Remembrance of Apocalypse Past: The Psychology of True Believers When Nothing Happens - CSI

So depending on which kind of nut you follow, the end of the world is once again upon us.  Like the numerous predictions of doom prior, I expect this one to fall by the wayside as well. 

As is fairly obvious by now, the much-heralded end of the world in 2012 didn’t happen. Quetzalcoatl didn’t return on his raft of snakes. The earth was not torn asunder. Alien overlords did not materialize. It didn’t even rain very much that week.

We were privileged to publish an article in the Skeptical Inquirer last year (Sharps et al. 2013) concerning the psychological factors that made it possible for modern human beings, even with modern access to scientific information, to believe in this type of baseless nonsense. We found that disturbingly high numbers of university students either believed in or entertained the likelihood of the “Mayan end of the world.” We found curious incoherencies in their patterns of belief: for example, many believers in the Maya “prophecies” did not believe in what those prophecies predicted. The idea expressed is completely illogical, but this illogical incoherency was in the minds of a great many people who were attempting to think about the 2012 apocalypse before it didn’t happen. Whether the believers expected world peace and a new age, or world destruction and apocalyptic doom, logical inconsistency was very commonly observed.

This type of incoherency didn’t die with the nonexistent apocalypse; it’s still there, ready and waiting, in the minds of enormous numbers of True Believers.

Remembrance of Apocalypse Past: The Psychology of True Believers When Nothing Happens - CSI