Doomsday Cults?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In the late fifties, leon festinger and two colleagues infiltrated a doomsday cult in which a woman whom called marian keach predicted that the world would end on december 20 first of that year. Now what they found was, so when they joined the group, they were pretending to, pretendingto be believers, pretending to be believers. So there were several people, there were many people, who believed the world was going to come to an end. You could sit quietly in your house and wait for the world to end, or you could proselytize. All right? Mustn't invent orat what's the matter with you? All right?

For the first full episode of Mindscape, it's an honor to welcome social psychologist Carol Tavris. Her book with co-author Eliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), explores the effect that cognitive dissonance has on how we think. We talk about the fascinating process by which people justify the mistakes that they make, and how that leads to everything from false memories to political polarization. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/carol-tavris.mp3" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Carol Tavris received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan. She is the author of numerous books, covering topics such as gender, biology, and emotion, and is a frequent contributor to a variety of newspapers and magazines. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Carol Tavris on Wikipedia Social Psychology Network profile Amazon.com author page A lecture on "Dissent and Dissonance: The Science and Art of Argument." Download Episode See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.