rss-bridge 2021-10-04T21:09:23+00:00

When You Need It To Be True

When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. This week, we bring you two stories about how easy it can be to believe in a false reality — even when the facts don’t back us up.

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[An elaborate maze in the shape of a heart.]

When You Need It To Be True

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ January 30, 2023

Additional Resources:

BOOKS:

A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Leon Festinger. Stanford University Press. 1957.

When Prophecy Fails. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, Stanley Schachter, University of Minnesota Press 1956.

RESEARCH:

The Advances in the History of Cognitive Dissonance Theory. Irem Metin, Selin Metim Cagoz. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. 2011.

The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys. Louisa Egan, Laurie R. Santos, and Paul Bloom. Psychological Science. 2007.

Intragroup Dissonance: Responses to Ingroup Violation of Personal Values. Demis E. Glasford, Felicia Pratto, John F. Dovidio. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2007.

GRAB BAG:

A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance. Dr. Philip Zimbardo walks us through a lesson in Cognitive Dissonance, including original footage from one of Festinger’s earliest studies.

Cognitive Dissonance & Michael | Ted Gideonse | TEDxUCIrvine. Ted Gideonse explains how to understand and respond to cognitive dissonance in our everyday lives.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's December 1954, around dinnertime in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. A group of Christmas carolers is performing before a huge crowd of about 200 people. It all seems perfectly normal. Except when you get closer, you can see something about the scene is off. Few people in the crowd appear to be in the Christmas spirit. Instead of cheering, they are taunting the carolers. Eventually, things reach such a frenzy that police are called in. The carolers are unfazed. They keep singing, their eyes on the sky. They're on the lookout for flying saucers, aliens who are going to transport them to another planet. One woman tells a newspaper reporter, "We have been instructed to sing carols while we wait to be lifted up." You might think the carolers were stupid, or hopelessly gullible. Yet the psychological phenomenon that had them in its grip turns out to be surprisingly common. You have certainly experienced it in your own life. Today, we're going to tell you about the events that led up to that December evening in 1954, when flying saucers failed to appear over Oak Park. We're also going to tell you a second story, a modern story about what happens in our minds when our biggest dreams fail to materialize.Liz: Several times I said, "My friends think that you may not be real," and his reaction was, "Why are people jealous of real love? And why aren't people happy for us?"Shankar Vedantam: This week on Hidden Brain, the strange alchemy in our minds that makes it possible for us to live happily in an upside down world and believe that everyone else is wrong.Shankar Vedantam: A few months before the caroling incident, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota sat down to read the newspaper. Most of the stories weren't notable -- until he got to the back pages, where he saw an article about a middle-aged suburbanite named Dorothy Martin. She claimed that extraterrestrials had chosen her as their messenger to planet Earth. The aliens, known as the guardians, had told her a flood would engulf the west coast of North and South America, from Seattle all the way to Chile, in December 1954. The guardians supposedly had the power to take control of Dorothy's hand and use it to write important teachings that she and all earthlings needed to follow. The only way to be saved from the flood, the guardians said, was to become spiritually pure. Most people probably laughed at the newspaper article and move on. But Leon Festinger, the psychologist, was intrigued. He'd been studying the idea that when something you believe is challenged, it creates a psychological tension or dissonance. In Dorothy Martin and her followers, Leon Festinger saw a perfect, real-life experiment to test his theory of cognitive dissonance. The flood would surely not occur. How would believers respond when this happened? The theory of cognitive dissonance predicted that faced with unwelcome facts, the believers would come up with rationalizations that allowed them to believe that they were right and the world was wrong. The psychologist and his colleagues had cohort observers infiltrate the group. Soon, they reported that Dorothy Martin's followers, who called themselves "the Seekers," didn't just believe in an impending cataclysm. They were also convinced that they would be saved by aliens who would come in flying saucers to pick them up the night before the flood engulfed the world. The seekers had plenty of company in their fascination with aliens and UFOs. The obsession with otherworldly creatures had reached something of a frenzy in 1950s America.Series of audio clips from old movies: Yes, it came from outer space to fill the world with terror....New Speaker: Imagine yourself as one of the crew of this faster than light spaceship....New Speaker: In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA traffic control center ....Shankar Vedantam: Unlike most people fascinated by the idea of flying saucers, the Seekers were deeply invested in their beliefs. Many quit their jobs, actively distanced themselves from their loved ones, and drastically changed their lifestyles. A man named Charles Laughead was one of the most devout members of the group. He and Dorothy Martin did many interviews about their beliefs. We were unable to track down audio recordings of those interviews, but throughout the story, you'll hear voice actors reading comments that Dorothy Martin and Charles Laughead made to newspaper reporters and to the researchers who infiltrated the group. They were certain that the end times were coming.Thain Berton, as Charles Laughead: It is an actual fact that the world is in a mess, but the supreme being is going to clean house.Shankar Vedantam: Charles Laughead was a physician in Michigan State College. His views eventually made him something of a pariah. He was forced to resign from his job. His church community scorned his new beliefs. He and his wife spent so much time propagating the beliefs of the Seekers that their children were very nearly taken away from them. We'll circle back in a bit to what happened to the seekers, but as I said at the top, we're going to tell you two stories in parallel today. I told you the story of the Seekers looking

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