When Prophecy Fails, Hardcover

Description

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book. Festinger and his associates read a story in their local newspaper headlined "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood." The prophecy came from Dorothy Martin (1900-1992), a Chicago housewife who experimented with automatic writing. (In order to protect her privacy, the study gave her the alias of "Marian Keech" and relocated her group to Michigan.) She had previously been involved with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics movement, and she incorporated ideas from what later became Scientology. The group of believers, headed by Keech, had taken strong actions to indicate their degree of commitment to the belief. They had left jobs, college, and spouses, and had given away money and possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer which was to rescue the group of true believers. She claimed to have received a message from a fictional planet named Clarion. These messages revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21, 1954. After the failure of the prediction, she left Chicago after being threatened with arrest and involuntary commitment. She later founded the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Under the name Sister Thedra, she continued to practice channeling and to participate in contactee groups until her death in 1992. The Association is active to this day. Festinger and his colleagues saw this as a case that would lead to the arousal of dissonance when the prophecy failed. Altering the belief would be difficult, as Keech and her group were committed at considerable expense to maintain it. Another option would be to enlist social support for their belief. As Festinger wrote, "If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct." In this case, if Keech could add consonant elements by converting others to the basic premise, then the magnitude of her dissonance following disconfirmation would be reduced. Festinger and his colleagues predicted that the inevitable disconfirmation would be followed by an enthusiastic effort at proselytizing to seek social support and lessen the pain of disconfirmation. Festinger stated that five conditions must be present if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation: A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual's commitment to the belief. The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief. Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief. The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

About the author

Leon Festinger (1919 - 1989) was an American social psychologist, perhaps best known for cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. His theories and research are credited with renouncing the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he perhaps most famously practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect (or propinquity). Festinger was the fifth most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Henry W. Riecken Jr. (1917-2012) received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1950, having studied in the Department of Social Relations, which enjoyed a well-known relationship with the Department of Psychology. A thought leader, and a follower and booster of interesting thoughts (more prescience), Riecken was the first director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Office of Social Sciences (later called a division) in 1959. As vice president and then president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1966 to 1971, Hank led the development of the first state-of-the-art monograph on randomized controlled trials in the United States. Riecken was a member of the first Director's Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Medicine in 1969 (one of two social scientists) and, as a founding member, assisted in the challenging effort to create the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1971. Stanley Schachter (1922 - 1997) was an American social psychologist, who is perhaps best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal. Schachter also studied and published a large number of works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. Schachter was the seventh most cited psychologist of the 20th century.