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When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World

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This work first saw print in 1956. It is the story of a UFO cult in a large city in the Midwest...how it developed, how the leaders recruited followers, how predictions about the coming end of the world started flowing from the psychic members who allegedly channeled messages from the spacemen/pilots. The cult members were told they would be saved, picked up by saucers on an appointed date. The members quit jobs, sold possessions, and gathered, only to be disappointed. Did they all quit in a huff? No way. The first failure only made them more determined they were right, more anxious to be ready for the next announced departure date. Then a second failure. A few members fell away, a few suffered doubts, a few challenged for leadership themselves. The point of this book is that it takes "three disconfirmations" to kill a movement of true believers, and even then, some still hang on to the discredited "theology" by grasping at excuses. I found this book by accident about 30 years ago, and have read it at least four times. I find it fascinating. In the 1970's I knew two women in Albuquerque who were amateur psychics. They started bringing forth "space brethren messages" and eventually, although they failed to attract a following, they went up into the nearby mountains one night sure they would be lifted off before the coming unspecified disaster. They waited, but no ship appeared. I think people inclined toward UFO beliefs haven't changed much since this book was published. The basic data shown in this study can apply to religious or political groups as well. I am sorry it is out of print, but if you have an interest in this field, get a used copy...the prices are reasonable and the book will not disappoint!

It's fascinating what we humans can make ourselves believe! And frequently hilarious, too!

This is partly a study of how followers of cult movements can paradoxically become more committed even when the central tenet has been disproven. The first few chapters are fairly dry, but they move quickly and are very interesting, especially since the hypothesis is so counterintuitive.

Things really pick up once they get into the day-to-day details of the flying saucer group they've infiltrated. The group goes to extremes of self-deception to keep believing (and they want to believe so badly) that "the boys upstairs" (ie, flying saucer people) are in contact with them. The dry, scholarly tone reads as subtle dry humor when describing, for example, a woman in a suburban living room bellowing "I AM THE CREATOR" (she is supposedly "channeling" the Creator) and then complaining about the chair she is forced to sit in. I didn't expect this book to be laugh-out-loud funny but it certainly was in places.

For anyone interested in the psychology and group dynamics of millenarian/prophetic groups, this book is essential reading. Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s the authors stumbled upon and infiltrated a group based on a prediction of imminent world destruction. When the prediction failed (after all, we are all still here in the late 1990s), the group underwent a severe crisis. This study details how that crisis developed and was resolved, drawing from it some general ideas about how groups based on prophecies survive the failure of those prophecies.

I recently borrowed "When Prophecy Fails" from my psychology proffesor. I have been interested in the theory of cognitive dissonance since I first came across it in my general psychology text book, and was thrilled at the opportunity to read the source of it all.

The book is an easy read; at times it feels more like a novel than a psychological study. After the initial first few chapters of background information, it falls into an easy description of Marian Keech and her fellow Seekers. Festinger and his co-authors do a fine job of illustrating Mrs. Keech's ideology and the history of her doomsday prophecies. The description of the group members on the days leading up to and after the predicted cataclysm is very detailed.

However, this high amount of detail is also what makes me hesitant about truly endorsing this book as an ethical psychological study. Festinger & co. gave ample enough hints at the location and press coverage of the group that confidentiality cannot have been preserved. Just a few minutes with google provided me with the real identities of the cult members described in the book. Though I think the study may have been conducted before the APA created the ethical guidelines, I still found myself somewhat horrified by the looseness of the confidentiality. While "When Prophecy Fails" is an interesting read, it does very little to scientifically prove its hypothesis in a way that could not have been done in a less damaging way. Though my searches seemed to indicate that Mrs. Keech and her fellow believers moved on, I still feel a great deal of pity for the woman and her comrades. Even though their beliefs were absurd, did they really deserve to be so cruelly tricked? I am not sure about this. And so I am not sure that the means justifies the end in this particular landmark study.

Nevertheless, the book is certainly a must-read for anyone who is interested in landmark studies and the history of psychology.

This book is one of the most difficult books to find in Spain so I'm very happy for having it.

Leon Festinger et. al. promise their study will shed light on the mysterious psychological forces which drive people to commit to millenarian groups of various kinds, especially the end-of-the-world movements within Christianity. But in the end they shift their explanation to the side issue of why such cult members delay proselytizing until after their prophecies have failed. The fundamental question of why such cult members become committed to their peculiar prophecies in the first place, is simply avoided. The result is a book that is mildly interesting, but ultimately disappointing.

Festinger's project is to use his theory of "cognitive dissonance" to explain the behavior of members of millenarian cults. What is "cognitive dissonance"? Think of it as a denial of the sort of hard-nosed literalism which drives some psychologists to become behaviorists. Behaviorist believes there always is a fact of the matter and a theory is true only if it corresponds to such a fact. The rat has learned to turn left in the T-maze if it in fact finds Purena rat chow down the left run of the maze. Festinger says this does not work for explanations of human action. Our beliefs are true (or at least justified) only if they are part of a larger set which is "coherent". Thus, finding whether our beliefs cohere with those of others raises their level of coherence to ourselves as well, because the larger the intelligible set, the greater the "consonance" of the members of the set. Our process of justifying our beliefs by locating them in a larger set of consonance beliefs, enables Festinger to explain many puzzling behaviors. For example, if we join a group with a high cost of entry, we will raise what we judge our membership to be worth in order to retain our view of ourselves as "non-dissonant."

The problem with this drive to maintain our status as consistent is that we can create excuses for why our specific beliefs fail to correspond to fact. For example, the flying saucer cult Festinger studied made an excuse for the failure of the predicted catastrophe to occur. They claimed the group had spread so much "light" that God had decided to spare the world the trials he would otherwise have inflicted on it. It is unclear how any set of facts could defeat a belief which can be defended in so free-wheeling a way.

The great mystery to me is why people are attracted to end-of-the world prophecies in the first place. Sure they proselytize after dis-confirmation in an effort to boost the "consonance" of their beliefs. But what drew them to such odd beliefs to begin with?

All the members of the flying saucer cult were familiar with altered states of consciousness, and with expressions such states enable such as automatic writing and seances. The main leader of the group, named (pseudonymously) Marian Keech, got all her "information" about the spacemen and their leader, Sananda (who was also Jesus Christ), by means of automatic writing. Another group member, Bertha Blatsky, claimed to be able to "channel" the "Creator", i.e., God himself. Since God trumped Christ in the order of being Bertha was able to wrest leadership away from Marian Keech for a while. A third medium named Ella Lowell channeled a spiritual agent named "Dr. Browning", who was the "seventeenth chair of the seventh density." (I have no idea what that means, and Festinger leaves it unexplained. See p. 106.) Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a physician who administered a student health service at a nearby university, was almost as influential as Marian Keech in the group. He was not himself a medium, but he gave great weight to the deliverances of other mediums, including Ella Lowell, and brought Ella Lowell's revelations to the attention of the group.

I do not deny phenomena like automatic writing exists. (C.G. Jung gives examples of his own ability in this area in his book, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections.") (In 31 years of teaching, I saw one example among my students. A woman whose son had died in an accident would suddenly have her handwriting change in form, and spell out messages from a "spirit guide" who assured her the son was all right in the hereafter. But I know no one who would take such odd psychic phenomena as a source of information about the physical world, such as whether the Midwest would soon split open between Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico, and flood Chicago. That is the prediction the flying saucer group anticipated would occur on December 21 of the year described in the book. This evidence shows that unlike myself, some people do. But why do some people surrender the regularities of the commonsense world for wild predictions originating in the spirit realm? Festinger explains why such persons begin proselyting after their prophecies fail. But he says nothing about why such crazy beliefs arise in the first place. That is why I was finally so dissatisfied with his book.

I am flabbergasted that so few have (so far) seen the relevance of Festinger's and his colleagues' theories to what is going on in the US today. We have "disconfirmation" after "disconfirmation" of almost everything that is supposed to be competent and decent about the current administration, yet its followers continue to deny its incompetence, its lies , its corruption and graft, and to believe its pseudo-religious, pseudo-patriotic puffery about its methods and motives.

This book is well worth reading to help people put the followers of the radio and television opinion-manipulators such as Limbaugh and O'Reilly (whose own behavior offers PERSONAL disconfirmations of the very ethics they preach) into some kind of context.

The people who continue to believe seem to be grasping at straws in order avoid facing the truth, yet their voices as "true believers" become increasingly strident. It seems to me that we are WAY beyond three disconfirmations, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. (What will it take to make these people finally see the light re the way they were duped and betrayed by the very people they trusted to lead them)?

Even though the number of his followers seems to be decreasing rapidly, the people who still believe in Bush have upped their proselytizing (as would have been predicted by Festinger et al), and we see the evidence of their misguided zeal every day. They are even more shrill and more willing to destroy the careers of decent people than they were at the point they merely dreamed of having power. They are overlooking the real evidence of malfeasance, of incompetence, of outright lying, and refusing to face the facts (in fact, they continue to try to destroy the reputations of scientists and of facts).

I, too, wish that this book could be reprinted with a new preface by some noted social psychologists who could place it in its new increasingly important, increasingly dangerous context.

In this book, Festinger, et. al., set forth the cognitive dissonance model, which helps any of us to observe the unfolding human drama with greater understanding. It compares with Julian Janes' masterpiece, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as a work in which the reader is urged on by the awakening suspicion that perhaps on the next page, just beyond the horizon of comprehension, lies a unifying theory that will lay to rest the most vexing enigmas.

On this note, Festinger came through, by observing social cultism in action and identifying its dynamic elements and tracing them to the common human condition. But he doesn't scrawl arcane formulae or speak in academic tongues to reach his readers. He simply explains in very simple, concise language why his very human subjects behave in such bizarre, but predictable, ways. His conclusions may be summed in a few sentences, derived from a very entertaining account of a UFO cult of his time, which is identical in form and content with the many varieties of social cultism running rampant today, especially the 12-step recovery group movement that, during the half decade since this book's publication, has silently possessed our social service system.

Festinger's cult-founding protagonist, Marion Kreech, may be constructively compared to AA founder, Bill Wilson, but her bizarre message did not find the mass appeal that surrounds AA. Moreover, the disconfirmations of her improbable predictions did not have the resounding support of others of greater accumulated credibility, who ironically now include Festinger's own descendents in the social sciences who endorse the disease concept of addiction and require 12-step indoctrination for its remission.

Interestingly, Festinger inserts a cameo-like discussion of Joseph McCarthy's ultimate failure, which in the cognitive dissonance model, resulted from his accusations of persons of greater credibiilty. It seems quite likely that AA's day in the sun will end when its prophets attack the character of famous "dry drunks" for whom the public has greater esteem than our de facto state religion, Alcoholics Anonymous.

My last biased comments are an example of how Festinger's work may fit into anyone's subjective experience, to simply illuminate why people do the damndest things.