Good synthesis here of some literature that's peripheral to harder-core cult studies, but pretty useful. I'd like to push back on the language of "joining." As a a cult survivor and researcher, "joining" implies consent and agency, both of which are directly violated by the recruitment process. Cultic groups function first and foremost through deception. You can't "join" a cult. You can, as the late theorist Cathleen Mann said, "delay leaving an organization that misrepresented itself."

It sounds like a semantic issue, but downstream of it are all kinds of attitudes about the "joiner," and their gullibility. It can be ableist and victim-blaming, but more than that, simply inaccurate, because no one is well-defended against deception; that's what makes it deception.