3.
During the war, a young statistician named Leon Festinger worked on a project for the Army Air Forces. His job was to devise better ways of selecting people for pilot training, which sounds like a dry academic exercise—until you remember how dire things were for the Air Forces in the long months of 1943. Festinger’s job was essentially to figure out which young men should be sent to what—statistically speaking—was an almost certain death.
Leon Festinger went on to become one of the most famous social psychologists in the country. And I’ve always wondered whether his experience with the Air Forces was the motivation after the war for his most famous study, an analysis of a cult out of Chicago called the Seekers. Festinger approached the Seekers with a question that must have crossed his mind years before, during that dire period when everything the Bomber Mafia believed in was proved false: What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?
As Festinger recalled, “The idea that you have to supply cognition that will fit with—that will justify—what you feel or what you do made this immediately the first thing we thought of: well, if this operates, it must be a very pervasive thing.”
The leader of the Seekers was a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed to be in contact with a group of aliens she called the Guardians. The Guardians told her, she said, that the world was going to be destroyed by flood on December 21, 1954. But a few days before the apocalypse happened, she and her followers would be rescued by a flying saucer. It would land in her backyard. In preparation for this moment, the Seekers quit their jobs, left their families, and gave away their possessions. They gathered in Dorothy Martin’s house, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. At first, Martin said, the flying saucer was supposed to arrive at four o’clock on December 17. The aliens didn’t come. Then at midnight, Martin said she’d received a new message that the flying saucer was on its way. It never arrived. Then she said the aliens had given her a new date: midnight on December 21—just before the apocalypse. So the Seekers gathered again in Martin’s living room and waited. And waited.
As Festinger recalled, “We were reasonably sure that their prediction was not going to be borne out. And so there we had a group of people who were committed to a certain prediction, and they were indeed committed. People had quit jobs, sold things. They were preparing for a cataclysm, for their personal salvation.”
It’s worth quoting from the opening pages of When Prophecy Fails, Festinger’s account of that final night at Dorothy Martin’s house:
Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen?
Festinger and two colleagues asked Dorothy Martin if they could observe the Seekers as they waited. Festinger describes, moment by moment, what happened:
When the…clock on the mantel showed only one minute remaining before the saucer was due, [Dorothy Martin] exclaimed in a strained, high-pitched voice: “And not a plan has gone astray!” The clock chimed twelve, each stroke painfully clear in the expectant hush. The believers sat motionless.
One might have expected some visible reaction. Midnight had passed and nothing had happened…But there was little to see in the reactions of the people in that room. There was no talking, no sound. People sat stock still, their faces seemingly frozen and expressionless.
The Seekers stayed rooted in their seats for hours, slowly coming to terms with the fact that no visitor from outer space would be coming to their rescue. But did “disconfirmation” of their belief cause them all to abandon it? No. At 4:45 that morning, Martin announced that she had gotten another message. Because of the unwavering faith of the Seekers, she said, God had called off the destruction of the world.
What did Festinger make of all this? The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.
As Festinger recalled in an oral history, “One of the things we expected would happen would be that, after the disconfirmation of this prediction…they would…have to discard their belief, but to the extent that they were committed to it, this would be difficult to do.”
Back to the disaster of the Schweinfurt raids and the long discouraging summer and fall of 1943. Did those events lead Haywood Hansell and the Bomber Mafia to give up? Of course not. Here is what Hansell wrote to Ira Eaker after the first attack on Schweinfurt, on August 17: “I need not say how tremendously proud I was of the Regensburg-Schweinfurt operation. In spite of the very heavy losses, I believe it was completely justified and represents one of the turning points of the war.”