Reducing Cognitive Dissonance
Thus all plots and prophecies become possible — the capacity
to reduce cognitive dissonance is the cement of the cult when it confronts reality, and this is why the layman is helpless before the nonsense that is spread by these speeches.
Reducing Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger infiltered and closely studied the millenarian cult in the
suburbs of Salt Lake City led by Marian Keech. Festinger noted the group’s astonishing capacity to reduce this cognitive dissonance. Keech had announced that the end of the world would occur on December 21st , 1954. The group, reduced by then to some twenty-five followers, had been convinced that a flying saucer would rescue them from the final flood. This conviction was based on the many messages that Marian
Keech is supposed to have received from extraterrestrial beings in visions and even in written form.
The followers waited for the flying saucer for several days, and performed multiple rituals that were intended to facilitate their departure. The followers were then surprised to be given the happy tidings, through Keech as usual, that a divine update had been received. The great faith of the cult had saved them from enormous suffering and the final cataclysm had been postponed to a later date, whose exact time would be communicated to the followers later through the usual channels.
While ordinary logic would suppose that the group would be much shaken in its conviction, on the contrary, Keech’s followers were able to recruit more than two hundred new followers within a few days of this incident. The apparent failure of the cult had been changed to advantage by reducing the dissonance by amending their message. Notice of an impending apocalypse was converted to a message of love from God and a warning for the future. The failed experiment was interpreted as a pledge
of faith of the followers and a proof of the effectiveness of their prayers, since they had caused the postponement of the fatal date.
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Reducing Cognitive Dissonance
The ability to reduce cognitive dissonance, to use American sociologist Festinger’s term, is one of the essential characteristics of cults.
Festinger suggests that sectarian groups have the capacity to
“recalibrate” their objectives or their thought when a confrontation with reality shows the thought to be false. When there is "dissonance” between the thought and reality, the group tends to reduce the discordance by experimentally revising its thoughts and analyzing the results.
Cults have a stunning capacity to reduce dissonance. Traversing their recent history, one notes that the followers are not terribly shaken by the non-realization of their frequent prophecies. The failure of the world to come to an end, as frequently predicted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, does not seem to slow down their enthusiasm to convert others.