This is a linkpost for http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jhbs.70043
This seems like it should have knock-on effects for Eliezer's "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs", which relies on When Prophecy Fails as a source.
If Kelly's account of things is correct, then one could describe the events as follows.
Leon Festinger and his colleagues made a dramatic and surprising prediction. When they had the opportunity to test that prediction out, things didn't in fact go the way they had predicted. In response to this, they falsified the evidence, interpreted things tendentiously, and went ahead with a vigorous campaign to spread their theory and get lots of other people to believe it; their theory prospered and remains widely believed to this day.
So it seems like Kelly's critique is kinda self-defeating. If Dorothy Martin's little UFO cult isn't really an example of the mechanism Festinger popularized, in the way Kelly describes, then Festinger and his colleagues themselves are an even better example of it.
Kelly's paper kinda acknowledges this: "If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow." But if he appreciates just how thoroughly he's portrayed Festinger's own behaviour as a perfect exemplification of the very theory he's skewering, he doesn't show it.
(My impression, as very much not any sort of expert, is that Kelly seems to be somewhat overselling the discrepancy between Festinger's account and reality. But I haven't read When Prophecy Fails, I haven't read the recently-unsealed documents Kelly is citing, and I could well be all wrong about that.)
So it seems like Kelly's critique is kinda self-defeating. If Dorothy Martin's little UFO cult isn't really an example of the mechanism Festinger popularized, in the way Kelly describes, then Festinger and his colleagues themselves are an even better example of it.
I think there is a huge difference between the two situations, for several reasons:
Yes, that all seems fair. I was just struck by the parallels.
(It is not entirely clear to me exactly what if anything Kelly is claiming about the state of mind, and motives, of Festinger and his colleagues. He does say near the start "that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false", but I don't see much evidence in his article that the authors knew their central claims were false. He does offer evidence that the authors interfered more than they admitted, but that isn't really the same thing.)
In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.