Leon Festinger

And the second point I wanted to talk about is I think where the psychology gets really fascinating.

So back in the 1950s, there was a psychologist called Leon Festinger, and he developed something called social comparison theory.

So essentially, the idea is that we often evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves with other people.

And we're particularly likely to compare ourselves with people who we see as similar to us.

And in that, it could be ripping down your identity, your degree, your job.

And so there was a psychologist called Leon Festinger that coined a term called cognitive dissonance, which even hearing the term helped me understand myself and my feelings, which is the discomfort you feel when something sort of threatens or conflicts with what you know.

The whole world is experiencing this right now.

Yep.

If MAGA goes down, they go down forever.

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult in Chicago to study what happens to true believers when everything falls apart.

The cult he joined believed the world would end on a specific date.

Members quit their jobs, gave away all their possessions.

because it tells us just how far that our minds will go to protect us from admitting something uncomfortable in our cognitive dissonance between what we think and what we do or say.

Back in 1959, yeah, a long time ago, psychologists Leon Festinger and James Carl Smith conducted an experiment involving college students.

There was a boring task, and there was a little bit of money involved here, too.

What they discovered helped explain why people sometimes change what they believe simply to justify something that they've already done.

And our brains have evolved to do exactly this.

So back in the, I think it was the early to mid 50s, there was this famous social psychologist, Leon Festinger, and he put forward a hypothesis around social comparison theory.

And the basic idea was pretty simple.

He basically said that human beings have a built-in drive to evaluate themselves.

And when we fall short of kind of the standards that others create for us, we don't feel great about ourselves.

And I think Festinger created this framework kind of social comparison theory more than 70 years ago.

And I think it's still very kind of influential within psychology and other fields, it definitely shapes our interactions.

Think about all the ranking lists we consume all the time, right? From kind of Fortune 500 to the best cities to live in and the best companies to work for.

Three generations of ruined pot roast ends because nobody stopped to ask.

Is our pan still too small? Why don't we ask? Because of a psychological mechanism discovered by Leon Festinger in 1957 called cognitive dissonance.

You see, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort you feel when you hold two contradictory beliefs or when new evidence directly clashes with an old inherited rule.

Our brain hates this discomfort.

But to understand what we're going to read next as we continue, I need to take you back to this study back in 1954.

And it's from this psychologist from Stanford University named Leon Festinger.

And he studied the members of an apocalyptic cult who believed the world was about to end in a cataclysmic flood.

And this message was delivered to them by aliens.