Hope this is relevant. I'm an independent researcher, and I'm looking for sources about cult leadership rather than membership. Specifically I'm interested in the question of what triggers the move toward group suicide. Here I do not so much mean groups like Heaven's Gate, where group suicide is baked in at the start, but more the Jim Jones or David Koresh model, where the community is relatively stable, but then there's a precipitating event that triggers the leader to swerve to group suicide. I can surmise how it works, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I'm sure there must be sources that look at this side of the phenomenon directly as opposed to examining it from the victim/follower p.o.v. I'm finding lots of the latter but not much of the former. Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

I can't help you out unfortunately, DrBBennett.

In the Jonestown mass suicide, not every cult member was willing to poison themselves. Those that refused were murdered. I wonder if this is the case with more of these cult mass suicides.

In that case, the psychological mechanisms behind those combined homocide-suicide cases might be no different from those behind family homocide-suicide cases where the perpetrator was a dominant head of the family. Such cases are likely much more numerous than cult-specific cases so there's probably more research about them; might be worth looking into.