GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – When Belief Conflicts With Fact

Take, for example, what happens to doomsday cults when the world doesn’t actually end.

The classic text on this subject is “When Prophecy Fails”, a 1956 book by three University of Minnesota psychologists — Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter — who “joined” such a cult in order to study its members.

This group believed in a mash-up between Christianity and UFO conspiracy theory: The two leaders claimed to be receiving secret messages from aliens, one of which had “revealed itself … as the current embodiment of Jesus.”

Eventually, the leaders said that the Jesus-alien had warned them of a great flood that would destroy Earth and everyone on it — except for the members of this group, who would be spared.

There was a particular time and day that the flood was supposed to happen, and this time came and went.

Nothing, as you might’ve guessed, happened, and so the three undercover psychologists got to watch the cult members’ reactions.

At first everyone was stunned; one of the leaders openly wept. But things began to turn around when the leader the researchers referred to as Mrs. Keech alerted the group to another message she’d received from the aliens: Because of the faith of this little group, the world would be spared!

This resulted in a blitz of proselytizing with the group members “more convinced than ever that their beliefs were correct and thus avoiding the embarrassment of admitting they were wrong.

I suspect something similar will have to happen with Trump and his followers.

He (and they) will have to keep talking about voter fraud as the reason for his losing the election… even as he leaves the White House for the last time .