In 1956, the sociologist Leon Festinger published a landmark study of a cult formed around a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin. Martin channeled messages from extraterrestrial beings living on different “vibrational planes,” which she recorded via automatic writing. Her messages predicted a catastrophic flood that would destroy the United States on December 21, 1954. The acolytes of the cult’s prophet would be saved via alien spacecraft, which would whisk them off to the higher planes of existence they had been specially selected to experience. The cult’s membership grew in time, and as
In 1956, the sociologist Leon Festinger published a landmark study of a cult formed around a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin. Martin channeled messages from extraterrestrial beings living on different “vibrational planes,” which she recorded via automatic writing. Her messages predicted a catastrophic flood that would destroy the United States on December 21, 1954. The acolytes of the cult’s prophet would be saved via alien spacecraft, which would whisk them off to the higher planes of existence they had been specially selected to experience. The cult’s membership grew in time, and as the apocalyptic date approached, the members left jobs, let properties and businesses languish, and alienated their disbelieving families in expectation of the end times. When the flying saucers and ensuing apocalypse failed to appear on the appointed date, the cult’s believers did not lose faith. On the contrary, the experience bolstered their beliefs, annealing them into an intimate confederacy of false belief. Vestiges of the cult persist even to this day. This study would lay the groundwork for Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”: the mental stress people suffer when presented with realities contrary to their deeply held beliefs. The key takeaway is that humans naturally avoid this discomfort, skirting situations that aggravate it, or ignoring data that make their mental contradiction more apparent. Note: The purpose of the following exposition is not a neener-neener troll...
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A good history on how the term “cognitive dissonance” was coined
