 Benjamin Zablocki responded that brainwashing is not "a process that is directly observable," and that the "real sociological issue" is whether "brainwashing occurs frequently enough to be considered an important social problem", and that Richardson misunderstands brainwashing, conceiving of it as a recruiting process, instead of a retaining process, and that the number of people who attest to brainwashing in interviews (performed in accordance with guidelines of the National Institute of Mental Health and National Science Foundation) is too large to result from anything other than a genuine phenomenon.Zablocki also pointed out that in the two most prestigious journals dedicated to the sociology of religion there have been no articles "supporting the brainwashing perspective," while over one hundred such articles have been published in other journals "marginal to the field.