In the 1950s, The Seekers, a small doomsday cult (a.k.a. The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays) predicted when the world would end. Festinger, who would study The Seekers with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, read about the cult leader's predictions in a local newspaper and "saw a made-to-order way of putting his theory [of cognitive dissonance] to the test" (When Prophecy Fails, p. 10).
The front page of The Chicago Tribune in December, 1954:
The Seekers believed a flood would destroy the world on December 21, 1954. Their leader, Dorothy Martin, claimed she received this information from "the Guardians," who lived on a planet called Clarion. After the world did not end as predicted, Martin made a new prediction: a UFO would come on Christmas Eve to save the Seekers.
After both predictions failed, Festinger and his team observed the cult members' behavior: some members of the cult left, while others showed strengthened belief and renewed fervor toward Dorothy Martin's teachings. This contradiction in the remaining members was what psychologist Leon Festinger and his team predicted to find. Because the members had sacrificed their families, work, money, and possessions to join the cult, they looked for "ways to minimize any negative aspects of the group and to maximize its benefits" (When Prophecy Fails, p. 11). They largely justified their failed predictions by claiming their faith had saved the world from ending and had earned the approval of the Guardians of Clarion. This flipped the failed predictions into successes.
To define cognitive dissonance: "Cognitive dissonance is a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. The clashing cognitions may include ideas, beliefs, or the knowledge that one has behaved in a certain way" (Psychology Today).
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