Expand Your Thinking

Continuing with my series of overviews of cognitive biases, we have “cognitive dissonance” and “belief perseverance”. The story of how cognitive dissonance and belief perseverance were first recognized or described in Social Psychology is an interesting story to me. It involves the sociological study of a 1950s UFO cult by the psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter . This was published in their book, When Prophecy Fails in 1956. I originally read this book in the ’90s. The group’s leader claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials (through automatic writing if I remember right) and they told her the earth would be…