Buying In - (Page 47) buying in 47 is compelling is the changed nature of the way that Keech interacted with the rest of the world: For the first time, she called the press. In fact, she ha all her followers calling the press now, too. Faced with what to most of us would seem like indisputable evidence that they were completely wrong, they had the exact opposite reaction: They insisted they were right. They were no longer content to keep their important insight to themselves. They told everyone they could. They became evangelistic. All of this was studied very closely, and in real time, by social psychologist Leon Festinger. He had, in fact, predicted that this was what Keech and her followers would do. Essentially, they had invented on a nonconscious level, a rationale for their behavior that justified it despite clearly contradictory evidence—much the way a smoker who knows cigarettes are dangerous invents rationales for having another one just the same. Festinger labeled this phenomenon “cognitive dissonance.” Moreover, his argument was that Keech and her followers did not become more publicly insistent that they were right despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but because of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. “If more converts could be found, then the dissonance between their belief and th knowledge that the prediction hadn’t been correct could be reduced,” Festinger wrote. Elliot Aronson, another social psychologist, built on Festinger’s work in arguing that we regularly adjust our beliefs to make sense of the facts in a way that allows us to tell ourselves, “I am nice and in control.” In his book The Mind’s Past, Dartmouth professor Michael S. Gazzaniga surveys these insights, adds findings from his field of neuroscience, and introduces a useful concept: “the interpreter.”
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