The Doomsday Cult That Gave Us Cognitive Dissonance

In 1954, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin announced that aliens from the planet Clarion had told her a great flood would destroy the world before dawn on December 21. Her followers, a small group called the Seekers, quit their jobs, left their spouses, and gave away their possessions to be ready when the saucers came to rescue them at midnight.

Leon Festinger, a young social psychologist at the University of Minnesota, infiltrated the group with two graduate students. He wanted to watch what happened when the prophecy failed. It did. Midnight passed. Then 4 a.m. No flood, no saucers.

What the group did next became the founding observation of his theory. Around 4:45 a.m., Martin announced she had received a new message: the Seekers' faith and the light they had spread had convinced God to spare the world. Members who had previously avoided publicity now phoned newspapers. Believers who had wavered hardened. They proselytized harder than they had before the deadline.

Festinger published When Prophecy Fails in 1956 and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957. The claim was simple. Holding two contradictory beliefs creates a psychological tension people are highly motivated to relieve, usually by warping whichever belief is cheapest to bend. The Seekers could not undo the time and money they had sunk in. They could only revise reality.

The theory predicted, against intuition, that paying someone less to do a boring task makes them like it more. Festinger and James Carlsmith ran that experiment in 1959. Subjects paid one dollar to lie about how interesting an assignment had been later rated it more positively than subjects paid twenty dollars. The well-paid liars had an external excuse. The cheap liars had to convince themselves.