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On 21 December 1955, a group of people called the Seekers gathered in a Chicago house awaiting the end of the world, believing a UFO was on its way to rescue them from Armageddon.

Neither the end of the world or the alien mercy mission occurred.

Unbeknownst to the Seekers, one of their members was in fact the renowned psychologist, Leon Festinger, intent on studying what happens when someone’s beliefs are challenged by new and overwhelming contradictory information.



He found that instead of accepting they were wrong in the face of an alternative reality, they actually increased their efforts to recruit members and scheduled another apocalypse for the next year. These were the result of an effect he termed “cognitive dissonance”, dissonance that arises when facts counter your beliefs.

On 21 December 1955, a group of people called the Seekers gathered in a Chicago house awaiting the end of the world, believing a UFO was on its way to rescue them from Armageddon.

Wheeler went to jail and into the annals of the world’s dumbest criminals. It was such a feature, in the 1996 World Almanac, that brought Wheeler’s story to the attention of David Dunning, a Cornell psychology professor. He saw in this tale of dim-witted woe something universal. Those most lacking in knowledge and skills are least able to appreciate that lack. This observation would eventually become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect