The history of coercive persuasion, from Pavlov to social media.

Dr. Joel E. Dimsdale, M.D attended Carleton College and then Stanford University, where he obtained a MA in Sociology and an MD degree. He obtained psychiatric training at MGH and was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976-1985, when he moved to University of California, San Diego, where he is now Regent Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus.

His clinical subspecialty is consultation psychiatry. He is a former career awardee of the American Heart Association and is past-president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine and is a previous guest editor of Circulation and former editor-at-large of Journal Psychosomatic Research. He has been a consultant to the President’s Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, the Department of Justice, NASA, and NIH and was Advisor to the UC Regents Health Sciences Committee. He was a member of the DSM 5 taskforce and chaired the workgroup studying somatic symptom disorders.

His research interests include stress physiology, ethnicity, and sleep. He is the author of more than 500 publications, including Anatomy of Malice: the enigma of the Nazi War Criminals, Yale University Press, 2016 and Dark Persuasion: the History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media, Yale University Press, 2021.