is primarily a sociological rather than a psychological phenomenon. Gaslighting should be understood as rooted in social inequalities, including gender, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships. The theory developed here argues that gaslighting is consequential when perpetrators mobilize gender-based stereotypes and structural and institutional inequalities against victims to manipulate their realities. Using domestic violence as a strategic case study to identify the mechanisms via which gaslighting operates, I reveal how abusers mobilize gendered stereotypes; structural vulnerabilities related to race, nationality, and sexuality; and institutional inequalities against victims to erode their realities. These tactics are gendered in that they rely on the association of femininity with irrationality. Gaslighting offers an opportunity for sociologists to theorize under-recognized, gendered forms of power and their mobilization in interpersonal relationships.

GASLIGHTING AND ITS SEQUELAE FOR DUMMIES ABSTRACT A question, that every academic must ask him/herself and seek an honest answer is:- "Do I really want to advance scientific knowledge come what may, or do I want to retain my tenure and/or research funding for my continued prestige, despite the fact that it may well be fruitless due to me ignoring the latest threat of an imminent paradigm shift?" How a lay person realises integrated notions; dimensions abstract, voids imaginary, devious logic etc.. One has to cast aside one's allodoxophobic instincts to have the bravado to challenge the reigning clique/cabal of astrophysical gurus re alleged "Dark Matter" as really being a myth, a figment of uninformed and misguided beliefs and imagination, when it is really Relativistic Mass, (E-Mass), `hiding in plain sight'!

Review of Communication, 2023

Communication scholars are uniquely positioned to engage in complex, interdisciplinary research that integrates insights from different fields alongside a key expertise in the role of human symbol use. Viewing symbolizing as one of many central elements in complex social problems, we argue that communication scholars benefit when they begin from an interdisciplinary posture in conducting their research. We take as a case study the example of gaslighting. We show how research on gaslighting from philosophy, psychology, and sociology profits from the addition of insights from the field of communication and propose directions for future research on gaslighting that incorporate communication into robust interdisciplinary projects.

Academia Letters, 2021

The concept of gaslighting emanates from Patrick Hamilton's 1928 play, Gas light, renowned in America as Angel Street. The plot of the story anchors on a man intent (Gregory) on convincing his wife (Paula) that she's insane, with his main goal of gaining access to his wife's inherited jewels. At first the relationship is all tranquil, but small pockets of perplexing anger stir up. These pockets of perplexing anger and performative manoeuvre continues for a stretch of months.[i] The husband intentionally hides a brooch and blames the wife for losing it. He places his own watch in her purse when she's not looking, blames her for stealing it, and then later discovers the watch in her purse while she is in the company of several friends-to whom Gregory had warned earlier about Paula's unstable condition[ii]. This public incident not only confuses and upsets Paula but contributes to her sense of isolation and conviction that she is indeed going mentally sick. Gaslighting as a concept emerged from the psychoanalytic literature, where it is depicted as a transfer of psychic conflicts from the perpetrator to the victim. Thus, today gaslighting implies to overwrite and overload someone's reality towards the extent that such reality is unstable, incessantly questioned and emotionally constructed in a way that opposes scientific facts and the truth. According to Abramson, gaslighting differs from the transfer of sanity to insanity from a psychoanalytic perspective.[iii] Instead, gaslighting could be differentiated in social relations from two perspectives. First, those who adopt gaslighting in political life or otherwise engage in a form of emotional manipulation to alter the reality or socially constructed facts instead of driving their targets insane. Second, those who adopt gaslighting often seem not to have a clear destination or end goal; they are not clearly trying to rob their victims of mundane realty. Instead their target is a conscious manipulation fostered by repetitive performative acts which guarantee that the reality of their targets is altered or continuously up for debate which ends up in a

Symposium paper Joint Meeting of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association July 2023 Gaslighting is a form of domination, which builds upon multiple and mutually reinforcing strategies that induce rational acquiescence. Such abusive strategies progressively insulate the victims and inflicts a loss in self-respect, with powerful alienating effects. In arguing for these claims, I reject the views that gaslighting is an epistemic or structural wrong, or a moral wrong of instrumentalization. In contrast, I refocus on personal addresses that use, affect, and distort the very practice of rational justification. Further, I argue that the social dimension of gaslighting cannot be fully explained by reference to bare social structures because this compound wrong succeeds via emotional person-to-person addresses. Rational justification becomes, then, the locus where the struggle for power takes place. This struggle invests in and is operated by not only victims and wrongdoers, but also third parties. They are crucial elements in wrongdoing as well as in victims’ rehabilitation and re-empowerment. Ultimately, this study shows that the deontic structure of wrong is multifocal, and its relationality points to modes of epistemic and moral rehabilitation that are also modes of social empowerment.

The Monist, 2019

This paper develops a notion of manipulative gaslighting, which is designed to capture something not captured by epistemic gaslighting, namely the intent to undermine women by denying their testimony about harms done to them by men. Manipulative gaslighting, I propose, consists in getting someone to doubt her testimony by challenging its credibility using two tactics: “sidestepping” (dodging evidence that supports her testimony) and “displacing” (attributing to her cognitive or characterological defects). I explain how manipulative gaslighting is distinct from (mere) reasonable disagreement, with which it is sometimes confused. I also argue for three further claims: that manipulative gaslighting is a method of enacting misogyny, that it is often a collective phenomenon, and, as collective, qualifies as a mode of psychological oppression.

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 2023

Philosophers have turned their attention to gaslighting only recently, and have made considerable progress in analysing its characteristic aims and harms. I am less convinced, however, that we have fully understood its nature. I will argue in this paper that philosophers and others interested in the phenomenon have largely overlooked a phenomenon I call moral gaslighting, in which someone is made to feel morally defective—for example, cruelly unforgiving or overly suspicious—for harbouring some mental state to which she is entitled. If I am right about this possibility, and that it deserves to be called gaslighting, then gaslighting is a far more prevalent and everyday phenomenon than has previously been credited. And it can also be a purely structural phenomenon, as well as an interpersonal one, which remains a controversial possibility in the current literature.