Gaslighters Take Over the Learning Process, Making Their Targets Question Themselves
Denial, distraction, misdirection, minimization. These are a few of the common tactics of gaslighting, a form of manipulation that tricks you into questioning your thoughts, emotions, and experiences — even your own perception of events — over time.
The trick to these manipulative tactics? They take advantage of your learning process. That’s what a team of psychologists has proposed, anyway, after introducing its new theoretical framework of gaslighting in a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Published online in June 2025, the paper’s framework explains how gaslighters get their victims to distrust themselves, by creating surprising situations, and by turning those situations into opportunities to teach their victims to doubt their sanity and their sense of their surroundings.
“When you trust or you love somebody, you expect them to behave in a particular way,” said Willis Klein, a paper author and a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at McGill University in Canada, according to a press release. “Gaslighters, in our view, are behaving in an atypical way, one that is somewhat surprising, and they’re making use of that surprise to direct the learning of the people they target.”
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A Framework For Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a type of manipulative abuse that picks away at a person’s perception of themselves and of their own thinking. Though the term, initially introduced in 1969, has received increased attention in recent years, the phenomenon itself is relatively understudied by today’s scientists. In fact, the team says that psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists are still in search of a standard, scientific explanation for how this type of abuse works.
Setting out to address this, the researchers turned to the theories of learning to explain how gaslighting gets people to feel that their sense of the truth isn’t trustworthy. Focusing on the theories of how people learn from what they experience, the team proposed a model that explains the psychological and cognitive mechanisms involved in gaslighting.
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Gaslighting and Learning
Specifically, the team’s model suggests that gaslighting takes advantage of the phenomenon of prediction error minimization (PEM). PEM is the learning process that occurs when your internal predictions and incoming perceptions of the world are out of alignment. In other words, it’s the learning process that takes place when you’re surprised — when your expectations aren’t accurate and when you adjust them accordingly.
In this way, gaslighters create surprising situations, prompting the victim to “correct” their “incorrect” predictions through the phenomenon of PEM. The gaslighter then suggests to the victim that their surprise comes from their irrationality, or their inability to register what’s real, getting them to feel “epistemically incompetent,” Klein said in the release. Basically, the gaslighter is creating a teaching moment and then teaching the victim to feel unstable and insecure in their interactions with the world.
“This is repeated over and over,” Klein said in the release, “until the target has really integrated the idea that they don’t actually have a good grasp on reality.”
According to the researchers, the fact that the framework relies on the learning process reveals that gaslighting is something that can affect anyone.
“In our model, there’s not necessarily anything specific about the target of gaslighting that makes them particularly vulnerable to it,” Klein added in the release. “In essence, it could happen to anyone, so long as they’re trusting the wrong person.”
While further additions to the framework could consider the personal characteristics that impact a victim’s vulnerability to gaslighting, other work could confirm the assumptions of the model and could contribute to a more complete theory of the phenomenon in the future. The hope is that these efforts will eventually help those who have experienced gaslighting, giving them the strategies and support to take back their sense of self.
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Article Sources
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