![]() ![]() The seekers had plenty of company in their fascination with aliens and UFOs. 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 psychologist and his colleagues had cohort observers infiltrate the group. 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. In Dorothy Martin and her followers, Leon Festinger saw a perfect, real life experiment to test his theory of cognitive dissonance. He'd been studying the idea that when something you believe is challenged, it creates a psychological tension or dissonance. But Leon Festinger, the psychologist, was intrigued. Most people probably laughed at the newspaper article and move on. ![]() The only way to be saved from the flood, the guardians said, was to become spiritually pure. 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 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. She claimed that extraterrestrials had chosen her as their messenger to planet earth. 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. 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. 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. You have certainly experienced it in your own life. Yet, the psychological phenomenon that had them in its grip turns out to be surprisingly common. 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. They're on the lookout for flying saucers, aliens who are going to transport them to another planet. They keep singing, their eyes on the sky. Eventually, things reach such a frenzy, that police are called in. Instead of cheering, they are taunting the carolers. Few people in the crowd appear to be in the Christmas spirit. Except, when you get closer, you can see something about the scene is off. A group of Christmas carolers is performing before a huge crowd of about 200 people. It's December 1954, around dinnertime in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Ted Gideonse explains how to understand and respond to cognitive dissonance in our everyday lives. Philip Zimbardo walks us through a lesson in Cognitive Dissonance, including original footage from one of Festinger’s earliest studies.Ĭognitive Dissonance & Michael | Ted Gideonse | TEDxUCIrvine. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Intragroup Dissonance: Responses to Ingroup Violation of Personal Values. The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. The Advances in the History of Cognitive Dissonance Theory. Riecken, Stanley Schachter, University of Minnesota Press 1956. Additional Resources:Ī Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. And to learn more about human behavior and ideas that can improve your life, subscribe to our newsletter at. If you like our work, please consider supporting it! See how you can help at. 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. ![]() When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. ![]()
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