Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance

A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance

Timothy Jenkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137364456
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137357601
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What happens when prophecies fail? Timothy Jenkins' re-reading of Leon Festinger's classic work on "cognitive dissonance" seeks to answer this question by studying a 50s doomsday group. This volume explores the relations between anthropology and psychology, and between social scientific and natural scientific accounts of human behavior.

1

Introduction: The Issue of the Scale of the Event—One Object or Three Parties?

Abstract: The Introduction introduces the text to be re-read, Festinger’s 1956 study When Prophecy Fails, and outlines the key distinction employed in the essay, between a psychological and a rhetorical reading of human behaviour, describing the nature of the latter in terms of character, emotion, and demonstration. It also introduces the aims and scope of the proposed re-reading.

Keywords: anthropology/psychology; Festinger; rhetorical/cognitive approaches; When Prophecy Fails

Jenkins, Timothy. Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. doi:10.1057/9781137357601.

When Prophecy Fails is an account of a short-lived flying saucer cult in the Chicago area in 1954. It was written by Festinger, Riecken and Schachter and published in 1956, and served to introduce Festinger’s theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’, a theory which has enjoyed lasting influence (Cooper 2007). The book is primarily a work of social psychology; however, the detailed description it gives is of such a quality that it allows other, particularly anthropological, interests to be pursued, and that is the purpose of this essay. This is a case study of real value and, while I offer a reading that differs from the authors’ intentions, the re-reading is conceived as a tribute to a classic not only of sociological description but also of analytic reflection. Its quality allows certain issues to emerge with great clarity.

The story in outline is very simple. About a year before the events described, a woman medium—named ‘Marian Keech’ in the account—began receiving spirit messages from a race of ‘spacemen’, whom she called the ‘Guardians’. The Guardians had two objectives: to warn the human race of a coming global catastrophe and to use the woman as a means of gathering together an elect group. These chosen people would be rescued from the disaster by flying saucers and taken to other planets, where they would be trained before being returned to earth to lead the recovery of human civilization. A small group of followers was organized in two locations around these messages, largely by a couple—‘Dr and Mrs Armstrong’—who befriended the medium, the husband in particular taking a series of initiatives. These included releasing to the press a precise prediction of the date of the catastrophe, naming 21st December. Attracted by the story in the press, the social scientists made contact with Mrs Keech and then Dr Armstrong, without revealing the nature of their interest, and infiltrated observers into the group. This allowed them to follow events over a matter of weeks up to the ‘disconfirmation’ of the prediction, which was the focus of their interest, and to follow the group members for a short period after this moment. There was considerable press interest generated by the prediction of the end of the world and the arrival of spacemen. The group effectively ceased to exist in the months after the passing of the date in question.

The prime question concerns the unit of observation, or the scale at which the events concerned occurred. This is an important issue, because much else follows from it, and hence I shall outline the difference between Festinger’s approach and my own. It is my view that the events in question were constructed through the interactions of three parties: in the first place, the group, led by, it emerges, more than one medium; in the second place, the social scientists; and in the third, the press. There never was an uncontaminated series of (religious) events generated by the first party, to be studied by the second, and reported by the third. Yet Festinger’s¹ claim is precisely of this kind: that the behaviour of the group may be studied as if it were a natural phenomenon, open to objective description even though in practice, he concedes, certain interferences or distortions resulting from the presence of the observers need to be allowed for.

The issue then is whether the phenomenon being described consists in a single neutral object, to be observed, or, on the contrary, in three parties interacting and mutually affecting one another. The point at issue concerns the appropriate style of explanation. Festinger seeks to explain the behaviour described in terms of psychological motivations, and proposes a theory of cognitive dissonance—a new mental mechanism—to account for the actions observed. In suggesting that the phenomena are better described in terms of the interactions and mutual effects between parties I am looking instead to a rhetorical theory, a theory in which words and actions are seen less in terms of expressing inner mental states of individuals and more in terms of the persuasive force such actions and words exert on both self and others (see Descombes 2001: 90–93).

In order to establish this case, I shall in the first part consider each of the three parties in turn, first the social scientists, then the group and the mediums that led them, and last, more briefly, the attitudes of the press. In each case, we are concerned with the categories, assumptions and motivations each party brought to the encounter, for persuasive force may be analysed in terms of the reliability attributed to the speaker by the hearer, the feeling shared by the speaker with the hearer, and the logic or world of understanding established, common to both parties. Festinger’s description offers us material on all these matters of character, emotion and demonstration (or ethos, pathos and logos, in Aristotle’s terms—see op cit: 91).

A good deal of the interest of examining these distinct worlds of personality, feeling and reasoning lies in their interaction and the mutual misunderstandings (Jenkins, T. 1994: 441) that arose between them as persuasion on the part of each party had its effects or was rejected, and the series of events recounted unfolded. The second part of the re-description consists in reviewing this series of events to test which account—rhetorical or social psychological—better corresponds to the complex narrative contained in the book.

As we work through the two parts, three topics emerge as being of particular interest and also of more general sociological worth. They explore the contrast between Festinger’s social psychological approach and a rhetorical account in terms, first, of the difference between prediction and prophecy, then, of the distinction between Festinger’s pairing of concealment and proselytizing on the one hand and the concept of secrecy as a structuring principle on the other, and, last, the play between two ‘ideologies of language’, the language of science and the language of secrecy. This exercise is not then confined to a careful reading of the single study; rather, by examining an account of a small new religious movement in the perspective proposed we can raise some questions of much wider sociological interest.

Indeed, by following Festinger’s account and by asking some different questions of the material—in particular, by bringing the enquiring (social science) community into the picture as well as the group under investigation, and including elements of the wider social context—it is possible to identify a series of objects, concepts and topics that are central to the current sociological and social historical study of religion. In short, a study of Festinger may serve as a way in and introduction to the contemporary social scientific investigation of religion.

Note

1   I shall attribute the work to Festinger for the sake of brevity of reference.

Part 1

The Presuppositions of the Various Parties

2

The Social Scientists

Abstract: This chapter concentrates on the social scientists and their investigation, considering their hypothesis and the theory of cognitive dissonance, their presuppositions and methods, and exploring these through the distinction between prediction and prophecy.

Keywords: 1950s social science; cognitive dissonance; prediction/prophecy; scientific approaches to human behaviour; social psychology

Jenkins, Timothy. Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. doi:10.1057/9781137357601.

The social scientists provide the lens through which the social phenomena are viewed. We will therefore look first at the nature of the social scientific hypothesis being tested and the presuppositions expressed in that hypothesis, which takes natural science as its explanatory model, exploring the limits of these presuppositions in terms of a contrast between ‘prediction’ and ‘prophecy’.

The social scientists: (i) the hypothesis

Festinger has a specific object in view, summed up in the book’s title, the moment ‘when prophecy fails’. He had identified a series of historical case studies of millennial or messianic movements: the Montanists, from the early Church; the Anabaptists, from the Reformation period; and a movement among Sephardic Jews in Asia Minor in the seventeenth century. In each instance, specific predictions—of the second coming of Christ, of the destruction of the world and the saving of a small group of the elect, or of a particular set of miraculous occurrences—led to committed behaviour on the part of believers—such as the abandonment of earthly possessions and jobs—and were open to failure, to ‘unequivocal disconfirmation’ in Festinger’s terms, with which the believers had to come to terms.

The focus of investigation was then a particular kind of event, ‘the disconfirmation of a belief’ (Festinger 2008: 4), and reaction to this event, the response of the believer to disconfirmation. Festinger sets out a hypothesis to this effect, that if the believer is isolated, disconfirmation has to be accepted, but, if the person is part of a convinced group, disconfirmation is met by an increased effort to spread the belief, in an effort to persuade others that the belief is correct. In short, Festinger’s hypothesis is that ‘increased proselyting [we would say ‘proselytizing’] follows the disconfirmation of a prediction’ (op cit: 27).

The hypothesis is the expression of a psychological theory, the theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’, which was the subject of a contemporary book (Festinger 1957). Festinger suggests that two ‘cognitions’—by which he means opinions, beliefs or items of knowledge—may be either mutually consistent or inconsistent; he labels these relations ‘consonant’ and ‘dissonant’. Further, he claims that ‘dissonance produces discomfort’ and that ‘there will arise pressures to reduce or eliminate the dissonance’ (Festinger 2008: 28). This is then a ‘cognitivist’ theory, applying to the individual’s mind and inner thoughts, and employs utilitarian categories, seeking to minimize discomfort and effort, and to maximize pleasure.

Cooper, reviewing the history of cognitive dissonance, emphasizes the context in which the theory emerged, a context which included such elements as an interest in crowd psychology (and its role in the rise of Fascism), induced compliance or ‘brainwashing’ (with respect to the Korean War), fears of defection or disloyalty at home (manifested in the Communist scare), and the rise of ‘mass persuasion’ and the art of advertising. The dominant psychological approaches of the period looked to the role of reinforcement of learning, or persuasion by rewards. Cognitive dissonance however contradicted the account given by behaviourism, making predictions that were both novel and non-obvious, for the theory claimed that people are driven to achieve consistency and to make adjustments in the wake of inconsistency (Cooper 2007: 26). Festinger was concerned with psychological drives and arousal rather than preferences, and, by complicating the account of motivation through the notions of consonance and dissonance of ‘cognitions’, introduced, on the one hand, the possibility that you might like what you suffer for (in this way offering insight into the various historical and current issues mentioned) and, on the other, the testable and controversial claim that there is more arousal when the magnitude of the incentive (dissonance) is low rather than high.

The evidence that dissonance occurs is found in observable manifestations of attempts to reduce dissonance, and these attempts can take one of three forms. A person experiencing dissonance, according to Festinger, may, first, alter their beliefs, for example, by abandoning a previously held conviction; or, second, may adapt or reinterpret their beliefs so as to make them more compatible; or, third, may seek to quell inner doubt by engaging in compensating behaviour. This last possibility covers spreading the word or proselytizing, and is the particular focus of interest, although instances of the other two forms also occur in the book.

It is worth noting the circularity of a method that provides evidence for a hypothetical mental event by interpreting behaviour: behaviour is held simultaneously to be evidence for the inner event and to have been produced by it (through a mechanism which is not explained). This circularity is characteristic of cognitivist accounts, and it does not prevent them from carrying conviction: Dawson (1999) lists seventeen studies that have applied the theory of cognitive dissonance to a dozen contemporary religious movements¹; it has also been applied in the field of Old Testament prophecy (Carroll 1979), and has led to more than a thousand papers in social psychology (Cooper 2007).

Festinger sets out the conditions for such an ‘increased fervour following the disconfirmation of a belief’ in a formal fashion. The belief must be held with conviction, resulting in changed behaviour; the individual should have made sacrifices on the basis of this conviction, actions which are difficult to reverse; the belief must be sufficiently specific, and concerned with the real world, to allow unequivocal failure or refutation; and ‘such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief’ (Festinger 2008: 4). Under these circumstances, the behaviour of groups of believers on the one hand and of isolated believers on the other can be compared to test the theory.

Although he is concerned with a recurrent psychological phenomenon, in the first chapter Festinger traces the beginnings of a North American genealogy of comparable social forms. Having mentioned the Anabaptists, he turns to consider the Millerite movement (op cit: 13–25), created by a New England farmer, William Miller, who predicted that the end of the world would occur in 1843. Miller’s convictions arose from his study of the Scriptures together with the application of certain numerical techniques and, from small beginnings, turned into a mass movement through meetings, newspapers and organized proselytizing, activities which in turn solicited opposition. In 1843, a rhythm of anticipation, disappointment and heightened expectation developed, with accelerating efforts both of organization and opposition. Both reinterpretations and new predictions followed on disappointments. The role of the Millerite press in this period, and its financing through the millenarian disbursements of the faithful, were crucial to the climax of the movement and, after three or four disconfirmations, to the ultimate disappointment of its hopes. The movement disappeared in 1845, although—as Festinger does not note—it generated successor movements, in the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It should be emphasized that the Millerite movement sets the terms of the hypothesis, which turns on the acute disappointment experienced by these Adventists.

The particular interest of Festinger’s book is that he believed he had found a contemporary movement which allowed sufficiently detailed investigation to test the hypothesis: ‘direct observational data about a group which appeared to believe in a prediction of catastrophe to occur in the near future’ (op cit: 32). The investigators were alerted by a newspaper article which reported a prophecy by a woman in ‘Lake City’ that the city would be destroyed by a flood on 21 December 1954 (although the year is not given in the book), stating that she had received a message from outer space to this effect. The beings from outer space had been visiting earth in flying saucers, and had seen signs of fault lines which foretold the disaster, an inland sea that would stretch from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico. Other land slippage would take place at the same time along the West Coast of the American Continent (op cit: 32–3).

When the social scientists made contact with Mrs Marian Keech, the source of the prophecy, they discovered there was a group of people around her, and joined this group. The investigators did their best to reconstruct the previous history of the movement and to record subsequent events through observation and interview; in the book, they attempt to describe the members of the group and the history of their involvement, the ideology constructed and the influences to which it was subject, and then the events leading up to the moment of the disconfirmation of the prophecy, tracing the various parties’ reactions. It is a gripping tale, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: The Issue of the Scale of the EventOne Object or Three Parties?
• Part 1  The Presuppositions of the Various Parties
• Part 2  The Events and Their Rationale
• Bibliography
• Index