Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.
Most of the suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a place not lacking in wealth. But due to rapid population growth, the wealth per capita has fallen by about half in a generation.
I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.
Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour?
Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.
Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.
Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.
Anyone who has ever had the feeling of being higher than a kite after giving a public speech is well aware of the effects of attention.
Successful cult memes induce intense social interaction behaviour between cult members. This trips the attention detectors.
People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.
The information that is passed from person to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor that gives humans a competitive advantage over other animals.
Some people recovering from drugs or alcohol stay with the programs indefinitely, making the recovery program their family, a long-term source of attention rewards.
High status males had multiple wives or additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment.
Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error.
Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.
The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.