In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even bigger disaster was on its way. Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and was puzzled. Festinger didn’t think people would voluntarily adopt anxiety-inducing ideas. Instead, he reasoned, the rumors could better be described as “anxiety justifying.” Some had felt the earth shake and were overwhelmed with fear. When the outcome—they were spared—didn’t match their emotions, they embraced predictions that affirmed their fright.
Festinger was developing the now ubiquitous theory of cognitive dissonance. He argued that, when people encounter contradictions, they experience so much discomfort that they feel an urgent need to reduce it. In response, a person can update his views—or he can misinterpret, and even reject, whatever information has challenged his beliefs. He might seek out people who agree with him; he might try to persuade those who don’t. “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger later wrote. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” Cognitive dissonance helped explain human choices that otherwise seemed irrational, stubborn, and shortsighted: these were, in fact, attempts to reduce psychological distress.
In 1954, while Festinger was refining his theory, he stumbled upon a rare opportunity to observe the effects of dissonance. A newspaper reported that a small Chicago-area group, the Seekers, were receiving messages from aliens about an impending flood that would submerge North America. Festinger and two colleagues, plus several assistants, went undercover. In an influential 1956 book, “When Prophecy Fails,” the trio wrote that the Seekers committed to the prediction so fully that some quit their jobs while emptying their savings accounts. When no flood or aliens arrived, Festinger and his colleagues wrote, the Seekers tried to reduce the dissonance they were experiencing by recommitting to their belief and evangelizing—a seeming attempt to bring others into alignment with their views. “Their research resulted in convincing, if not definitive, confirmation of their hypotheses,” a reviewer from the American Sociological Review wrote. In 1957, Festinger published another book, “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” which described laboratory studies of people acting to resolve dissonance.
It’s hard to overstate how influential the theory is today. “You almost certainly can’t get through an introductory psychology class without hearing about cognitive dissonance,” Adam Mastroianni, writer of the psychology Substack “Experimental History,” told me. The phrase has been invoked to explain why environmentalists eat meat and why some Trump supporters play down the President’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Last month, on social media, memes making fun of Cynthia Erivo, the lead actress in the “Wicked” films, for rushing to protect Ariana Grande from a fan, spread on social media. The musician SZA said that we’d eventually look back on these posts and experience cognitive dissonance.
Lately, though, the foundational case study of the Seekers has been contending with its own kind of dissonance. Until this year, a box of Festinger’s documents—communications with colleagues, research notes, transcribed telephone conversations—in his archives at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, remained sealed at the request of his widow, Trudy. When the files were released, a political scientist named Thomas Kelly discovered that the researchers, who were ostensibly neutral observers, actually wielded a profound level of influence over the Seekers. In a recent peer-reviewed paper, Kelly noted that there were at least five paid observers in addition to the three researchers; at some Seekers meetings, half of those present may have been infiltrators. One research assistant pretended to dream about a flood and receive psychic messages; one of Festinger’s co-authors, Henry Riecken, was revered by the group’s leaders. When the flood didn’t come, Riecken apparently encouraged the Seekers to double down on their beliefs, Kelly told me in November. “Here’s this canonical study, and it’s backwards,” Kelly said. “This is misleading people about the dynamics of new religions and social psychology.”
In the years after Festinger co-authored “When Prophecy Fails,” his stature grew. In a 1959 study, he and a colleague gave Stanford undergraduates excruciatingly boring tasks: moving spools on and off a tray, rotating pegs on a pegboard. Afterward, they were instructed to tell the next participant that the tasks were enjoyable, and in return they were compensated either a dollar or twenty dollars. Right after the students delivered this message, they were asked what they actually thought of the task. Oddly enough, those who had been paid a dollar rated it as more enjoyable than those who were paid twenty dollars.
Joel Cooper, a psychologist at Princeton, remembered reading the study when he was an undergraduate. He was so surprised that he missed his subway stop. “That was unimaginable to the field of psychology at the time,” Cooper said. The prevailing dogma was that people, like Pavlov’s dogs, responded based on rewards. In this instance, those who were rewarded more said they liked the task less.
