John Lisle

And it's a really fascinating story where...

he was looking in a newspaper and he saw an announcement for the end of the world.

There was this cult called the Seeker's Cult, and they had said basically on December 21st, 1953, I think it was, it's going to be the end of the world.

There's going to be a massive flood.

Join us.

And so we can get whisked away on the spaceship before the end of the world happens.

Festinger sees this and he thinks this is a great psychological experiment because they are making a specific prediction.

On this day, this is going to happen.

What happens when it doesn't happen?

So he decides to embed himself in this cult.

Basically, they knew he was a psychologist, but they said, yeah, sure, come on by.

So him and some of his researchers, they just sit with the cult on the day that the world is supposed to end because they want to know, how are they going to deal with the fact that the world doesn't actually end?

Obviously, there wasn't even a light rain.

There was like no flood.

And so the world doesn't end.

Some people actually do end up leaving the cult afterwards.

But many people stay, especially the people who had sunk many costs into the cult.

They had abandoned their families to join this.

They had donated lots of money.

They had quit their jobs basically to be in this cult because they thought the world was going to end.