All of this was well known in the 1930's and used to great effect by a man named Goebbels for a man named Adolph Hitler.

History is such a wise teacher, don't you think?

Further explanations come from behavioural psychology.
In one experiment, the "Halo, Horns" effect was tested, which showed that your intitial impression of somebody will persists, regardless of what comes later. Once you mentally place a halo, or horns on somebody's head, there is little they could do or say that would persuade you to remove it...so, people who had a wonderful experience at their beginners event, and met the Loving Ramtha (in the days when Ramtha appeared at beginners events - now replaced by the Loving Master Teacher)would keep on believing in the goodness and rightness of it all, and of the Master, in spite of subsequent nasty, badgering or offensive behaviour.
About compliance, the Stanford Prison experiment showed that ordinary or fairly ordinary people (such as white collar criminals) with no higher levels of agression or sadism than the general population would shock a test subject, and keep doing so when commanded to do so by an "expert scientist/authority figure", even when it was clear that the subject was experiencing pain...This was presented to them as a learning experiment...even past the point where they were advised by the "expert" that they could permanently incapacitate the test subject. (no actual shocks were inflicted on the test subject, a skilled actor, but the participants did not know this).
And I think some of the groupthink and weird behaviour is explained by the studies on the Risky Shift Phenomenon, which showed that people in groups behave in a much more extravagant, dangerous or wild manner than people alone.
Then, there was the experiment where the researcher would go to a crowded city intersection, and start running pell mell...usually, several, sometimes many, people would start running too. When asked by the researchers' associate - "Why are you running?" - those who joined in said they figured, since other people were running, it was the right thing to do.
"And we like sheep are led astray".

OOPS! The "Stanford Prison Experiment" was not the name of the study I labelled as such. The Stanford Prison Experiment was another study entirely, about social roles and the effects of incarceration.
Sorry.
It's been a while since I studied these things.

lost.
you were referring to the Stanley Milgram experiments of 1961.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The prison thing was by Dr Phil Zimbardo in the early 1970s
http://www.prisonexp.org/

tanks joe.