Cognitive Dissonance And The Harmonialist Gospel: How Psychology Made The 'New Age'

Famous study was flawed, unethical, more revealing than intended

Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter were Chicago psychologists who learned about a flying saucer cult in Oak Park, Michigan and set out to study what happened when their doomsday prophecy failed. They presented their findings in a 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, that stood for decades as a landmark study.

My reading of that text is at th…