{"id":62981,"date":"2023-08-16T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2023-08-16T05:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=62981"},"modified":"2023-08-15T09:29:23","modified_gmt":"2023-08-15T13:29:23","slug":"qotd-cognitive-dissonance-or-when-cultists-retcon-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/08\/16\/qotd-cognitive-dissonance-or-when-cultists-retcon-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Cognitive dissonance, or when cultists retcon reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[Leon] Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails<\/em> was a study of a UFO cult which predicted the end of the world on a very specific date … in 1953. Festinger was on hand to see what happened to the cult when the world didn’t end, and he discovered a very important psychological principle. He called it “cognitive dissonance”, but since that term has taken on a life of its own, we’ll swipe one from [the] Internet and call it a “retcon”.<\/p>\n

For those with even a moderate level of commitment to the cult (and I’ll leave it to you to speculate what moderate<\/em> commitment to a cult might be; Festinger’s work is not without its critics), disconfirmation of the cult’s central belief led, astoundingly, to an even greater commitment to the cult. “The world will end on X date” was immediately retconned into “the world didn’t end on X date because of our righteousness<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

You know you’re really onto something when it seems head-slappingly obvious in retrospect. Yeah, of course they did that. Everybody does that to a degree. You expect something isn’t going to work out, then it does work out \u2014 it must be because you’re special, right? It’s another way of assigning yourself agency in a world where you’re basically powerless over the big stuff. Humans are wired to believe they have agency, that things happen for a reason. It sounds like I’m giving Festinger at best a backhanded compliment, but I’m very seriously singing his praises \u2014 “everybody knows” this stuff, but no one had isolated and described it before. That’s a major achievement \u2014 if I could have the equivalent of “discovered cognitive dissonance” on my tombstone, I’d die an ecstatically happy man.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Quick Takes: Festinger Edition”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2021-01-19.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Leon] Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails was a study of a UFO cult which predicted the end of the world on a very specific date … in 1953. Festinger was on hand to see what happened to the cult when the world didn’t end, and he discovered a very important psychological principle. He called it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,7,41,13],"tags":[1063,1364,139,1462,1427],"class_list":["post-62981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-1950s","tag-cognitivedissonance","tag-psychology","tag-severian","tag-ufos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gnP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62981"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84258,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62981\/revisions\/84258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}