Jodie and Matthew once again investigate the exciting world of alternative religious movements. This time, they talk about The Seekers, a UFO religion from the 1950’s that was convinced the world was going to end on December 21. But what they didn’t know was that a group of Sociologists and Psychologists infiltrated the group to try to understand what happens when their predictions of the end of the world fail, and they came up with one of the most famous theories in social psychology because of it: Cognitive Dissonance.
Works Referenced and Recommended Readings:
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Rieken, and Stanley Schachter (1956)
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