John Lisle

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And so those people stayed.

And now...

Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance.

So the idea that you're holding two irreconcilable views in your mind at the same time.

So one of their views is we predicted because we have received revelations from God, basically, that the world was going to end on this day.

That's one position they're holding.

The other position is the world didn't end on that day.

So this is cognitive dissonance.

How do we reconcile the fact that these two things contradict each other, but we have to believe both of them?

So Festinger was interested in how they would do this.

There were a couple rationalizations originally.

One was, well, maybe God meant it in a figurative sense, not a literal sense.

Maybe it was a figurative flood that was going to cleanse our minds of something.

Not like a literal flood that was going to kill everyone.

But then they said, no, no, we actually thought it was going to be a literal flood.

So he's in the middle of their discussions when they're rationalizing this.

And they eventually come upon the conclusion that

God was going to destroy the world.

We were right to believe that he was going to do that.