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On the night of 21 December 1954, in a suburb of Chicago, a small group of people sat together and waited for the end of the world. They had good reason to believe in it. For months their leader, a housewife named Dorothy Martin, had been receiving messages from higher beings on the planet Clarion, who guided her hand through automatic writing. The messages were unambiguous. Before daybreak a great flood would swallow large parts of the Earth. Shortly before midnight, though, a spacecraft would come and carry the faithful to safety.
Some of them had given up everything for this. They had quit their jobs, spent their savings, given away their possessions. One man had left behind a wife who wouldn’t come with him. That night they sat together and prepared to be collected. On the beings’ instructions they removed everything metal from their bodies, zippers, bra clasps, the eyelets from their shoes, so there would be no trouble aboard.
Then it was midnight, and nothing happened. The clock on the wall read five past twelve, still no visitor. Someone noticed that a second clock in the room was running a little behind, perhaps that one was right. They agreed that it was in fact only just before midnight, and went on waiting. The minutes stretched. At two, at three, at four o’clock the group was still sitting there, cold and silent, trying to grasp why the world wasn’t ending and the spacecraft wasn’t coming.
Around a quarter to five, Dorothy Martin reached for pen and paper again. This time the message was: the little group had radiated so much light and faith that night that God had spared the world. The flood’s failure to arrive was, to them, no sign that they had been mistaken. It was proof that their faith had worked. The catastrophe that didn’t come became confirmation that they had been right all along.
And then something happened that you’d least expect. The group, which until then had been careful to keep to itself and had turned reporters away, suddenly went public. They phoned newspapers, gave interviews, wanted to spread their message now with all their strength. The more plainly the prediction had failed, the more eagerly they proselytised.
Three Who Didn’t Believe in Clarion
Among the faithful in that living room sat three people who didn’t believe a word about Clarion. The social psychologist Leon Festinger and two colleagues had infiltrated the group weeks earlier, disguised as ordinary followers. They weren’t there to be saved. They wanted to watch, up close, what happens to a conviction when reality contradicts it beyond any doubt.
Festinger had predicted how the evening would go, right down to the burst of proselytising. He expected the followers to cling to their belief more tightly after the failure rather than let it drop. Behind this lay an idea he soon developed into the theory of cognitive dissonance, one of the most consequential in twentieth-century psychology. It describes the uncomfortable tension that arises when two things we hold to be true don’t fit together. I have staked my whole life on this prophecy. And the prophecy was wrong. Holding those two thoughts side by side is almost unbearable.
There would be a simple way to resolve the tension: admit the error and give up the belief. But that is exactly what people do least often, especially when they’ve invested a great deal. Giving up the belief would mean admitting you handed over your job, your money, your marriage for nothing. That realisation is even harder to bear than the disproven prophecy itself. So the other route remains. You leave the conviction standing and bend reality until the two fit again. The flood stayed away because faith averted it, and the picture clicks back into place.
A Dollar for a Small Lie
You could take this for the aberration of fanatics, something that has nothing to do with your own level-headed mind. A few years later Festinger showed, with a plain little experiment, that the same mechanism runs in perfectly ordinary heads.
He had students spend an hour on an excruciatingly boring task. Loading wooden spools into a tray, emptying it, filling it again. Then a row of pegs on a board, each to be given a quarter turn, then another, on and on. When the hour was up, the experimenter asked them for a favour. The next participant was sitting in the waiting room, and ought to hear from them how interesting and enjoyable the task had been. For this small lie, half the students were paid one dollar, the other half twenty. Both groups then went out and talked the task up to the waiting person, one set for a dollar, the other for twenty. So everyone lied.
Only afterwards, one-on-one, did the experimenter ask each of them something else: how much they had really enjoyed the task. This was no longer about the performance for the next person, now what counted was their own honest assessment. And here came the surprise. Those who had been paid twenty dollars freely admitted the task had been dull. Those who had been paid only one dollar suddenly found it rather pleasant.
The reason is the same tension as with the Seekers. I just claimed that was exciting, and in truth it was deadly boring. Anyone with twenty dollars in their pocket could dissolve the tension easily, because twenty dollars was real money then and justification enough: I fibbed for the pay, done. A single dollar couldn’t carry that weight. It was too little to explain the lie. So all that remained was to touch up the memory. The task wasn’t really so bad. Looked at properly, it even had something going for it.
The point is an uncomfortable one. We like to believe our convictions steer our actions. Often it runs the other way. We act first, and then we assemble the conviction that best fits. The less reason we had for an action, the more firmly we have to believe in it afterwards for the books to balance.
How far this can go is shown by a quite different line of research. In some people with severe epilepsy, the corpus callosum used to be severed, the thick bridge of nerves through which the two hemispheres talk to each other. Afterwards the halves work largely apart, and only the left one can speak. The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga showed the right, mute hemisphere of a patient a snow scene, and the left, speaking one a chicken claw. With his left hand the man then reached for a shovel, with his right for a chicken, each fitting the image it had been shown. When Gazzaniga asked why he’d taken the shovel, the honest answer would have had to be: I don’t know, the half that decided it can’t speak. But the man replied without hesitation that you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed. The speaking half knew nothing of the snow, and on the spot it invented a reason that fit what it could see, and believed it completely.
This part, which keeps supplying reasons for our own behaviour without knowing its true cause, Gazzaniga called the interpreter. None of us has a severed callosum, and still this interpreter runs the whole time. The explanations it hands us often arrive only after we’ve already acted, and they feel like the real motives, because the place where the decision was actually made stays closed to us.
Your Own Quiet Reinterpretation
Once you start watching for it, you find the mechanism everywhere in your own life. You know perfectly well that smoking harms you, and still you catch yourself how readily the reasons arrive, why the one after dinner is fine after all, your own grandfather having smoked well into old age. You stay in a relationship you’ve put so much into that drawing a line would feel like admitting all those years were wasted. You’ve spent a lot of money on something and then discover one virtue after another in it, while the alternatives you were seriously weighing beforehand barely get a second glance.
It’s clearest with whatever you had to work hardest for. What we fight to obtain, a difficult admission, a gruelling course of training, a circle you only get into with effort, we upgrade afterwards. The effort wants justifying. If the thing had only been mediocre, the trouble wouldn’t have been worth it, and no one likes to think that of themselves. So it must have been wonderful.
And we often defend most stubbornly the very positions where we were furthest off the mark. The more embarrassing the error, the greater the tension, and the more tempting the reinterpretation that turns it into something else. The open admission costs more than most are willing to pay.
One Last Twist
There’s a coda to this story, and it’s almost too fitting. Recent historical work has gone back through the original notes and suggests it didn’t unfold nearly as cleanly as the famous book tells it. The group seems to have fallen apart after the flood failed to come rather than proselytised, and Dorothy Martin in the end did recant. The researchers had walked into that living room with a firm expectation, and it may well have coloured what they believed they saw. This doesn’t make cognitive dissonance a figment, it can be demonstrated in the lab thousands of times over. But there’s a quiet irony in it: a theory about how hard we find it to part with a cherished conviction may itself have been kept in shape by researchers reluctant to let go of their cherished thesis. The mechanism stops for no one, not even for those who describe it.
That’s the most uncomfortable part of all. We almost never notice the reinterpretation in our own heads. From the inside it doesn’t feel like dodging, it feels like insight. The reasons we work out for ourselves strike us as the truth, because we wrote them ourselves.
Before the Reasons Arrive
The reinterpretation almost always runs afterwards, once the decision has long been made and nothing about it can be changed. That’s exactly why knowing about it helps so little in hindsight. It becomes useful at a single point, the moment before, while you can still choose. Watch what your head does then. If you start gathering reasons why you should do something, and the list grows the longer you think, that’s often already the answer. What truly fits you rarely needs much justifying, it simply suggests itself. The eager collecting of arguments is frequently dissonance at work, only in advance. One part of you has long decided, and the other is building the justification to match. The same the other way round: if you find yourself mainly hunting for objections, for risks and the bad timing, then part of you often wants the thing already, and the rest is fending it off to be safe.
The rule of thumb tips over at one point, and it’s worth knowing where. Sometimes you laboriously talk yourself into something hard but right, quitting, or walking away from something that isn’t good for you, and then the reasons you’re reaching for aren’t avoidance, more like a run-up. The difference lies in the feeling the reasons are trying to drown out. If you’re marshalling arguments to talk down a quiet relief, the honest answer is usually already there, and it’s: better not. If you’re marshalling them to talk down a quiet fear, then underneath the fear is often exactly what you want.
An exercise for the coming week
Pick a decision you’ve defended recently, ideally one where you get a little too fast or a little too heated when someone pokes at it. That heat is a good sign that there’s tension sitting underneath.
Then take twenty minutes and write down the strongest counter-argument you can manage, as if you had to convince someone who holds the exact opposite to be right. The point isn’t to flip your opinion. The point is to feel where it starts to get uncomfortable.
At some point you’ll probably hit the moment where you want to put the pen down and quickly think about something else. That moment is the interesting one. That’s where what you invested is sitting, the effort, the money, the time, the part of your self-image that hangs on the decision. You don’t have to change anything there. It’s enough to know the spot exists, and that the good reasons that otherwise come to you so readily sometimes only took shape after the decision had long been made.
