Why Cult Beliefs Don’t Stop When Proved Wrong

by James Lindsay

In the 1950s, there was a UFO cult called the Seekers, and it was infiltrated by a psychologist named Leon Festinger who wanted to understand why they believed what they believed and how their beliefs worked. In particular, he wanted to see what happened when their very specific central prediction, around which the cult orbited, did not come true.

The Seekers believed there was an impending catastrophe that would strike the world on December 21, 1954. On that date, there would be a gigantic global flood. As a cult they engaged in lots of rituals and “awareness raising” activities about the impending disaster.

The Seekers also believed in aliens—it was a UFO cult. Specifically, they believed that aliens would save the faithful Seekers from the coming disaster. In particular, the aliens would rescue the faithful Seekers for trying to warn people about the coming catastrophe. They also believed the aliens had the power to intervene on Earth if necessary. As everyone might suspect, the aliens would only intervene, believed the Seekers, if there was sufficient faith in Seeker doctrine and its vision of living a moral life on Earth.

Obviously, what the Seekers believed amounts to a 1950s UFO-based version of the biblical story of Noah recorded in Genesis 6–9. Also obviously, they were completely wrong.

Leon Festinger understood this and wanted to understand not just the Seekers but the phenomenon of cults. To learn more, he infiltrated the cult, posing as a faithful Seeker, and observed it through the lead up to the fateful December 21, 1954. Additionally, from his position inside the cult, he was positioned to observe and interview subjects when it turned out after that date that nothing of the sort had happened.

Eventually, December 21, 1954, came and went, and… nothing happened. This failed prediction marked a crisis of faith for the Seekers.

What did the Seekers do? Did they abandon their beliefs? No! They did not abandon their beliefs, except in a few individual cases. Instead, most Seekers experienced some form of emotional crisis and emerged from it with a powerfully increased commitment to the Seekers’ cult beliefs. Festinger was intrigued.

Most of the Seekers emerged from the crisis of their failed prediction firm in a new belief. They believed that their faith and devotion had saved humanity because the aliens saw it and intervened to prevent the flood, thus saving not just the Seekers but also humanity at large. Yay, Seekers!

That’s obviously nonsense, but it served as the foundation for the psychology not just around cults but around conspiracy theories (not conspiracies, which are real, but the “theories,” which are borderline crazy crap).

What Festinger observed is that under certain conditions, people do not abandon their conspiracy theories or cult beliefs when presented with solid evidence those beliefs are wrong. Instead, they modify and repackage their beliefs in even more tenuous ways so they can keep believing them. With the Seekers, the aliens magically intervened thanks to their Seeker faith. Who could check this claim? Well, nobody, and that’s the point.

Festinger explained what happened with the Seekers by formulating what’s called the theory of cognitive dissonance, which many have heard of but may not fully understand. When our minds are occupied with two contradictory but strong beliefs (cult doctrine versus hard evidence, for example), a state of great psychological discomfort and unrest called “cognitive dissonance” arises and becomes an impulse for the subject to resolve that discomfort, which is psychological but can be profound and manifest with physical signs.

There are a few roads to resolving the state of cognitive dissonance, but two stand out. One is to double-down on the cult belief or conspiracy theory, which is called “rationalization,” and the other is to accept the hard facts of reality and repent of your error, which is also psychologically painful.

Under many conditions, the psychological pain of facing reality is far too high for most people to bear, and they will instead rationalize. Perhaps the moral implications of their beliefs and resulting behavior is too high, so they cannot face it. This is easily understood. Imagine you transitioned your child and have to cope with the fact that you've done them irreparable serious harm in the name of “inclusion” so you could feel virtuous. That’s hard to walk back from. This recommitment to the beliefs rather than facing the emotional pain of facing the consequences of your error has been called the “Backfire Effect.”

Festinger observed with the Seekers that their commitment to the cult beliefs was too deep, so they could not overcome it. Instead, they not only came up with a rationalization for what had happened that preserved their beliefs; they also specifically came up with a rationalization no one could check—an unfalsifiable rationalization. No one could know whether or not the immensely high-tech aliens and their UFO came close enough to Earth to stop the flood but without being seen. It had to be taken on the Seekers’ word.

It turns out this phenomenon is common. When a cult’s doctrine gets crushed by a collision with reality, the psychological and social importance of the cult or its beliefs can win out and cause the individuals involved to make their beliefs unfalsifiable instead of letting them go.

The question here is why that commitment is so deep. The answer, when factual embarrassment and moral culpability aren’t the only explanations, is almost always that one’s social milieux and sense of identity get wrapped up in the cult and its beliefs that it’s more important to keep seeing yourself in line with the cult than in line with reality. For many people, there’s simply no going back if being part of the cult is who you are and how you fit in.

So how does someone get so locked into a cult that they’ll deny reality, even at the point of catastrophic falsification of their beliefs?

Being socially locked into a cult is usually its primary hold over people, particularly at first. Eventually this social lock will creep into one’s sense of identity through the processes of psychosocial valuation on the self (answering: how do I fit in as a valued member of a community I esteem, thus who am I in relation to this community and in a more universal sense?). At the point when the cult defines your identity and sense of virtue and worth, you’re deep in, and there’s no easy escape.

This gets worse in ideological, political, and religious cult circumstances, especially rigid and militant ones—like Communism, Fascism, Woke Left, and Woke Right. Part of this is psychosocial, as before, though with a particularly vicious twist. You will be heavily punished both socially and psychologically for any defection both while inside the cult and while attempting to leave it—and you know it. In fact, you have probably participated in that punishment ritual against others by the point of being fully ensconced in such a cult.

In ideological cults, though, there’s an even deeper layer because there’s substantial doctrine that allows you to intellectualize your beliefs in terms that sound true and reasonable. This feature facilitates the rationalization process of deepening cult commitment against exposure or contrary evidence (the “Backfire Effect”). While rationalizing the UFOs through unfalsifiable claims seems risible (from outside the Seekers), the ideology of ideological cults is the cult’s rationalization schema turned into a totalizing worldview. There’s already no escape!

Because the conditions of an ideological, totalizing cult can be so vicious to defectors of any kind, rationalization is the easier road in the case of doubt or encountering contradictory evidence, and most (not some) take it. Millions of people died, property was destroyed, and everything fell apart in a horrible war last time we attempted a mass movement based on your “new” world-changing beliefs? That’s because the people back then did it wrong and didn’t believe it sincerely enough! Obviously. Of course, this belief cannot be falsified.

This is the essential feature Festinger noticed, too. The rationalizations of the Seekers were that the aliens came and, from a safe distance, saw the faith of the Seekers and their righteousness and so intervened to stop the flood. No one could see this happen because it was far out in space and very high tech, and the bad thing the Seekers predicted simply didn’t happen. “Nothing happened” became “evidence” that something happened.

The way it was possible is that the Seekers changed the fulfillment conditions of their beliefs without changing their beliefs. Their new belief structure reaffirmed the cult rather than evidence against the cult’s bogus doctrine.

What Festinger noticed, ultimately, is that when cult beliefs and conspiracy theories encounter hard evidence that they’re wrong, or other exposure, most of the cult’s victims will cling to the cult’s beliefs by rationalizing them in ways that render them unfalsifiable.

While the example of the Seekers is clearly instructive, take the example of the moon landing being “fake and gay,” as some people today phrase it. The equipment from that landing is still mostly on the moon, and it has been observed in multiple ways by orbiters and even from the ground (in the case of the mirror array for laser telemetry).

Confronted with this evidence, deniers will counter that the imagery is all faked, probably by NASA, which is also “fake and gay” and also Satanic, including because the acronym represents something nefarious and evil in secret Hebrew which is probably also in the Talmud but only the one Jews will never let you read without having to kill you if you do…or something. The conspiracy mindset only grows deeper, and the evidence in front of their own eyes gets denied. At every turn, new evidence is just more “evidence” of the alleged conspiracy, and the belief becomes unfalsifiable.

Not incidentally, this is in a way similar to the state called “demoralization” that Yuri Bezmenov warned about with regard to Communist subversion. The “demoralized” person, Bezmenov explains, cannot see or comprehend as real evidence that contradicts his demoralized and propagandized view of the world “until the boot comes crashing down on his balls,” at which point he might still rationalize it away.

This is the ideological equivalent of locked-in syndrome, where someone is fully locked into their minds because their bodies are in every way absolutely frozen and unusable, even though they are fully conscious. Another good way of putting it, especially when the cult belief is a political ideology, is that people in (ideological) cults are ideological prisoners of war. People still wearing their masks alone in cars are Covid ideological POWs, for example. So are most deep conspiracy theorists, though for different belief programs.

You might think this is a dumb-people problem. Not so. Notice that rationalization is an intellectualizing and abstracting process, so higher intelligence isn’t a guard against it but a liability for falling into it. Smarter people can rationalize better. If you find yourself wondering how smart people can fall for this stuff, it’s that they’re still human (thus social) and are in a literal sense too smart for their own good. They're expert rationalizers.

Festinger did not have a particularly optimistic prognosis for this circumstance, and I have to admit for myself that as the internet and social media in particular have exploded cult recruitment and expansion (including conspiracy theories), that it's hard to be optimistic about our psychosocial environment under the circumstances we've built for ourselves.

There’s genuinely only one antidote: exposure to reality until the victim of the cult begins to see it for themselves. Something has to become undeniably out of alignment with the cult’s views, and the cults failures and manipulations have to become visible. Only then can the process of escape begin.

This process can take months or years, though, and it will almost never be from a sudden change of mind. The process of leaving a cult is literally called “deprogramming” for a reason.

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