QAA Podcast - When “When Prophecy Fails” Fails (E350)

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

The 1956 book When Prophecy Fails describes one of the most famous case studies in social psychology. The researchers Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter covertly joined a small, apocalyptic UFO group, observing how members prepared, including quitting jobs, giving away possessions, and severing ties with skeptics. According to the book, when the group’s predicted disaster did not occur, instead of simply abandoning their beliefs, many core members strengthened their commitment and actively sought new converts. But it didn’t actually happen like that. In truth, Festinger and his fellow researchers glossed over evidence that contradicted their thesis and actively influenced the UFO group to get the result they wanted. This is the discovery of our guest Thomas Kelly. By combing through newly unsealed materials from Festinger’s archives, UFO and occult magazines of the 1950s, later writings by group leader Dorothy Martin, he discovered crucial information that was omitted by the original book. Kelly detailed his startling findings in a paper published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences titled Debunking “When Prophecy Fails.” Travis interviews Kelly to discuss the real story behind When Prophecy Fails, the possible consequences of invalidating Festinger’s study, and how his work fits in the wider “replication crisis” in experimental psychology. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa The first five episodes of Annie Kelly’s new 6-part podcast miniseries “Truly Tradly Deeply” are available to Cursed Media subscribers. www.cursedmedia.net/ Cursed Media subscribers also get access to every episode of every QAA miniseries we produced, including Manclan by Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly, Trickle Down by Travis View, The Spectral Voyager by Jake Rockatansky and Brad Abrahams, and Perverts by Julian Feeld and Liv Agar. Plus, Cursed Media subscribers will get access to at least three new exclusive podcast miniseries every year. www.cursedmedia.net/ Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast. SOURCES Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jhbs.70043 Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” (Free Preprint Version) https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/9j7qc_v2 Failed Prophecies Are Fatal https://journal.equinoxpub.com/IJSNR/article/view/33085/32543 Cults, Conscripts, and College Boys: Whither Cognitive Dissonance? (Preprint) https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xdj2u_v1

Keep mehap. If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 350. When, when prophecy fails, fails. As always, I'm your host, Travis View. The first post on 4chan from the anonymous entity, later known as Q read, HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross-border run. Passport approved to be flagged, effect of 1030.

at 12.01 a.m. expect massive riots organized and defiance in others fleeing the U.S. to occur. Of course, Hillary Clinton wasn't extradited. Her passport wasn't flagged, and there were no massive riots in the days after that post. The fact that QAnon's very first message contained predictions that did not come to pass didn't seem to dampen Q's popularity among conspiracies. How could so many people see Q&N as a source of truth when it was clearly wrong in this and many other instances. Well, social psychology provided a ready answer. In the 1950s, Leon Fessinger developed the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, people feel most comfortable when their beliefs, known facts, actions, and values don't contradict each other

or consonant. When their beliefs or mental states do contradict in some way, the resulting cognitive dissonance creates powerfully uncomfortable feelings, which in turn drives people to resolve the contradiction in their heads, even in ways that may seem strange or irrational. to outside observers. This theory was tested in the famous field study, which was reported in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fales. Fessinger, along with his colleagues Henry Reichen and Stanley Schuster, observed members of an obscure apocalyptic UFO group. The group's leader, Dorothy Martin, claimed that the entire world was destined to be destroyed by a flood on December 21, 1954. According to the book, the group was mostly reluctant

to evangelize their beliefs before that date. But that changed after the date. But that changed after the day passed with no apocalypse. Suddenly, the group's most committed believers became even more committed, and further, their previous reluctance to spread their beliefs gave way to a newfound willingness for publicity. This demonstrated that when a committed believer is faced with disconformation of their beliefs, they resolve their cognitive dissonance in ways besides abandoning what they believe. This case study has been cited countless times for the past 70 years in order to explain the strange behavior of cults in other committed groups. The problem is that it's just not true.

It didn't happen the way that the authors said it happened in the book. This is the discovery of our guest today, Thomas Kelly, by combing through newly unsealed materials from Festinger's archives, UFO and the cult magazines of the 1950s, later writings by Dorothy Martin and other neglected sources,

he discovered crucial information that was omitted. Kelly detailed his startling findings in a paper published in a journal of the history of behavioral sciences titled, Debunking When Prophecy Fails. Now, Thomas Kelly joins me today to discuss what he found and how may impact how we understand the psychology of belief. Thomas, thank you so much for taking time to speak with me today.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited. It's a really interesting topic. It really, really is. And I have to say, how I discovered your paper was mentioned in a tweet when I was browsing Twitter one day, in my immediate sort of reaction to just the title, debonking when prophecy fails was, I guess, incredulity, because, like, again, this is something that, like, many people in the field that have referenced, and something that I've referenced

several times on this podcast, because I really thought it, you know, it provided a good case study and then a good sort of framework for understanding this kind of phenomenon. But, boy, when I dove into the paper, I have to say that your case is very convincing. Thanks. For a long time, I also thought of when prophecy fails is, like, presumptively true just because it's canonical. So, you know, it's really interesting. Yel also, you are listed as an independent researcher on this paper. So is this not your primary area of research?

That's right. I'm a political scientist and I mostly work on, like, public health policy. So this is definitely a side project for me. My educational background is political science, not psychology. Well, I mean, yeah, it's a hell of a side project. I mean, it's just really interesting because of like how impactful the study is. Like, the 1999 review, when prophecy fails and faith persists, a theoretical overview, opens with, there's a quote, almost everyone in the sociology of religion is familiar with a classic

1956 study by Fessinger et al of how religious groups respond to the failure of their prophetic announcements. I mean, the study provides, like, just the default model for how, like, we understand how groups respond to failed prophecies. It inspired decades of empirical work on doomsay and millenarian movements, and it could to function as a reference point. It's like it's one of those studies that like even people who are not really in the field may be familiar with. So let's get into your findings. Again, the, I mean, the sort of like the story in it is really, really important because like it's basically goes,

well, they at first they were kind of reluctant to publicize. They did it a little bit, but not that much. But then this big disconfirming event happened and all of a sudden their willingness to like call newspapers and sort of like try to get more people into the group. So there's this like, which is counterintuitive finding, but it did, according to Fessinger, sort of confirm his then developing theory of cognitive dissonance, like a perfect example of like what he was trying to push in academia. But you found that basically this wasn't true in all parts. Let's start with the idea that they didn't work to sort of spread their beliefs before the

disconfirming event. You talk about how they actually, they publish a lot of like articles and letters promoting their messages about the end and the coming cataclysm in these UFO occult magazines you found you found in like magazines like roundhouse and mystic this is a few months before december so you were you found that they were they actually were very much interested in talking about what they believed right yeah that's right so the the official story of when prophecy fails is that um dorothy martin and her main followers a married couple charles and lillian law had like a brief passing interest in spreading the word like they sent out a press release and they attended a couple of talks and they say that's how they

found out about this group. You know, they just were in the right place and the right time and during this brief spur of publicity, a few months before the flood was supposed to happen, they heard about it. But right away, just reading the account that Festinger and his co-authors providing when prophecy fails, it seemed like a little more substantial than that because they would provide examples like they say like, there was also a book publisher like at these meetings because they were trying to get him to publish a book of their teachings. And yes, there is some subjectivity between like what's like a sustained evangelism campaign, but like a brief interest in it.

That seemed pretty sincere to me. Another issue was that they would like offhandedly reference like one of the followers' jobs was to copy down these messages and to send them out to UFO groups across the country and world. And quite quickly when I just started reading what people had written about Martin, mostly from the UFO community, people were aware of how eager she was. us to spread her word. So for instance, in the Sassarian magazine, Gray Barker, who is, he's a little bit dismissive of Martin, but did cover her, but she was well known, wrote something like she was sending her messages out to anyone who would listen. Yeah, again, yeah, the complete opposite of the thesis of the book. Archival notes also record Martin telling followers that from now on until the cataclysm, her job was to gather in the recruits and that aliens had

explicitly commanded her and the law heads to spread the message and there was even like specific roles handed out. Yes, that's right. So Dorothy Martin received most of her messages through automatic writing where she would like sit and write something on the paper and the idea it's being guided by this like ascended extraterrestrial intelligence. And a lot of these messages would say something like Dorothy, like you need to spread the word. Dorothy, you need to tell the world. And she even thought that it was the role of Charles because of her channeled messages that he was supposed to help out with the publicity. And you see that, you know, you know, he does this. He, like, publishes a couple of accounts about her teachings. And this is all

before the prophecy starts to fail. And then what's interesting is you see from the internal notes of the researchers, some of which were only opened up this year, they, like, openly talked about gathering the recruits or how to start the proselytizing. And they talked about, like, who Martin trusted when people would visit her house. They would talk about who she trusted to, like, teach them the real teachings and who she didn't. But she was kind of choosy about this. So, okay, so she had favored lieutenants who were, like, more adept at sort of spreading the word over, over others. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is the sort of the second shocking part of it, because the thing is that, like, you know, bad science happens. Like, bad science

is part of science, you know? It's like, it's normal to publish ideas that may be a little off, but perhaps are sincerely explored or perhaps on the right track. I'm thinking of, like, Charles Darwin on the origin of the species. He believed that he didn't even have Mendelian genetics. He believed this an idea of like blended inheritance, which does even make sense on its face and or so contradict his own theory. But he was like, he was wildly wrong in some sense. But like just the core idea was so solid, it's been expanded upon and refined over the, uh, over the decades. But you're proposing something more serious, which is that not merely, this isn't merely just bad science. This is a science in which the scientists knew that something was off, knew that there was information that contradicted their

main thesis, but they chose to ignore or gloss over it anyway. Yeah, that's right. I think that's fair. And, like, what you were saying about bad science is, even if you do everything right, there's always some risk you're just going to get some random or non-replicable result, right? Like, they could have just studied a really weird cult that didn't generalize, right? And it's not their fault. That can happen.

But here, every step along the way, there's serious problems. So for one, they do a lot of things that help convince the cult members that their beliefs are real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, interesting. I have read criticisms of the study before that they were a little too embedded, little too involved in the group. But this was, you know, that by itself didn't invalidate the results. Like the core thesis essentially could survive kind of research practices that today would be considered unethical. But, again, you're suggesting, like, more extreme that they really had their thumb on the scale, and we're trying to push the group towards the kind of result that they thought would sort of support their cognitive dissonance thesis.

Yes, that's right. So one example of this that they briefly acknowledge in when prophecy fails, but you see in more detail, and I discussed in the journal, is that one of their paid research assistants joined the branch in East Lansing. When she shows up to the house, they're like, hey, why are you here? And she's like, well, I had a dream about a cataclysmic blood and being rescued from it. And then another research assistant joins them too. And of course, the cult is thrilled. They're like, wow, these two people joined us out of nowhere. They're obviously like channeling sacred messages from the extraterrestrials as well.

We've been right all along. But the most persistent bad actor in this whole study is Henry Rican, whom everyone loves and adores. And for whatever reason, they immediately become convinced he is like spiritually ascended. They start calling him brother Henry. Everyone else basically goes by like their first name. But he's like a big man on like the cult campus. So, and you see this from his writings and also the writings from the other observers and Leon. And so, you know, there's a meeting at Martin's house and they're all waiting for Henry.

And they're like, we need to wait for the man from Minnesota. And of course, Stanley and Leon are also from Minnesota. But no one just like cares that much about them. They're just like normal members. And people will ask him for blessings. They'll ask him for messages. is he talks about in one of his research journals. He's like, yeah, if I wanted to, I could easily take over this group.

And he starts to play a bigger and bigger role. And so probably the most dramatic instance is on the night when the prophecy fails, he kind of like coaches them through specific things. Maybe that's jumping ahead a little. No, it is, I mean, the interesting is shocking. It would be as if, like, I through like doing this podcast, I didn't merely report on what they believed. I went to like four-channer and stuff and, like, encourage people to go down

rabbit holes or like explained why, uh, why they should believe despite cues failed prophecies and like took an active role in the direction of the belief and the sort of the group dynamics rather than be an observer. So it's like, I think it's a pretty extreme example of them sort of like fiddling with their own experiment. Martin said that Henry Rican was, uh, the favorite son of the most God. And oh, yeah, could you explain what was the, um, the magic box episode that you say was actually misdescribed in uh when when prophecy fails sure so the martin had a like a book of like sealed teaching so she had some documents that like other people she believed weren't supposed to see but after the prophecy fails both martin and charles lawhead are in legal trouble

martin might face they're both dealing with like allegations of mental incompetence and they're worried out being institutionalized so martin ends up leaving um Illinois and she's like oh what to do with these books. And the researchers have always wanted to see these for a long time. So Henry, who has just revealed to the group or just claimed to the group that the Space Brothers sent him all along. So he's just said, you guys are right. My title is earthly verifier. And I was sent from above. He's like, you should give the books to us. I'm going to put a magic protection symbol on them. And then I'm going to give them to someone trustworthy to look after them. And that guy was one of the paid research assistants who had also infiltrated the cult in the book there's like this this

in when prophecy fails this happens too but in a different way they're like they were scared about what to do so they asked us what should we do and like Henry was like fine I'll put a magic symbol on it although they don't identify who's who they're just always like one of the authors and then in that telling they gave it to one of the true believers and they go on to say this proved the belief of the true believer because according to them like some of his like school book had inadvertently been sealed in this box, and he couldn't get them out because, like, he was afraid of breaking the magic symbol. But in their internal research notes, there's no, there's no reference of this.

So, like, I guess there's a tiny possibility this box made the way to the true believer in the future. There's no documentation or discussion of it, and so it doesn't sound like that. So it appears to be, but yeah. Yeah, real terrible stuff. The other part of the equation when prophecy fails is the idea that, like, there was this disconfirming event, and then they, the group reacted and they countering. intuitive way, which is that they doubled down and they believed even, even with even more

energy. And then they all of a sudden they found a new passion for spreading their beliefs that was not present before. Again, this is something you also found to be not true. I mean, could you talk about like what you found was the actual reaction to the date coming and going without the apocalyptic flood? Sure. So even in the original account of when prophecy fails, they admit that, like, some people give up just waiting for the flood, like, they get too bored. Like, there's this story about this, like, a teenage woman who's a follower, and she gets bored. Her boyfriend's like, hey, want to, like, go get a drink? And she just, like, leaves and never comes back.

So they acknowledge there's, like, some attrition. But what really happens is that a fair number of people do leave right after. But among, like, the hardcore, who are gathered at Martin's House for the apocalypse, there's definitely a few days where they're, like, trying to keep each other's spirits up, right? So, you know, they do release a press release with a psychic message, although this message, you know, that says, you guys were such good people, your light prevented the flood. Although, as I show, this message was in part prompted by Henry Rican himself. So they do do do some press releases. And they do at one point, like, go outside and sing a song of, like, Christmas carols as like a song of praise to the aliens hoping maybe they'll decide to show up.

There's like a few days where they're like still holding on. And then the group essentially disintegrates. So Martin is worried about legal trouble. so she goes and stays with a friend outside of her hometown. And there, some of the younger members are already like, you know, they're still cordial with her. People aren't mad at her, I want to say. People still seem like they always like her as a person. But, you know, one of the younger believers is quoted by the research is saying like,

hey, it was like pretty disappointing because like nothing really happened and we thought something would. And then a new paid researcher shows up, Marsh Ray, and they're really excited because they're like, maybe this is a sign of vindication. So they're still holding on hope and they start. They're like, welcome, Brother Marsh. Like, do you want to give us a blessing? And he's like, no. And from his telling, they had totally given up

by evangelism at this point. And so this is like, his first interaction with them is like Christmas Day, right? So this was in like four days. They've abandoned it, right? And the other thing, I do want to stress it. Like, these people don't go become like, you know, like normal, stereotypical suburban people, all of them. Or at least Martin doesn't and neither do the lawheads, right?

Before they connected, they were interested in the occult and the UFOs. and they stay like that. But that's actually helpful because you can see their writings in later years and they refuse to talk about it. So a few months later in 195, there's a big piece

in the Sossarian magazine published by Gray Barker, who I mentioned earlier, and she's already walking back her beliefs. She's not saying like there was going to be a real flood, we were really going to

rescue the state of the world. She's like, well, I never really believe we were going to be physically picked up by aliens. And the law head's like, yeah, like,

you know, but maybe like our spears were like lifted by like, bonding through it. And they both have lots of opportunities to spread the word. So a few months after that, Lillian Lawhead is published in Mystic Magazine. And everyone in the UFO community knows who these people are now because there was like mainstream press coverage of them. And so the editor literally has an editor note before her article being like, you guys, this is

the Lillian Lawhead who is like involved in this whole failed prophecy. So this is like a great opportunity for her to like talk about the Christmas message or like reaffirm her belief. But instead she starts talking about these secret messages and these alleged alien footprints that someone's found in the desert. And Lillian, this is like a long-term project of her. She had written about this before Martin and she would like continue writing it afterwards. So she doesn't want to talk about it. The Lohads and the Martins do stay friends at least briefly. They visit Peru and they, you know, they try to channel psychic messages.

There's kind of some like ancient alien type like archaeology going on there. But then they split up and Dorothy Martin goes off to call herself Sister Thay. And she is, I guess, pretty charismatic, but she does, once again, start to gather a small number of followers in her later years. But she refuses to talk about this. And we know that because, like, they put out many books of compilations of her teachings where she never talks about it. And they talk about how, like, they have no idea what happened in her life from 1950

to 1955. And she even changes her story about how she gets her psychic powers and she totally omits the Illinois thing. So she's written out this entire incident that was supposed to, instead of affirming it, She's changed her entire biography. She has a new name. The call itself doesn't exist. Yeah.

Like under the theory they were operating under, they would like hold to this confirming event, but like reinterpret it in some way, but that's not what you saw. They seem to run away from it entirely. Yeah. Like they do do this interpretive move for a couple of days. I mean, it's clouded because Henry played a big role in triggering it, right? But they do come up with the initial explanation that like it was going to happen, but like they were such pure people and like meditated.

did and prayed essentially so that they like saved the world right so um you know it's not that this moved in a happen it's just it doesn't like didn't lead to like long-term reaffirmation of their beliefs well i mean yeah so this is and was essentially basically a kind of cherry-picking evidence where they sort of they did find something that seemed to affirm their theory but instead they kind of like ignored the more long-term consequences of the failed prophecy uh yes that's right and um unfortunately i think that's a um a pattern in the like literature on failed prophecies. I talk about this in another paper. Failed Prophecies are fatal, where I discussed the 1999 article. You mentioned earlier, whereas people will, like, interview people, like,

a couple days after a prophecy failed and that they don't, like, immediately say, we were completely wrong. It gets listed as a case study for, like, how beliefs are, like, really resilience. Yeah, that's a pretty shocking. So, yeah, I mean, you list a lot of, like, is, again, this is not just empirical problems that you found in your research. There are also some some serious ethical problems. For example, you talk about one of Liz Williams, who fabricated a mystical dream about being saved from a flood. I mean, what was this about?

Yeah, so that's how she wasn't sure how she could join the group. So the group essentially has two bases, Martin's home in Oak Park, Illinois, and the Law Head's home in East Lansing. And she was this graduate student at Michigan State University at the time, although I think I had a different name back in the 50s. And in order to gain entrance, she, like, comes up with a flood story, and they're really impressed. And then she starts functioning essentially as a nanny for the younger daughter of the lawhead. So she's almost constantly at their house.

So she's able to observe them in great detail. Liz is, you know, she's a funny writer. She's not a fan about some of the other cult members. So she, you know, she wants one of them to leave the house. So she, like, fakes, she's an automatic writer too. So she, like, gets a psychic message to, like, encourage her to leave. or this one time this woman she didn't like was like having a like you know who would sometimes like have a beer or a cigarette and Liz would speak loudly about like oh we must

be so enlightened and avoid the temptations of the blast like alcohol and nicotine actually a very large amount of her notes are just dedicated to complaining about this one cult member and so what was probably the most shocking is that Liz and her fellow observer Frank actually try to stall a child welfare investigation into the law heads so this is triggered by Charles's sister who has a long-running grudge against Charles. For instance, like, he would always try to encourage her to not seek out conventional medical treatment, you know, and she was seriously ill and, like, focus on the power of positive thinking. So she, like, really, like, had a grudge against him, at least as she's portrayed by, like, the

Sussarian magazine and the accounts in the archives. And she's, she contacts people in Michigan. It says, like, hey, I'm really worried that my brother and his wife are neglecting their kids because they're in a cult. And so a child welfare psychologist is sent over to talk to interview the children. And at first, she's really dismissive of Liz, but she thinks Liz is just, this is from Liz's, a Liz and Franks account, she thinks Liz is just a cult member. And then Liz is like, listen up, I'm a real social scientist. This is a crucial study. You can't interfere this. And just so you know, like, higher-ups at Michigan State know about this and have approved it, you need to go talk to them. And so she tries to like pull break on her and to stop this because this happens just like a

couple days before the flood's supposed to occur. So this really is like the worst time imaginable for the study. And then she goes to talk to people at MSU and she like has the younger daughter with them. And the younger daughter loves Liz because she's like her nanny and they're like, oh, like I don't know if we should like interrupt the situation at such a crucial point and like go tell Charles who maybe from their perspective crazy that there's like a spy in his house. So like the court officers don't show up until after the prophecy fails. So Liz is able to, like, well, we don't know the counterfactual, but at least there's no. The course don't, like, send a probate officer until after the crucial date. I mean, this is, yeah, really, really shocking that, like, you know,

is, I suppose it does happen where, I don't know, they're more interested in making sure, I don't know, their grant money wasn't wasted than actually doing sort of a real, sort of rigorous, legitimate science. Now, like I said, I was pretty skeptical of, like, you know, the bold title, the Bunky when prophecy fails, until I read through all the evidence, you know, we just discussed and show that, like, no, this is pretty bad, pretty bad for the case. But, I mean, that still kind of like, you know, leaves us with a lot of questions about what this means for, I guess, social psychology research and, like, the theory of cognitive distance more broadly. Because first of all, it is the case that we can know of, like, many examples of sort of like prophetic kind of like groups that continue believing despite

the prophecy like QAnon, you know, this is something that happens that requires some kind of explanation, I feel like, because it's so counterintuitive. So having the question is like, well, what exactly is happening here if it can't be explained by the sort of like the kind of events as described in when prophecy fails? So here I want, I think I want to make a distinction between like what I think are different implications for my work on cognitive dissonance in general versus for like the study of prophetic failure. So for people who think the theory of cognitive dissonance has a lot of explanatory power, they don't think that because of a single study, right? They'll point to different, you know, like a larger body of evidence that they think substantiates it.

There's definitely criticism of that larger body of evidence, which I share. But this paper doesn't show, you know, by itself that like people need to abandon it. When it comes to new religion, just movements, I think it's a lot more substantial because this is a field that's like, you know, we don't get to observe that many examples of prophecy failing, right? There's not really a huge number of case studies. And when you actually go and evaluate these case studies, you see that the evidence for persistence of belief is a lot weaker than people say. First of all, just like this one case study actually shows the opposite. The other issue is this, is that some people who have tried to study this have just like looked at the past and said,

that group exists, that group had a prophetic failure. That's fine, to some extent, because it shows that it's not impossible, right? So you can point to Jehovah's Witnesses and you can say, like, just because you have like a failed prediction early in your history, it doesn't stop you from becoming a large religion. So that's true. But the issue is if you're selecting only from surviving groups, you're going to weigh overstate. The other issue, and if people are interested, they can read the open source article. Fail prophecies are fatal at a different peer review journal, is that a lot of groups have been falsely claimed to survive when they don't survive. To some extent, that's just ambiguity, like, what does it mean to, like, survive failed prophecy?

But if you just, like, zoom out a decade, a lot of these groups are supposed to provide evidence for survival, they don't exist. You know, they fall apart. So I would say that we should now think of group surviving failed prophecy is exceptional rather than expected. And then you can look at the survivors to see if there's any commonalities that might provide at least a reasonable hypothesis for, like, why some are better than the others at dealing. You know, yeah, one thing I really, I really liked about your. paper and some of his implications is that it uh it kind of vindicates debunking a little bit as a as a persuasive tactic because my whole stance through doing this podcast researching this material was like you know debunking may be a no worthwhile on its own just as an exercise but it's not a method

of persuasion you know it's like it's like you know finding you know the logical flaws or showing how you know the a belief system does not actually predict what it claims to predict is, I think, valuable on its own and in some cases may even persuade people who are less committed, but generally is ineffective. But this is, I think the idea that generally these groups that have sort of like these strong belief systems don't survive a failed prediction, sort of like, I don't know, the vindication of the debunkers, you know, is the idea that it is in fact possible very frequently to persuade people to abandon false beliefs through showing that is very much

demonstrably false. I mean, though, as that's, I don't know, that's kind of like, it's kind of like a hopeful, I think, a possible consequence of your research. Yes. One thing that I do think maybe is like, is relevant from these false beliefs, maybe versus other categories is the stakes of these being true or false are really high, right? So in Martin's group, some of these people had literally quit their jobs because they thought they were like saving their lives and getting to go hang out with like spiritually, like enlightened extraterrestrials, right? So the potential payoff was really high either way.

So the truth of it mattered a lot. But a lot. lot of things we believe like it really doesn't matter if it's for us as individuals often there's no harm to having inaccurate beliefs but for these high demand of groups you really care if they're saving you from the like the cataclysm or not one thing i really thought of when i was reading your paper was that like how is it that this went unnoticed for seven decades i mean like you mentioned like there were newly released materials from his notes but even absent that i think as you point out very well, there were very serious flaws in the study. And there are like many smart people who investigated this and took seriously. And as you point out, sort of like try to

replicate it with not much success. So, I mean, how is it that this study has become so iconic and without any serious challenge for seven decades? Yeah, I do think it's pretty bad that happened is if you simply even read Festinger's own work, comparing one prophecy fails to his later account of the cult in a theory of cognitive dissonance, literally published one year later, you can see like he's revising his story to make it more dramatic. And I think there's an, there is, or at least there was an issue where people who like to argue about social psychology like to argue by coming up with their own pet theories rather than diving into data or case studies. So if you look at the early criticism of cognitive

dissonance theory, you'll see people saying like, hey, this theory could also explain these results, not just your theory, but you see much less work going into like, does this literal exact experiment replicate, right? Or why are you throwing out so much data in your data analysis? Or in the case of when prophecy fails, these people could have gone and read like several different UFO magazines that would have posted a lot of, post a lot of challenges to the study. Or Martin, aka Sister Thedro, is not like, you could, you could have written her, you could have gone and talked to the law heads. This would have been really easy to fact check. And some newspapers would cover them just as like, you know, fun public interest stories, right? So when

Martin, like, moved to Arizona, her local newspaper ran just like a human interest story that's basically like, hey, we have a new neighbor who gets psychic messages. So yeah, it's troubling that they trusted the account of like the credentialed psychologists, even though like the actual people were trivial to go out and talk to, but they just didn't. When we were emailing back and forth, I talked to you about this, like remind me of a case I studied for a couple of, um, podcast episodes for my mini-series Trickledown, which talked about the case of Henry Herbert Goddard's study on the, what he called the Calicac family, in which he claimed that there is a feeble-minded barmaid in the revolutionary times who gave birth to generations of feeble-minded

children who behaved in these awful antisocial ways. And from this, Goddard basically put together a scientific case for eugenics, is saying that, like, you know, the feeble-mindedness is a very serious hereditary quality and therefore it was like good for society to like limit you know these people from from reproducing and they were like many many of flaws with this as like scientists discovered later like for example he got some of the genealogy wrong he didn't really actually know much about this feeble-minded barmaid he was very very selective he did cherry picking in order to kind of like bolster his case but this is a theory that was like the original study was published in 1912, but it was more or less kind of like debunked by 1930s, but then

it kind of persisted decades after in kind of academia, just so it was like it was too good of a story. People liked it so much. I mean, are you sort of like concerned that maybe something similar might happen now? It's like even as sort of like more critical research, like your own and maybe more inspired by this kind of work, sort of shows that that work was really, really bad, it's just going to persist in sort of like popular consciousness and even the scientific literature, despite that fact because, gosh, it's such a good story. I think that work like this is effective, but only over time, right? I think there's a difference between like if you're like a new academic or researcher who like sees a set of pivotal moment in your career, maybe versus

someone who's been like working in a subfield for 30 years and now, you know, some of the thing, you know, some of the premises you should have questioned are now being questioned. And also, you know, it is appropriate, I think, for, like, people interested in this field to, like, take their time to, like, read my work and think about other things as well, right? Like, you know, and evaluate it. And if people want to do this, you can find supporting archival material is out at the Open Science Foundation. If people want to read some of these things and some of these psychic messages or research notes themselves. Generally, the whole area of, like, field research psychology, experimental psychology, has taken kind of a beating in the past couple decades.

You know, there's been a what I call the replication crisis in which, you know, studies of these kinds of psychological phenomenon, which were considered very, very solid and serious, just are not holding up either because they can't replicate or when people go back and scrutinize them more carefully, they realize that there is very serious ethical or empirical flaws with them. I think a famous example is like, you know, the Stanford prison experiment. People I have some sort of really serious questions about the Milgram compliance experiments, like all of this research they thought that we previously thought sort of like opened up a whole new sort of like empirical understanding into how people behave and what their motivations are and their reactions

under certain circumstances have kind of been crumbling over the past 20 years. I mean, I'm curious. I mean, how does your like your study sort of like fall into this current phenomenon? I don't know. What does this mean for the field more generally? Yeah, that's interesting. So I had no reason. to think that when prophecy fails in particular was flawed. But I had, I guess, been influenced by, like, awareness of the replication crisis and how some of these famous studies didn't hold up. So I guess whenever I read these studies, like,

especially from the 20th century, you know, like, and maybe not as charitable to them as, like, people reading this 30 years ago would have been, right, when the, you know, when it wasn't normalized to think that these might have been really flawed. I don't, like, I don't have, like, a great answer. I think it's just, like, a gradual replacement of, like,

bad evidence hope and bad studies mean slowly fact checked and um you know better larger scale more replicable work being done and i guess maybe it's like a vindication for people who are just like maybe a little skeptical in general right like probably looking back like why were did people find psychologists so convincing right like yeah like that's maybe just like a bad call on us i mean yeah it's i think it's especially interesting it's like yeah that's again that's a normal part of science. Like the example I brought of Goddard's Calicac study. This was debunked by other people in the field, often younger people in the field, who sort of like took a closer look at his research and found serious flaws. But what's interesting to me about your case is that, again, you are,

this is not your primary area of research. You would expect people who would be, you know, really kind of like raised up in this kind of like this field and sort of like really kind of immersed it to take a more sort of like skeptical eye towards it and sort of revise it and provide perhaps more satisfying or empirically supported explanations for the phenomena of like you know fringe belief or whatever but that hasn't happened it took someone who was who was listed as an independent researcher on their paper in order to find the serious flaws yeah i believe the stanford prison experience laws were also exposed by sorry i'm blinking um i believe he's either um a french like journalist or filmmaker so this wouldn't be the first time and there was you know some weird

defensiveness i did get through this process at a couple of points not of the journal where i published but i'll say at a different journal i won't say which one i did get one review or comments and it was something like you're coming very close to accusing these people of dishonesty and like i just literally didn't know how to respond because it's like well i feel like i'm like demonstrate i'm showing facts that will cause a normal person to conclude that or when working um on kind of the companion piece failed prophecies are fatal. I said, we also shouldn't rely too heavily on this other study by these researchers braiding and hardened because there's no reason to doubt it itself, but because everyone in it has a pseudonym and even the location, like, we can't, you know, we can't check

on anything. So we should just be cautious about over-reline. And I got a reviewer comment there that was like, that was standard in the field. You're coming very close to saying this was wrong. And it's just like, you know, and I have no reason to think they did anything wrong, right? I'm just saying we shouldn't rely on things you can't. You should take things you can't verify with a grain of salt. It's the only point I made in that article. Yeah. You know, I feel like, yeah, in academia, there's this idea of, like, principle of, like, charity.

There's this a default assumption that, like, you know, people who are working this are sincere and are genuinely working towards finding, you know, the information. And they're not deliberately being fraudulent. That's just a very serious accusation. And I think that sometimes for the sake of discourse, you know, this, I think this is a fine principle. But, man, but the examples you provide, it seems as though it actually causes people to kind of like dig in their heels and, and refuse to look at very serious evidence that shows that they were fraudulent, regardless of how much charity might extend to them. I mean, it's convenient for me. I'm not, like, a social psychologist.

Like, nothing I do, like, depends on, like, professionally on the validity of this body of work. So it's like, you know, I'm less invested, I guess. Yeah, yeah, because like I mentioned, because like this thing has been just about every book I have that talks about, you know, new religious movements or Q and on or kind of like any kind of sort of like strange fringe belief that sort of contradicts their own predictions or empirical evidence, this study is trotted out. It's like if the field were to go in and say that, okay, actually this, this study is no good. we can't really rely upon anymore, and it shouldn't be referenced, except possibly as a case study of what happens when field research sort of violates very serious ethical norms, they're going to have to basically, like, rewrite decades and decades and decades of research into this matter, because so much is built upon this original study. I mean, it's just, I feel like, I mean, I don't know exactly what has happened, but it feels like the consequences of accepting that when prophecy fails is fraudulent. is pretty severe. It is amazing to me how guided people's interpretation of the events were by when prophecy fails, to the extent that people would use it as an example of like

new religious movement surviving disconformation. Because everyone knew this movement didn't survive, right? Like, it's not still around. Like, they didn't do anything. And they had this little coda that's like, oh, who knows if they hadn't run into like these legal difficulties, maybe it would have survived. But that's where it was like a lot of religious movements run into very serious legal difficulties or persecution or because in this example we know that like martin the law heads even reunited briefly like they could have done whatever they wanted but people just like i do i do wonder if like maybe we were um and i kind of share in this like it's just like fun to have a story about like how crazy people can be right because like you know i don't agree

with how they interpreted events right like i don't mind their beliefs very like convincing personally and so maybe because they were like you know like a stigmatized belief system maybe it was like easy to go along with like, you know, kind of this dismisses story. Like, they're so crazy, they don't even notice when they're obviously wrong. But, you know, a more realistic one is, like, maybe you think they seemed crazy in the sense they still were open to, like, the idea of psychics, but they recognized what part of their beliefs were wrong and moved on from them. Yeah, I think one sort of like optimistic possibility of the idea that when prophecy fails is debunked is the idea it opens the avenue to a more nuanced understanding of these dynamics.

You discuss a couple possibilities in that other article you mentioned. where failed prophecies are fatal, where you propose kind of like two possible ways or two possible situations in which a belief system survives failed prophecy. One of them is merely age, you know, was like if a belief system is very old, if it's been around for generations and it results in the failed prophecy, people aren't probably going to totally abandon that then, which makes sense. The other one, I thought really interesting, especially in the context of QAnon, is the idea that it could survive failed prophecy if it's based upon a textual interpretation as opposed to

say sort of like divine channeling or something like that which I mean and the reason reason that again we're hypothesizing is that with a textual interpretation you could always blame the interpretation while affirming the validity of the text this is relevant to Q&M because like the is it's all based upon a text the Q drops you know is like many people this is something I ran into over the years over and over again, is that whenever I would, like, you know, debunk something or say, like, he's like, you claim this would, this person claimed that this thing would happen based upon this Q drop and it didn't happen. And the response I got from, from believers was frequently, it's like, oh, that interpretation obviously was wrong. But the Q drop still comes from a valid source who has inside information and they know what they're talking about. But it does reveal something important. I can't say what it was, but you can't just turn to an interpretation of the Q drop and say that. therefore Q&NN is wrong. And I think that's, I don't know, that's, that's really, really interesting because it, I don't know, it provides us with a more complex framework of sort of like understanding why sometimes failed prophecy is in fact fatal and why it isn't. Yeah. And so like you said,

I mean, I think, I think there's a good, you know, I think it's a pretty reasonable hypothesis, but, you know, the sample size isn't enormous. And I don't really know much about, you know, Q, it's not my area, so expertise, but looking at new religious movements, right? If you look at the once you did the best, like the Jehovah's Witnesses was probably like the least harmed at all. And their beliefs were like, hey, like we're interpreting the Bible and we're trying to do it accurately. And this was in like a largely Christian population, right? So like just because one of their interpretations of the New Testament and the Old Testament were wrong, it doesn't mean that these people were suddenly like, well, I guess I don't believe in Jesus anymore. Or like, well, I guess I don't

believe in the Bible. Or even if you look at the Millerites, who did a bit worse, most people left the movement after their prediction was wrong, but a lot of them stayed. Once again, they were trying to interpret when Jesus would return based on a prophecy from the book of Daniel, right? So just because like their math was wrong, you don't have to be like, well, like I don't believe that like the Old Testament was inspired. And you even see this with like another, another group that did survive, although it was very harmed, called the Baha'is under the revision of the New Covenant, which comes up a lot in this literature, is a lot of people quit after they were wrong. But the leaders would emphasize like, hey, we're interpreters, we're not predicting. We're interpreting based off

like pre-existing sacred texts. And that makes sense because like, you know, you don't need to like abandon like your entire belief system if one part is wrong. And if you're just a human trying to interpret it, like, you know, if you're like, hey, I'm an omniscient angel channel and you're wrong, that looks pretty bad for you. But if you're someone who gets a couple details wrong about like how to read part of the Bible, that's like more sympathetic. Yeah. There's another way I think that your research invites, I think, a more nuanced understanding of these dynamics. Because, like, again, talking about, like, the Millerites was, like, after the failed prophecy, after the great disappointment, the Millerites kind of like, as they existed before, kind of disbanded, but

it gave birth to the Adventist movement, and then which still survives today as the seventh-day Adventist. But it was, obviously, it's not the exact same kind of belief system that that Miller sort of preach, but it's sort of like an altered form. And this sort of like, invites the question. So if there's a belief system that's based upon some sort of prophecy and it fails, what happens when it changes in a way that's sort of like between abandoning your belief system entirely, you know, they'll become, you know, an atheist or something, or doubling down, it's like, no, actually it's right, or perhaps it's right in a spiritual way, or some sort of reinvention of the narrative. What if it's altered? And how is it altered? And what ways does

the failed prophecy alter the core belief system? And what metamorphosis emerges and what sort of like comes at what what what belief system comes out the other side i think this is uh i think might be an interesting area of research that i think is like more nuanced and sort of assuming that every time a failed prophecy happens the uh people who believe the the belief system are kind of like either double down or abandoned entirely yeah that's right i do think this is um you know most of my work is like professionally is like pretty quantitative but this is an area where you know i do think you just have like reasonable people making like judgment calls right but there are some the cases where it's kind of like honestly even ambiguous whether a group had a failed prophecy

right like you know a lot of groups have very hedged language like they'll be like um so like some UFO religions they'll talk about like hey like the aliens are coming they're probably going to come next year and then they'll also have a message saying like well the aliens will only come when humanity is ready so it makes it really hard to say like you guys are like definitely wrong right so there is like a lot of like real social ambiguity and like the literal text of the prophecies sometimes and how it's like received by like the adherence. Yeah. So I'm curious what you're working on next because like we mentioned earlier, like just

because a study is bad or even just because a study is fraudulent, that doesn't mean that the sort of like the phenomena that sort of described in the study is totally wrong. But you were talking earlier, it's like you suspect that perhaps there are more serious flaws with the whole concept of cognitive dissonance theory than, then there's maybe uh then people think yes that that is my position and that comes from reading from outside of um social psychology to be honest so there's a couple of other um like famous findings of the cognitive dissonance theory and i think there's reason to be suspicious of one so one famous study said that if you undergo an more intense or stressful initiation into a group you'll value it more

So there's this famous study from the late 1950s where women in college had to like read something to join a discussion group. And some of them were given like a really boring thing to read. And some of them were given like dirty words essentially like sexual phrases to read in front of a male observer. And then they did like a small survey and they're like, oh, look like the women who had to embarrass themselves liked the group more. And then people are like, see, this is like why hazing works. You know, if you have a more stressful initiation to a group, you'll rationalize. he'll say, I didn't, like, do something stupid. You know, I went through the pain because the prize was worth it, right?

And I think, honestly, cognitive is weird to me. It was on one hand, it always has an intuitive appeal. But then you think about it and you're like, wait, does like making a job worse make me like it more? Or does like making an airplane worse? Make you like it more and then you're not. But in 2022, you have these two, I believe they're sociologists. Samino and Thomas do a study where they actually trap people going through fraternity initiation, some of which has what you might call hazing some which they're like hey in the real world more intense initiation has no experience another part of cognitive dissonance theory i'm skeptical is this idea of induced compliance and this is the idea if you're like pressured to do something it might cause you to convince yourself you don't want to think of yourself who's like bullied or badgered into doing something right so there's this idea that if you're like paid to do a boring task maybe you'll convince yourself that like you didn't do something really boring for no money you just you actually liked it or something or something

But we have real-world experiments of this from military conscription. Like during the Vietnam War, there was literally a lottery based on birthdays where some men were at high risk of being sent to fight in Vietnam and some men weren't in the United States. And the people who were like exposed to the state coercion, they actually became more anti-war, which like I think a normal person would expect, but you wouldn't expect that if you thought people rationalized their compliance with authority. And there's similar experiments like from East Germany.

So I have a preprint if people are interested that you can read freely at the Open Science Foundation called cults, conscripts, and college boys where I, like, review evidence from outside of social psychology that I think challenges some of this lab work. But, you know, it's not peer reviewed yet. So I don't want to say, like, those are my reasons for skepticism about the field, I'll say. But I don't want to present it as conclusive yet. I mean, yeah, it is really, really interesting because, like, again, so much, so much of the research I look into is really about, like, how, like, irrational people are. and like how people, like, they behave in these, these counterintuitive ways. But, I know, I kind of like your angle because it, although it has a little bit more optimistic sort of attitude towards humanity. It presents people as, like, more sort of, like, aware of their beliefs and more willing to change than perhaps some of the literature gives them credit for.

I do think, like, I don't think people are, like, perfect international nor perfectly intelligent. But I think, like, when we step outside of the world of psychology, people do, and what we're like, read in psychology studies it does seem like people are normally rationalish we can say if something's cheaper on sale people buy more of it if your job is more pleasant you like it more um you know you'll have like skeptic groups you go out and debunk mediums by showing their tricks that's bad for the mediums the mediums don't think to themselves yes now my fans will double down and believe my powers more it's like humiliating right and so i think if we step outside of the world of like social psychology literature we normally assume people are like move in the right direction

in general, when they're given information. Not like 100% of the time, but generally. That's really interesting stuff. Speaking to Thomas Kelly about this really interesting research into when prophecy fails. I'm going to look to some of the papers you've written in the show note so they can explore this more. I think it's really interesting. I think it's, oh, no. It's like, again, it's like, it gives me a hopeful feeling.

It's like, you know, it's the vindication of the debunkers. We're not just wasting our time. We're potentially helping people understand. and provide new perspectives on their belief system that may actually change. So yeah, thank you so much, Thomas. This has been a really interesting talk. It was great to be here.

Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. For everything else, we have a website, qaa podcast.com.

Listener, until next week. May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. Psychological story of decision-making doesn't end, however, when a decision has been made. The act of making a decision can trigger a flood of other processes. According to psychologist Leon Festinger, whenever we choose to do something that conflicts with our prior beliefs, feelings, or values. a state of cognitive dissonance is created in us, a tension between what we think and what we do.

And this tension makes us uncomfortable enough. We're motivated to reduce it in a number of ways. We may change the way we think about the decision or try to change how others think about it so that they can support our decision. Or we may change some aspect of our behavior so that our decision seems more in character with us. In other words, we try to reduce the dissonance between how we can support. think we should act and how we actually act by changing one or the other. By discovering how people actually behave and not how some theory says they ought to behave,

psychology can provide guidelines to help us catch ourselves before we go astray or redirect us once we do, if we follow them. Thank you.