Organizational Gaslighting: When Deflection Destroys Reputation

By Mary Beth West, APR, FPRCA

New PR industry insights into “organizational gaslighting” will take center stage in Vienna, Austria, among the hot-topic presentations at the June 2025 AMEC Global Summit of the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication.

The urgent public relations industry problem of unethical, abusive gaslighting techniques by communication teams and entire organizational management cultures cannot be ignored or swept under the rug any longer.

While ethical teams in ethical organizations do not engage in organizational gaslighting, far too much evidence is also clear: many unethical organizations with unethical attitudes about “PR” indeed exist. The damage they are inflicting on public trust and the PR industry as a whole – including damage to many members of the PR workforce who suffer personal health consequences from undue expectations, pressures, and even mental / emotional workplace abuse – is extensive.

For background, the term “gaslighting” originated with the 1944 film noir “Gaslight,” which starred Ingrid Bergman playing the part of a wealthy Victorian-era heiress.

The film’s plot unfolds with the heiress’ greedy new husband seeking control over her fortune and using psychologically cruel manipulations to make her think she’s going insane.

Among his dirty tricks: dimming the gaslights in their home without touching them, while he denies to his wife that the lights ever dimmed at all. Bergman’s character ultimately suffers a nervous breakdown – much to her evil husband’s satisfaction.

Given this contextual background, public notions of what “gaslighting” is have been rooted for decades in the context of interpersonal / romantic relationships. In these scenarios, gaslighting often manifests with one person in the relationship lording over the other person, using cascades of untruths and cruel manipulations to gain the upper hand.

“Gaslighting” behaviors are often used to describe manifestations of narcissism and other forms of sociopathy. The common denominators: purposeful infliction of harm on other human beings, usually in the form of mental suffering and anguish, for purposes of the perpetrator wielding and solidifying their own power.

Power dynamics always are core to gaslighting.

In short: long-term patterns of gaslighting behavior are no accident. They’re committed on purpose. It’s a power play. In its extreme forms of repeated behavioral patterns over long periods of time, it’s highly premeditated and calculated.

In today’s modern culture, public applications and contexts of the term “gaslighting” have grown exponentially.

The term “gaslighting” was Merriam Webster’s 2022 “Word of the Year,” after the term registered an increase in online look-ups of 1,740 percent. (According to Merriam-Webster, its dictionary site “logs 100 million pageviews a month,” and “chooses its word of the year based solely on data.”)

More and more in the post-pandemic, we in the PR industry see ubiquitous reference of “gaslighting” as anyone or anything – including businesses / organizations / governments and their management teams / “PR” apparatuses – using gaslighting tactics of bad-faith manipulation and psychological trickery, to hamstring public discourse, incite fear and intimidation among otherwise would-be truthtellers, and skew public opinion for purposes of self-gain and acquisition / consolidation of power.

Some examples of organizational gaslighting include:

• Scapegoating internal stakeholders who call out observed misconduct documented to have occurred in an organization, by counterclaiming that whistleblowers are the “real” problem instead of those holding power in the organization who are trying to conceal the truth;
• Shaming employees or other stakeholders who justifiably react with anger to bad management behavior, practices, and incidents of policy violations by those in power;
• Stonewalling and ignoring repeated pleas from stakeholders or even media for information and explanations about misconduct;
• Demonizing people who ask logical, valid questions, with false claims that anyone who would dare ask such a question is, themselves, morally corrupt and / or intellectually inferior.

(This final example of a manipulated “herd mentality” phenomenon was depicted in the 1837 Hans Christian Andersen fictional tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The children’s story tells of charlatans posing as tailors who convince a king – and his entire kingdom, but for one truth-telling child – that a king’s nonexistent “new clothes” are spun from thread that only smart and meritorious people can see. The age-old tale proves the point: organizational gaslighting is hardly a new phenomenon, but its tools and tactics are simply taking new forms with instantaneous, global reach in the digital age.)

Not surprisingly, widespread public discussions and admonishments of gaslighting behavior have surged across recent years.

Vast majorities of consumer and voting publics know they are being manipulated, and they’re sick of it. The public backlash against obvious lies being whitewashed and mislabeled – while rightful protest against this misconduct is being censored – continues to grow. Societal discord and disruption are constant, which arguably speaks to the premeditation at hand.

To that point, the PR industry writ large has failed to take stock of its own culpability in organizational gaslighting. The question: Why?

The PR industry’s own harm to public trust by failing to shore up internal industry organizational gaslighting is only leading to the industry’s own self-destruction.  One need only see what’s occurring with plummeting public trust in the journalism profession to observe a similar cautionary tale.

More to the point, the PR industry has opted not to identify, quantify, confront and combat organizational gaslighting as the harmful trend it has become, despite the increasingly pervasive way that it violates the core of global public relations ethics.

Making this situation even more complicated for the PR industry to sort out, the term “gaslighting” is continuously used interchangeably with such words as “disinformation,” “fake news” and similar terminology of separate communication misconduct – but without differentiating the contexts and nuances of “gaslighting” as its own separate and insidious problem.

This troubling situation is about to change.

New, formal academic research is now forthcoming, spearheaded by the Global Strategic Communication Consortium (GSCC), sited at the University of South Carolina and inclusive of credentialed academic researchers worldwide who are affiliated with numerous institutions of higher learning.

At the AMEC Global Summit in Vienna, a preview of “industry listening” insights also are being shared, as gathered from outreach by U.K.-based The Pulse Business to both agency and in-house PR team leaders.

Anyone can follow the progress of these current insights and pending academic research, by connecting on LinkedIn with The #PRethics Community.

Written by: Editor