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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, published in 1956, detailing a study of a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse.
Leon Festinger (8 May 1919 – 11 February 1989) was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory.The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. [1]
A more recent area of focus for Tavris is cognitive dissonance, a theory first developed by Leon Festinger and later advanced by his student, Elliot Aronson, into a theory of self-justification. Cognitive dissonance is the state of discomfort one feels when two beliefs, or a belief and behavior, contradict each other, or when a deeply held ...
Combating Cult Mind Control is a nonfiction book by Steven Hassan, first published in 1988.The book presents itself as a guide to resisting the mind control practices of destructive cults, and focuses on the research of Margaret Singer and Robert Lifton as well as the cognitive dissonance theory of Leon Festinger.
Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, [1] centers on the belief that individuals drive to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others to reduce uncertainty in these domains and learn how to define ...
Festinger and his researchers took the chance to pretend to be a part of the cult in order to observe its behaviors and reaction when the flood failed to occur. Furthermore, Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, which would be published the following year, predicted that the failure of the prophecy would not break the cult. Instead the ...
The Seekers were the subject of the book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, in which Laughead was given the pseudonym Dr. Armstrong and Martin the name Marian Keech. Festinger infiltrated the Seekers with the goal of studying their cognitive reactions and coping mechanisms when their beliefs failed, a thought-process which Festinger named ...
Forced compliance theory is a paradigm that is closely related to cognitive dissonance theory.It emerged in the field of social psychology.. Forced compliance theory is the idea that authority or some other perceived higher-ranking person can force a lower-ranked individual to make statements or perform acts that violate their better judgment.