WHEN
PROPHECY FAILS
A Social and Psychological Study
of a Modern Group that Predicted
the Destruction of the World
BY
Leon Festinger
Henry W. Riecken AND Stanley Schachter
©2014 Wilder Publications
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.
ISBN: 978-1-63384-275-5
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Table of Contents
Chapter I: Unfulfilled Prophecies and Disappointed Messiahs
Chapter II: Teachings and Prophecies from Outer Space
Chapter III: Spreading the Word on Earth
Chapter IV: The Long Wait for Orders
Chapter V: Four Days of Very Imminent Salvation
Chapter VI: An Unfulfilled Prophecy and an Elated Prophet
Chapter VII: Reactions to Disconfirmation
Chapter VIII: Alone and Dry
Epilogue
Methodological Appendix
Notes to Chapter I
Foreword
The study reported in this volume grew out of some theoretical work, one phase of which bore specifically on the behavior of individuals in social movements that made specific (and unfulfilled) prophecies. We had been forced to depend chiefly on historical records to judge the adequacy of our theoretical ideas until we by chance discovered the social movement that we report in this book. At the time we learned of it, the movement was in mid-career but the prophecy about which it was centered had not yet been disconfirmed. We were understandably eager to undertake a study that could test our theoretical ideas under natural conditions.
That we were able to do this study was in great measure due to the support obtained through the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations of the University of Minnesota. This study is a project of the Laboratory and was carried out while we were all members of its staff. We should also like to acknowledge the help we received through a grant-in-aid from the Ford Foundation to one of the authors, a grant that made preliminary exploration of the field situation possible.
A number of individuals also contributed importantly to the success of the field study. Our chief debt of personal gratitude is to the participant observers who bore the brunt of the day-to-day work: Doris Bosted, Elizabeth Williams Nall, Frank Nall, Marsh Ray, and Donald Salzman. We regret that we cannot here give them credit for their individual deeds of ingenuity, endurance, and self-sacrifice, since our attempt to disguise the persons, places, and times in our narrative makes it desirable to conceal who did what and where.
Dr. John G. Darley, director of the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations, deserves our gratitude for his logistic support. While we were entangled in the innumerable problems of data collection, dashing off at frequent intervals to attend meetings of the movement or to supervise the work of the observers, he kept a cool head and brought order out of the administrative chaos we dumped on his desk.
Finally, we want to acknowledge the insightful criticisms of the manuscript we received from Gardner Lindzey, Seymour M. Lipset, and Pauline S. Sears. Their many helpful suggestions are reflected in the final draft.
All the persons and places we mention have been given fictitious names and any resemblance between these names and those of actual people anywhere is unintentional. We have not changed the essential nature of any of the events we report, but by the disguises employed we have tried to protect the actual people involved in the movement from the curiosity of an unsympathetic reader.
The publication of a collaborative work sometimes raises questions among readers about what share of the credit (or blame) should be given to each author. We all contributed equally to the study and have tried to avoid the problem of seniority of authorship by arraying our names on the title page alphabetically.
LEON FESTINGER
HENRY W. RIECKEN
STANLEY SCHACHTER
December 21, 1955
CHAPTER I
Unfulfilled Prophecies and Disappointed Messiahs
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.
But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. 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? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.
How and why does such a response to contradictory evidence come about? This is the question on which this book focuses. We hope that, by the end of the volume, we will have provided an adequate answer to the question, an answer documented by data.
Let us begin by stating the conditions under which we would expect to observe increased fervor following the disconfirmation of a belief. There are five such conditions.
1.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 behaves.
2.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.
3.The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
4.Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
The first two of these conditions specify the circumstances that will make the belief resistant to change. The third and fourth conditions together, on the other hand, point to factors that would exert powerful pressure on a believer to discard his belief. It is, of course, possible that an individual, even though deeply convinced of a belief, may discard it in the face of unequivocal disconfirmation. We must, therefore, state a fifth condition specifying the circumstances under which the belief will be discarded and those under which it will be maintained with new fervor.
5.The individual believer must have social support.