When Prophecy Fails

And in the book, you talk about a famous cult that contributed to the development of my model, the Byte model.

You talk about Leon Festinger's work, When Prophecy Fails, about a UFO cult.

And it was that cognitive dissonance theory that formed the basis for my BITE model.

Thoughts, feelings, behaviors, people want to align.

And through the day, we rotate through a bunch of these.

Now, if you're very...

One of the things that... any immersive group does culture the most extreme case but they cut you off from other sources of your identity your family your friends your job and so they become the only identity that gets triggered and activated in your mind in every day and then they become a stronger and stronger part of your your identity and this reminds me of like one of the the key things that predicted um In the book, When Prophecy Fails, whether people persisted to proselytize about the cult after the alien ship never came and their prophecy was proven false, there was a bunch of conditions.

But the two big ones that stuck to me that I think really hold is how extreme they were in their commitment to the belief system and the cult.

Mm-hmm.

Um, there's a great sociological paper called, um, When Prophecy Fails, about what happens to members of a cult when the cult leader's prophecy doesn't come true.

You know, the world doesn't end.

Do they renounce the faith? No.