Quit by Annie Duke

Author:Annie Duke [Duke, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Cult of Identity

In 1954, Leon Festinger, one of the most famous psychologists of the twentieth century, came across a newspaper story about a doomsday cult.

An interesting feature of a doomsday cult is that the cult predicts an exact date when the doom is going to come, in this case, December 21, 1954. That’s the reason why the story caught Festinger’s eye, because he wanted to know what would happen to the members of the cult when that date arrived and the world did not end, when they learned clearly and unambiguously that the beliefs that caused them to join the cult and all that comes along with that were incorrect. Would they quit or would they stick with it?

Festinger, along with colleagues Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, were among the first psychologists asking these questions, publishing the classic field study about their findings, When Prophecy Fails, in 1956.

The story that the researchers read was about a suburban housewife, Marian Keech, who had been receiving messages from space aliens of superior intelligence from a planet named Clarion. According to those messages, a cataclysmic flood would submerge much of the western hemisphere on December 21.

The psychologists contacted Keech and learned she was one of the leaders of the Seekers, whose members believed the world would end on that date and that aliens would be sending a spaceship at midnight on the day of the flood to rescue the true believers.

The followers of this cult made a series of life-altering commitments. They quit their jobs, stopped attending school, and ended friendships and family relationships with skeptics and non-followers. They sold or gave away their possessions.

The psychologists infiltrated the small group of cult members to observe how people in this real-life situation would behave once their beliefs had been disconfirmed. Festinger’s team spent as much time as they could with Keech and her followers in the run-up to December 21.

By early evening on December 20, fifteen people had gathered at Marian Keech’s house to wait for the spaceship and the end of the world. As midnight approached, everyone sat in the living room, their coats in their laps, the silence broken only by the ticking of a pair of mantel clocks.

When one of the clocks struck midnight and the aliens did not come, there was a moment of confusion, until one of the believers pointed out that the other clock had not yet chimed midnight, so the first clock must have been fast.

A few minutes later, the other clock struck twelve and, still, no aliens arrived. Two of the Seekers were sufficiently convinced by the absence of a midnight ride to Clarion that they didn’t wait around for a flood. They went home and did not return, which is the behavior you would expect from a rational person whose beliefs (no matter how wacky) had just been so manifestly disproved.

This left eight true believers and Festinger’s observers.

The well-known finding reported in When Prophecy Fails was that the other eight members were not willing to quit their belief in the prophecy, even though it was demonstrably false.

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