Psychology
Cognitive Dissonance and How We Protect Our Beliefs
11 min
An exploration of the psychological discomfort that arises from holding contradictory ideas and the lengths we go to—from doomsday cults to everyday rationalization—to maintain internal consistency.
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Show notes
Believers in a nineteen fifty-four doomsday cult rationalized a failed prophecy as a divine reprieve to avoid embarrassment.
Paying someone one dollar to lie changes their mind more effectively than paying them twenty dollars.
The meat paradox involves devaluing animal intelligence to reduce the guilt of eating them.
Archival evidence suggests researchers faked psychic messages to influence the behavior of the cult they were studying.
Directly confronting someone's beliefs often fails because the brain perceives logical challenges as personal attacks.
Social support acts as a critical buffer that prevents groups from dissolving when their core predictions fail.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Birth of Dissonance: The Seekers2 min
- 3The One Dollar Lie: The Mechanics of Justification3 min
- 4The Modern Critique: Was the Foundation Flawed?2 min
- 5Everyday Dissonance: From Meat to Morals3 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- Yes, Cognitive Dissonance Is Still Actually a Thing | Skeptical Inquirer
- Why Do Doomsday Believers Double-Down When Prophecy Fails? | Psychology Today South Africa
- When You Need It To Be True - Hidden Brain Media
- The Psychology of Holding On to Beliefs | Psychology Today
- YANSS 324 – Why cults often grow stronger after their leaders turn out to be wrong – You Are Not So Smart
- Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”
- When Prophecy Fails
- YANSS 300 – Why cults often grow stronger after their beliefs, predictions, assumptions, and leaders all turn out to be wrong – You Are Not So Smart
- Apocalypse Now: Why Believers Will Grow Stronger If the World Doesn’t End | TIME.com
- Disconfirmed expectancy
- When Prophecy Fails
- When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That ... - Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, Stanley Schachter - Google Boeken
- Social:Disconfirmed expectancy - HandWiki
- Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”
- When prophecy fails Front Matter
- https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Motivation/required_reading/3Festinger_Carlsmith_1959_Cognitive_consequences_of_forced_compliance.pdf
- ARTICLE
- Classics in the History of Psychology -- Festinger & Carlsmith (1959)
- https://ia601609.us.archive.org/8/items/FestingerLeonATheoryOfCognitiveDissonance1968StanfordUniversityPress/Festinger%2C%20Leon%20-%20A%20theory%20of%20cognitive%20dissonance%20%281968%2C%20Stanford%20University%20Press%29.pdf
- When ‘when prophecy fails’ fails | BPS
- “Alarm Bells Went Off”: New Research Takes a Critical Look at the Landmark UFO Cult Study 'When Prophecy Fails' - The Debrief
- Download <!-- -->Festinger-Riecken-Schachter-When-Prophecy-Fails-1956.pdf (PDFy mirror)<!-- --> PDF
- When Prophecy Fails and Faith Persists: A Theoretical Overview
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