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Enjoy your day. Sell your car today. Car pickup fees may apply. Hi everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Julian Walker.
- [02:07]
B
I'm Matthew Remsky and we are on Instagram and threads on SpiritualityPod, as well as individually on Blue Sky. And you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon or just the bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. We are independent media creators and we really appreciate your support. Episode 2284 when prophecy Science Fails with Thomas Kelly. Tell me if you've heard this one before. In 1954, a doomsday alien cult headed up by housewife Dorothy Martin was waiting for the cataclysmic flood that would herald the arrival of spaceships to transport her and her followers to safety. But when the hour came and went and nothing happened, she and her followers followers made up a Bible's worth of excuses, saying that the group's penitence and piety had saved them. And so the failure of the prophecy was actually a validation of their new religion. And even though its central claim had been refuted, they accelerated their efforts to proselytize and convert new followers. This is the story of the 1956 classic psychological study When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry Reichen and Stanley Schachter. The problem is this didn't really happen, at least not that way. As researcher and guest this week, Thomas Kelly points out from his investigation of newly unsealed archival materials, the psychologists not only embedded themselves in Martin's cult in a way that provoked their most irrational statements, they also fudged the outcome of the Martin story to suit their virally popular new theory of cognitive dissonance. Thomas Kelly will join me to unpack his research, but Julian and I will start with a discussion of the implications on how we look at and understand cultic organizations and religion and politics in light of these new findings.
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A
Okay, so the main focus of today's episode is, as you just said, Matthew Thomas Kelly's brand new dismantling critique of what is often considered a bedrock study in social psychology, especially as it applies to one of our key topics here on the pod cult dynamics. And we're going to get into Kelly's paper and your great interview with him in a little bit. But to set the table, the original study was published in book form in 1956. It was titled When Prophecy Fails and it's really the best known work of Leon Festinger. Alongside co authors Henry Ryken and Stanley Schachter. They studied a UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers. And this study is cited absolutely everywhere. You said stop me if this is familiar. I mean it's familiar because there was stuff like this in the 50s. There was, there were quite a few cases like this. But this actual study and the story that they tell is cited everywhere in the academic and the popular literature whenever the concept of cognitive dissonance is being discussed.
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B
I think it came up just the the title of the book was repeated as kind of a mantra or refrain in the dark days of QAnon around the Biden inauguration. Actually I remember people sort of pulling that phrase whether they knew the book or not, but it was just sort of in the water.
- [05:49]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Now, prior to writing When Prophecy Fails, Festinger had already embarked on a very solid research career at several universities and in the government during World War II. He was the real deal in terms of being a polymath. Like, he developed statistical tests and. And something called mathematical decision theory or a version of a mathematical decision theory for that kind of statistical analysis. His PhD was on the taste preferences of rats, but he was most interested in how people's beliefs and opinions adapt to their social surroundings. He and his colleagues did work on something they called proximity theory, which became part of the canon. And it suggests that we often form relationships with in more passive ways based on how often we see and interact with one another, rather than purely on factors like shared tastes and beliefs. He also published work on how social communication informs our perception of reality, which led eventually to his coining another very influential concept, Social comparison theory, which argues that we evaluate the accuracy of our beliefs and perceptions of. In comparison to others who we perceive as similar to ourselves. And all of this work was happening in the early 1950s. This is when social psychology was just in its infancy and the mechanistic shadow of behaviorism was still looming large over psychology in general. And they were pushing back against that.
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B
Well, they were, but I think it's a crucial point because as we'll see in Kelly's report on how they actually carried out the study, they were kind of treating these folks like they were pigeons in Skinner boxes. But the irony was they were in the boxes themselves, along with the group members.
- [07:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, their methodology is really flawed. And to be fair, a lot of people have pointed that out in different ways over time. But it's this whole new layer of critique that Kelly's able to get into that is so fascinating and made us want to have this conversation today. Now we can perhaps, looking back at Festiga's career, intuit how there is this natural next step on the research path that moves in the direction of groups with atypical beliefs that are out of step with how most of society views reality. He and his colleagues were drawn to this group that had been reported in a newspaper as having announced that the apocalypse was coming on December 21st. It's always December 21st with the New Age folks. Yeah. In 1954, that article told of a housewife named Dorothy Martin who claimed to be receiving messages from benevolent aliens on a planet she called Clarion. In the summer before the prophecy was set to occur, Festinger and his colleagues began or people within their group began infiltrating this small group of followers of Dorothy Martin's, engaging in the controversial participant observer method of pretending to be new recruits.
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B
Although it wasn't really controversial at the time, they thought they were doing a great job. They were on the case, they were in there, they were getting the news.
- [09:00]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think since those times that that method has come to fall into, it's a pretty serious disrepute. Like how.
- [09:08]
B
Yeah, except in the documentary films that we've actually covered already on this podcast, so we'll get to that.
- [09:13]
A
Yeah, yeah. Those documentary filmmakers maybe could have benefited from some literature view anthropology and social psychology. So as they infiltrated, they noticed that some members were so committed to the prophecy that they had quit their jobs, they'd sold their houses, ended relationships with people who didn't go along with their beliefs. They'd given away possessions and money in preparation for being taken on board the UFO that Dorothy Martin said was coming to save them. And so as you mentioned, Matthew, and as is perhaps not too big of A spoiler, when December 21 came and went and there was no UFO, the contention of Festinger et al, was that this led to more vigorous proselytizing and recruiting. This is one of the key things, right, that the group had supposedly previously shunned publicity, but then when the prophecy failed, they doubled down and they started really trying to publicize their beliefs and get more people on board. And this observation, as it turned out, fit rather neatly with the hypothesis that they were already working on about cognitive dissonance. Essentially, this theory says that when we feel enough tension, enough discomfort around contradictions between our beliefs and our actions, we become motivated to find ways to relieve that dissonance. Dissonance, especially when the evidence that our beliefs are false is strong. And this can lead to you doubling down, denying reality, convincing ourselves of lies so as to protect those false or dishonest beliefs.
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B
It's really kind of like a story of a pathological further fall. Like you start out with something that doesn't work and then you make it worse. Like it's a very, it's a very eerie theory. And I think, you know, as we'll discuss, we see it, we see it at play. We, we, we recognize this. I think it makes intuitive sense, but it's also gives this version of humanity that's like, oh God, it's really. If you make a mistake, you're probably going to make it fucking worse. And that's just how we are. And yeah, here's your. Here's your little pellet in your Skinner box.
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A
Yeah. And just keep digging that hole deeper and deeper because it's way too humiliating to say, oh, I was wrong.
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B
Yeah. Right.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. So the theory of cognitive dissonance has been referred to as the most important achievement of social PS Research going back several decades.
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B
Yeah.
- [11:37]
A
And When Prophecy Fails has been viewed as the landmark study that, you know, is. Is the crowning glory or what really established the reality of cognitive dissonance theory. Continuing work on the theory by these and other researchers, I should say, have led to observations about things like how smokers rationalize the evidence of negative health outcomes and keep smoking anyway. Or how meat eaters. I was big into this when I was a vegan because they. It's true. Right. As a meat eater, I deny the suffering of the animals I eat. I kind of put that away somewhere and don't think about it while I enjoy a tasty steak. There are also experiments that show an interesting relationship between our willingness to misrepresent our beliefs or opinions to others based on financial motivations. And that brings to mind the famous quote from Upton Sinclair, often referred to by conspiracy theorists, that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. Right.
- [12:36]
B
Yeah. So this is a study of internal splits and contradictions that apply very directly and intuitively to inner psychic struggles over behavior that I think a lot of us are familiar with, like how do we make ourselves feel better about our shortcomings or our sins? I think the Sinclair quote is interesting because it gets at the political implications, that material influences of money or class might be used unconsciously to defend oneself against an ethical or political political challenge. And I think we are in a hugely interesting time for this particular reconsideration via Kelly, of When Prophecy Fails to Drop. Because a lot of us have relied, I think, implicitly or explicitly on the theory of cognitive dissonance to explain how Trump voters stand by him through lie after lie, embarrassment after embarrassment, failure after failure to avoid humiliation. As you mentioned, we watch the MAGA crowd generate rationalizations for one setback after another. QAnon set the mold here because it would instantly transform some vivid example of Trump's incompetence into evidence that he was actually playing 5D chess or whatever.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Of course, the core group. The irony here is that the core group of Chan posters were also trying to make those rationalizations as funny as hell, in part because they knew that Facebook boomers would make fools of themselves taking them seriously. So there's an added complication there of, like, who's actually believing, believing what they're saying.
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A
So it was 60 chess, right?
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B
So we watch this unfold politically, and I think there's this human part of us that says, like, why would anyone double down for this guy? And I think it's very comforting to reach for social sciencey explanations, cult dynamics, cognitive dissonance. But I wonder sometimes if they're not really explanations so much as descriptions. Right. Like, you know, okay, so you believed in A and then B happened, so now you're saying C. I mean, okay, but I think a fuller explanation would have to telegraph or predict how that strategy would fall apart. And that's what's so interesting about Trump's confrontation with the Epstein files. Just to take a present example, like, it could be a moment in which cognitive dissonance can no longer be defended against. But my question is, if the Epstein case is the straw that breaks the camel's back, like, why is it, like, why now? Because I think if you take a, instead of a psychological view on the rise of Trump, but like a really a historical, materialist point of view, his support is mainly coming from those who believe he will serve their interests, their class and financial interests. So is it cognitive dissonance that makes them bypass his behavior? Or is cognitive dissonance like the surface behavior on top of the fact that he's continuing to just represent their class interests? Like, my questions now are about how much psychology versus how much economic realism we are doing when we engage these stories and these theories.
- [15:38]
A
Yeah. And I think it is really interesting to think of those two different angles of analysis. Right. I mean, in a way, the whole QANON phenomenon, part of why we got so interested in it is that it does have obviously conspiracy theory aspects, and it also has this kind of metaphysical overlay where there, there is a religiosity, there is a sense of him as some kind of savior figure. Yeah. There is a sense that we are the good guys at war with an evil cab. Turns out the. At the center of the evil cabal in real life is Jeffrey Epstein.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And so, yeah, there, I think, I think with any of these kinds of. We could say cultish or, you know, just beliefs that have. Have conspiratorial qualities that maybe are not well supported by evidence that have metaphysical underpinnings. What happens, what seems to happen actually more often than what Festinger et al Said is that you lose a lot of the less hardcore followers as the prophecies fail or as the hypocrisy gets revealed. Right. And I think that's part of what we saw with QAnon and as part of what we, I think, are seeing right now with the Epstein files. And time will tell. I'll just add here that there are multiple examples of this because religious prophecies always fail. Especially. Especially the more specific they are, the more likely they are to fail. If they have anything to do with something supernatural or paranormal, they fail because those sorts of things just don't really exist. So in this way, they're like psychic readings and channeled writings and spirit mediumship, and people keep believing based on. Usually on confirmation bias. Right. And on ignoring the things that. That don't fit with what they want to believe. Another thing these sorts of examples all have in common. True believers can utilize that confirmation bias, ignore the failures, and then enact very generous interpretations or cognitive distortions and contortions to try to make it seem as if the prophecies and the conspiracy theories have actually come true. But in the case of group enrollment, there usually does seem to be this effect, and it's precisely in the opposite of what Festinger says.
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B
Yeah. And to clarify, the opposite direction would be that the beliefs actually softened and that they retreated from proselytization really quickly. So this core sort of pathological turn where the thing that goes wrong means that you're going to act out more against your fellow man. That's the thing that was disconfirmed by this problem, by the problems that Kelly's unmasked.
- [18:17]
A
Exactly. And so typically, I think what we've seen happen again and again, but we can just stay with this example, is that the hardcore people are going to come up with a rationalization that is going to cover over their cognitive dissonance, and they are going to say, well, the world was saved because we were such good and faithful spiritual people that we somehow struck a deal for all of humanity through just our good energy or our prayers or what have you. But the. The people on the outskirts do tend to fall away. And what we know with Dorothy Martin is that she ended up distancing herself, moving to another city, and, you know, not never really talking about it again, even though later on she did get involved in other kinds of metaphysical activities and, and drawing a group around her, she didn't refer back and say, hey, I'm the lady from the. From the failed UFO cult in Chicago.
- [19:06]
B
Or did she refuted her past position. I mean, this is a very important point, is that when she was actually asked about it, she was like, well, you know what? I didn't really think that the ships were going to come and pick me up, and I was wrong about that. She actually came clean because she had another cult for people to join. But, yeah, she did walk it back. And I think that's extraordinary because I think partially under the influence of a study like this, I have been led to believe that that is not what the charism leader is capable of. But now I'm starting to sort of understand that maybe leadership is much more about technique than it is about content. That, that if, if you can figure out how to actually walk a story back because you have a different one, then. Then you can use that. You can go that route. Certainly that's what we see with Trump. Right? Like, he doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't have to stick by anything.
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A
Well, no, absolutely. So we, we would wait a very long time if we were expecting him to be consistent in some kind of way. And I think there are, there are leaders in this kind of mold that we' talking about for whom that is very much the case. And there isn't a sense of continuity, of, like, yes, I've had this whole long career in which I've stood by a set of claims I was making. It does tend to morph in some cases. So, again, I think the underlying, perhaps theme of our conversation today is it's complicated and reductive explanations tend to fall flat if you expect them to apply in every case. But if we go back to some examples here, I've done a lot of work on this for my Roots of Conspirituality series. And the example that always comes to mind for me is William Miller's Great Awakening, which flopped into what was called the great disappointment in 1844. This was in the American Northeast. And what happened, it resulted in the splintering of the quite large movement he had drawn around him. Estimates say some hundreds of thousands of people who had gotten convinced that he had figured out when Jesus was coming back and that splintering would end up creating the Seventh Day Adventist Church, for example, because Ellen G. White as a teenager was a follower of William Miller, and to some extent the Jehovah's Witnesses would come out of this. This is a very fertile period where a lot of new religious movements were forming, and a lot of them have this kind of watershed moment around the failed prophecy of William Miller into going off and doing their own thing.
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B
You know, I'm really interested in the fact that it was called the Great Disappointment. And was it called that by, by who though, because it feels like it could have gone a more productive way and actually predicted, you know, Melanie and Melanie Klein's psychology around, you know, achieving the depressive position and realizing that nothing is ever going to be perfect. And there you become more existentially aware and you become, you know, like, it could have been that. But was the greatest. Was the great disappointment like, like, was it a. Was it an. Multiplied by the people who thought that, that the Miller Millerites were hilarious?
- [22:15]
A
Yeah, they were raked over the coals. They were made fun of. It was not. I mean, they were the, the nice people raked them over the coals and said, hey, you're still here. What happened? You. Are you disappointed? You. You told us all that we were, you know, going to go to hell and you were going to be the ones who were saved. And look, here you are, you idiots, and you've sold all your. You've sold your farm and you've cut off your hair and you've given away your jewelry. There were also people who like, attacked some of these followers. And there's even an account of a church having been burned down where people were really angry and saying, look, we've had enough of you people. Much later, in 1990, after Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church of Christ Universal and Triumphant hid out in heavy duty fallout bunkers they'd constructed in Montana based on her doomsday prophecy, fully a third of the group left when the US and the USSR turned out not to have gotten involved in a nuclear death spiral as she had predicted. And then you have people like this guy. This would come around every few years. Howard Camping, do you remember this guy?
- [23:22]
B
Yeah, right.
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A
He raised like $80 million from followers. He was a radio evangelist and he claimed that the world would end on Christ's return. He claimed this multiple times, but I think the last time he got to do this was in 2011. And some months after that prophecy failed, it was reported that his average Sunday in person church service was drawing around 25 people. Derek here. As a longtime independent contractor and small business owner, keeping track of my finances is among my least favorite activities. Things like paying estimated quarterly taxes to save on my annual tax bill when April rolls around. And then I found Found. The Fintech company reimagines what business banking should be by putting bookkeeping, invoicing and tax tools directly into your business checking account. Found eliminates the clutter by offering one platform that handles it all. Banking, bookkeeping, invoices and taxes. Take back control of your business business today, open a Found account for free at found.com that's f O-U-N-D.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with Found. Black Friday Savings are here at the.
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B
You know, I just want to flag I'm going to talk a little bit about this in a moment, but when we think about this inner core that remains right? So a third of Claire profits group leaves after the prophecy around all out nuclear war fails and then Howard loses all of his people. He's got 25 people in the pews. I think if we look at that through the lens of Festinger, we're saying, okay, so there's a group of people who harden around their psychological premises so closely that they just can't let them go. And they're really in trouble in terms of trying to resolve their cognitive dissonance. But I can tell you that in the two groups that I was in, the two high demand groups that I was in, the people who stayed weren't necessarily the most faithful ones, I would say, but they were fucking vulnerable. They were the ones who there was no chance whatsoever that they were going to get outside work. There was no way that they were going to be able to function in outside high demand group relationships. They were going to live and die by sweeping up the altar and that was it. There was no other chance or work for them. And so that's very complicated. It's like Is that cognitive dissonance or is it just like vulnerability and material need?
- [27:13]
A
Yeah, and that's it. I mean, you're making a really, really good argument there for these people are they have nowhere else to go and they, they rely for their material and, and interpersonal survival on being in this group. So for them, I think you could really make a strong case. Belief system is secondary to the needs that the group has come to meet for them.
- [27:38]
B
And it might be that, you know, if asked, they will say, yes, I believe in this. Like, anyway, I'll quote somebody later who says almost exactly this. We'll come back to it. But you had something else.
- [27:50]
A
Okay, Yeah. I mean, as you already referenced here on the podcast, we all watched and then reported on the fever pitch QAnon hysteria of 2020 fading rapidly as first the election in 2020 and then January 6, 2021, and then January 20, and then March 4 and then 20 March again. These were all dates when the buzz in the QAnon community was like, okay, this is actually what the prophecy is referring to. Right. This is when it's all going to happen and they're going to be publicly televised executions of the Democrat in Hollywood cabal and there's going to be this great awakening. Trump will be reinstated. He didn't really lose the election based on whatever math they were. Little did we know back in early 2021 that so many proponents of that nonsense would end up being back in the limelight. But now as, as people in the government having largely moved on from that failed conspiracy theory, like, like Cash Patel isn't up there saying, I'm still going to prove that QAnon is true. He's, he's one of these people who just morphed. Right, Right. But loosely affiliated groups like these broad New Age movements that we're talking about, I think they ex consumer culture that seems to be able to withstand popularly hyped up events like the failed 2012 Mayan prophecy. Like that was everywhere in yoga and wellness and New Age circles at the time. Everyone was like, 2012 is coming. And people got really wealthy selling books and concerts and, you know, audio tape programs and doing meditation sessions on preparing for 2012. The idea then was that disclosure was going to happen about all the UFOs that have been visiting us and the governments have been hiding it from us. And I just watched all of these authors and workshop speakers switch gears when nothing happened. In fact, I actually personally sent a very irate email to Sounds True Audio to Tammy Simon saying, hey, look, you backed all of this and you made money off of all of this. Where is the statement saying you're sorry and you want to give people their money back? Yeah.
- [30:00]
B
Did you get an answer from Tammy Simon?
- [30:02]
A
First of all, never did. Never did.
- [30:04]
B
Yeah. So you're saying something interesting here, which is that if there a consumerist engine behind a particular culture, is it easier to pivot and switch gears? And why? Is it because that the people who are consuming that stuff feel like they're shopping anyway?
- [30:21]
A
Maybe. I also think it's a little bit of the medium as the message where the spreading of the ideas is part of sales copy. It's like you're on the email list and the email list is telling you these very important prophecies as a way to sell you something. And so, okay, what is today's email selling?
- [30:44]
B
Right. Right. You're being sold on the promise itself and not its content. And there's a repetitive nature to that promise. And so why, why should you really niggle on the details of, of whether it's, you know, the Mayan prophecy or QAnon? Yeah.
- [31:02]
A
If you're selling products and services or experiences based on prophecy, well, then you always need new prophecy, right?
- [31:10]
B
Yeah. Because time is moving. Right.
- [31:11]
A
Time, and you gotta, you gotta sell more products. So like, what's the next prophecy? It doesn't. The prophecy that comes true is actually a liability. It's a, it's a feature, not a bug. When your prophecy fails. Especially if it's about the end of the world.
- [31:25]
B
Yeah. And I understand the, I really understand the attraction too, because I, I mean, and this is a, this is kind of like a, a Marxist comment about, about living in capitalism is that there never feels like there's any end goal. Goal. Right. So, like, where is this all going? What is the purpose of all of this production? Why are we developing this and that and the other thing? Like, there's no real answer to that. And I imagine that hooking into people's sort of alienation with regard to that problem is, Is really effective. Like if you can say, you know what, on December 21st, everything's going to be different. Finally, finally, everything's going to be different because, you know, I think I feel like there's a lot of treading water.
- [32:14]
A
Yeah. And you can say the same thing about wellness and optimization and becoming more masculine. Like, where is it all going and does it ever end?
- [32:23]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [32:25]
A
After you've bought this program, that is going to be the thing that finally fully optimizes you in the way you've always known was possible but have never been able to achieve. There will be another program that will make similar promises in a new way. So, yeah, all of that I think is on point, man. Matthew, I want to direct interested listeners if you're a little bit more nerdy in terms of the research paper trail to a 1994 paper titled When Festinger Fails, which examines how the multiple doomsday prophecies of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and this goes to your point, Matthew, were actually ameliorated. The failed prophecies were ameliorated within the Jehovah's Witnesses by the institutional structures and the ideology of the church. So this is a person who makes, I think, a similar argument to what you're making and also how within those kinds of well established structures and hierarchies and social networks, you can get away with a lot of failed prophecy because actually the organization is meeting a lot of other needs. There's also a 2011 paper by Dawson that's titled Clearing the Moving Beyond Festinger to A New Paradigm for the Study of Failed Prophecy. That's very interesting too.
- [33:38]
B
Yeah, so a lot has been said already about Festinger. I think Thomas Kelly. Kelly has this explosion coming out of archive box number four in this library that he gets to. So we'll hear about that. One of the things I think about this field, and especially hearing your recitation of these cases and how we apply cognitive dissonance theory, it seems to rely on a number of scenarios that are, I don't know, very clear, somewhat obvious, somewhat dramatic, involving fringe groups and dramatic stories. I think QANON stands out on the list because it was a mass movement that was interwoven with Maga culture. And when we saw it tear itself apart on Biden's inauguration day, it was clear that it was really a temporary coalition with too many cooks in the kitchen to come up with a coherent final rationalization. They had many of them, but it's not like any of them stuck to one. I also want to note that Festinger et al Suggested with caveats, that this theory could be applied very broadly as well, not just to UFO cults in the Midwest. They suggested that cognitive dissonance theory could explain the origins of major religions. So they implied that the evangelistic fervor of early Christians following Jesus's crucifixion was cognitive dissonance in action. They argued that the murderers of Christ falsified his messianic claims. And that disappointment, that great disappointment, drove the followers to attempt to spread their now falsified beliefs in order to reduce the painful dissonance. But to make that work, Festinger et al. They had to ignore the scriptural evidence and the cultural tradition that Jesus actually predicted his suffering and death at the hand of the state. And that would make the crucifixion a confirmation of a prediction, but not a disconfirmation. And so Festinger et al. Would be wrong. Yeah, but I think that the attempt to apply a fairly narrow theory to something as complex as a world religion with so many unanswered questions about its sources and so many different cultures and subcultures is a sign of a reductionist mode that tries to use one trick to reduce a ton of possibilities with regard to how people understand events and digest them into stories.
- [36:07]
A
Yeah, it is this unfortunate tendency to. It's like doing a just so story. Right. You've gone a heuristic and you're going to apply it to all these different things. When I look at Festinger's work, just from the familiarity I've been able to form from preparing for this, I see someone, I see a brilliant person doing a lot of legitimate research and making breakthroughs and having an impact on his field and then maybe getting a little transfixed with the eye on the prize of, wow, I'm going to have this big bestselling book and I'm going to become a giant in the field and we're going to make everything fit and then over in various ways that, you know, decoding the gurus, I think would, would sort of have a field day with the polymath, the galaxy brain, the overreach, the, the sense of narcissistic self importance that's going on here.
- [36:57]
B
Well, to that last point also, just the lying, because, you know, this is what Kelly goes through in the, in the notes, back and forth between the researchers is that they know that they are obscuring details or they're hiding particular aspects. They, they're, they're, they're making shit up.
- [37:13]
A
Yeah, and that's actually, you know, the study that we talked about a little bit ago where you basically, you, you do a really boring task for an extended period of time in the study and then you're recruited kind of in a, in a sneaky way where you think you're really just being recruited, but it's part of what they're studying to then convince other people that they should do this terrible task and you're told that you should represent, even though you found it boring, you should represent it to them as if it's really, really interesting, right? And, and it turns out that if you pay people a small amount of money that they will, they will go along with this and they will say, yeah, you know, actually it's, it's, it seems boring at first, but it's really fun doing this, this really meaningless task. And then when those people are asked later on how they felt about it, they will have sort of changed their mind. But if you, if you go further and they will actually end up saying, yeah, no, actually I did think it was, it was pretty cool. I wasn't actually lying. But if you give them more money, right, then they will be motivated to tell others it's a really interesting task. But later on they will say, nah, it was bullshit, but they paid me enough money that I was fine lying. That's really interesting. And that actually is one of the other studies that's held up as being really, really a really significant breakthrough. And I just can't help but think of Festinger in all of this going, yeah, I know we're lying, but it's kind of worth it. This is his own, he's in the Skinner box too. And he's making his, his own justification based on the cognitive dissonance of like, well, they're not really behaving the way our theory predicts, but the theory is good and we've got this book deal and I'm going to go on television a whole bunch. So yeah, we'll just do it.
- [38:53]
B
That was my last question to Thomas Kelly was actually was, you'll hear it is. So are there going to be a lot of people who are attacked by cognitive dissonance when they hear about Festinger's failure at establishing cognitive dissonance? Part of what I get from this all is that there's this zone of social psychology that feels intuitive, like we've seen. I know cognitive dissonance in myself and it might be useful at a certain scale, but at two to three times larger than Dunbar's number or whatever, the utility might fail. And then I really want to know the economic and political forces at play. And this is my hobby horse. Like every time there's a psychologization of a social phenomenon that gets some, that set some small group apart from the whole of society as if they're uniquely weird. I get uneasy about the politics because there's just so much that we never know about people's conditions. When you go through when prophecy fails, the financial details of Martin and her followers are fairly sparse, but you mainly find middle class folks in some professions, but more students and more working class followers. And then Kitty o', Donnell, to speak to the point I was making previously, is non student member who works on a production line of a nearby factory. And to commit fully to Martin's prophecy, she quits her job and she intends to live on her savings, which is like $600 at that point. And she later remarks, I have to believe the flood is coming on the 21st because I've spent nearly all my money. I quit my job, I quit comptometer school, I don't even know what that is, and my apartment costs me $100 a month. But she was also one of the first to leave after the flood didn't materialize. So there's all kinds of noise in but the last main point that I want to make is that, you know, we on this podcast have. Well, I've been on a bit of a crusade about the ethics of streaming cult documentaries, where the crew embeds themselves in the story and the filming without disclosing the degree to which they're impacting the story. So I interviewed John Casby, who made that Teal Swan documentary, where I uncovered some deceptive editing and a peak sequence, and where the subjects also came out and showed just how sleazy kind of the production team had been in making friends with the group and pitching the project as neutral when the end result clearly made them all look insane. There's the vow from HBO where doc makers Jahan Ujem and Karim Amer used a kind of cinema verite vibe to produce something more like reality tv because they were using their prior contacts with nxivm, which were undisclosed, to embed within and then exacerbate a schism in the group's leadership as Mark Vicente and Sarah Edmondson began to agitate against Ranieri along with Catherine Oxenberg. Like a lot of actors as well, in this particular screenplay, Amer played a key role in getting the first New York Times article published. And that started this cascade of thrilling action for them to capture on film. One of their contractors on that project was filmmaker Suki Madawi, who was a DOS survivor. This was Rainier's sort of elite group of women who were actually scarified. And she described being asked to play a double role in the filmmaking process of director of photography and subject. But also she said that she disclosed her story, her survivorship story, under circumstances of questionable consent. So there's a writer named Janet Malcolm that I just want to quote at the end here. She wrote for the New Yorker. I think she died in 2021. And she wrote a book called the Journalist and the Murderer Murderer, and it's a 1990 publication. And it examines this kind of toxic, investigatory, you know, bad boundaries tendency by looking at the case of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald and the journalist who wrote his story, Joe McGinnis. So McGinnis started out treating MacDonald as if he was innocent to gain his trust, but then ultimately depicted him as a sociopath in a book called Fatal Vision, and that led to a big lawsuit. But Malcolm Explore uses this story to explore journalism as inherently manipulative. Like it's something. If it's not. If it's not going to be inherently manipulative, you have to be working really hard to respect your subjects because she's talking about how journalists are trying to control the narrative by selectively interpreting facts. But more than that, she's worried about journalists being, like, parasitical assholes. And the quote that I love from this book is the freedom to be cruel is one of journalism's uncontested privileges. And the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions. And so I think this is an attitude that can, you know, creep up on people. I think that, you know, we kind of see it in When Prophecy Fails, and I've definitely felt it in myself.
- [43:56]
A
Yeah. And I think the very important thing that you're pointing out here is the. Is the distinction between doing any kind of academic research. Science.
- [44:07]
B
Yeah.
- [44:08]
A
And doing some version of storytelling, whether that's novelistic or journalistic, and where those lines are, then between, you know, well established data that holds up to peer review, well established facts and evidence that are in good standing as a journalist and. And then storytelling and interpretation and sensationalism.
- [44:33]
B
Right, Exactly. So we've got our interview with Thomas Kelly and that's coming up. He's a political scientist and writer who works at the intersection of social science and public policy. He recently published two articles on cults and Failed prophecy. So Debunking When Prophecy Fails is the focus of our discussion here. But he also published Failed Prophecies Are Fatal. Both links will be in the show Notes. He also writes at Cold Button Issues on Substack.
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Thomas Kelly, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
- [46:41]
C
Thanks, I'm excited to be here.
- [46:43]
B
Okay. In our communications prior, you said that like so many of us, you'd been familiar with with When Prophecy Fails just from the Cultural zeitgeist. And so I'm wondering, first off, when did you first pick it up for a close reading and what red flags did you see? At first?
- [47:03]
C
Sure, I started reading it, I think early 2023, just out of personal interest. It was always in the back of my head as, hey, this is a really funny, crazy story that ended up being really influential academically. And I did read the book and it is a really funny book. It's really well written. I would say, like, it's a great read. But the whole thesis of the topic is that you have this really insular group that's happy to keep their teachings to theirselves. Right? They'll grudgingly let people join, but they don't really care. They're not like a missionary movement. But then when the UFOs don't show up on time in order to like reassure themselves, they like go crazy trying to spread the word to other people. For instance, the authors make this big deal about like, after the prophecy fails, they start returning phone calls to some media outlets.
- [47:51]
A
Right.
- [47:52]
C
But what was weird in the book itself is they would say they didn't want to spread their teachings and the next chapter would be like, also in attendance was a book publisher. They were trying to publish a book of their teachings. Wow, that seems pretty committed to evangelism to me. So Dorothy Martin was trying to publish a book and she did interest a publisher who actually like didn't publish her books, but showed off to a lot of the Key meetings, like he was there the night the world was supposed or the night the flood was supposed to happen.
- [48:20]
B
Now had any of these red flags, you're just sort of picking them up and they seem very obvious to you. But had they been thoroughly examined in prior scholarship?
- [48:29]
C
People had worried about the general ethics of joining and small new religious movement. So people were like, okay, like we wouldn't do this today. So there was like there was discussion of that. And then within people who studied cults specifically, there was a mixed reception of when prophecy fails. They tend to accept that it provided evidence that like cults and like religious belief could survive being proved wrong. But they were skeptical about its emphasis proselytization. They were like, that seems pretty non generalizable. But in general people still take it as a serious canonical work.
- [49:09]
B
So you follow your instinct to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. And that houses the collected papers of Leon Festinger. And you find or you hear about box number four and how it had been recently unsealed or maybe you had something to do with it, like why had it been sealed previously and why was it unsealed?
- [49:30]
C
So what happens is when I first get interested in 2023, I go to the library and I see they have several boxes you can request to look at. And then they have one box that in 2023 is still sealed. It says sealed until 2025 and it'll list and its description is just like original transcripts of one prophecy failed. So that obviously seems the most fun and I'm hopeful I can get it, even though it's not 2020 25. So at these libraries, because they're like fragile documents, you have to request what they bring out. So I just like write down every single box and I'm like, maybe they'll just bring me box four. Anyways, but then the staff comes out and they're like, no, you cannot see this until 2025. I try. Michigan has their own version of the Freedom of Information Act. So I'm like, oh, maybe I can get it because it's from a public university, but it doesn't apply to these types of, of archives. So I kind of set it aside and I do find that like the basic story I would say when prophecy fails, like you can tell is fake without these transcripts, right? There's evidence that like Martin, Dorothy Martin gave up her beliefs, that she didn't care to spread them. The same thing happened to her followers, but the details of what went on. I had to return to ann arbor in 2025 to read those.
- [50:43]
B
So it's a box of transcripts, telephone logs, research notes, channeled messages and internal communications. The authors, led by Festinger. And as we'll get to like you show how these materials prove that the authors were making shit up and they knew it. I'm always puzzled by stories in which people incriminate themselves with their own papers. Like, why do you think Festinger preserved all of those notes?
- [51:11]
C
Okay, so it's really weird, but I have to say it's like, not unique. A couple of years ago, there was a reevaluation of the Stanford. Stanford Prison experiment.
- [51:19]
B
Yes.
- [51:19]
C
Which was also right. And that was also based on favors they didn't throw away. So why they do it? You know, I can't read his mind. Maybe it's like nostalgia. It was a big turning point in his life. It was probably a lot of fun.
- [51:33]
B
Right.
- [51:34]
C
Maybe he kept it for his own personal life because this is his family that ends up donating these. Right. And like, you probably assume if you have a famous academic in their family, that nothing in their papers is to going to make them look this bad.
- [51:46]
A
Right.
- [51:47]
C
I want to assume that you might also think that the only people who check in on this are going to just be really sympathetic to you.
- [51:53]
B
It's just really interesting because it's pretty shameful. I mean, it's all of this backchanneling around. Well, we are going to have to emphasize this or let's try to figure out how to position that. I can also imagine him just forgetting that marginalia and it just sort of being, oh, well, that's my diary from that time.
- [52:15]
C
Yeah, I could see that. And one thing that's interesting is I didn't find anything that indicated they followed up on Martin or the lawheads. So it's not clear if they knew how badly the future history of the cult members would contradict them. Right.
- [52:30]
B
I mean, they'd gotten the story right.
- [52:32]
C
Right.
- [52:33]
B
So it's the mid-50s, and in one passage you note that social psychology really is in its infancy as a discipline. You just flagged that at the top of our interview by talking about how like, you know, people who have review viewed this stuff has said, well, ethically we wouldn't do something like this before, but we're in the situation where the authors of When Prophecy Fails are really in at the ground floor as this discipline takes shape. Now, on a purely process level, this is before there are any solid ethics guidelines and procedures for engaging with subjects. Right. Because it just sounds like the authors, they hear about Dorothy Martin, like ironically from the group's own proselytization. And then they jump in the car and they're like tornado watchers and they crash the party. Is that a fair way to think about it?
- [53:25]
C
Yeah, I think that's very fair. So there's none of these institutional guide rails that we have today. For better. Some people think they go too far and for worse, but there's not IRBs. You don't have the Belmont Principle for a couple of decades, so you're kind of just relying on the discretion of researchers to behave appropriately.
- [53:49]
B
And what would give them discretion? Like because they'd been brought up in nice schools or something like that, they were well mannered or something like, what would. Why would we trust them?
- [53:59]
C
In retrospect, it seems bizarre to us today. But like, they're not the only people to do crazy studies like this. There's this book called the Three Christs of Ypsilanti, which is about a researcher who like makes these three men who all have the delusion that they're Jesus, like interact with each other just to see what would happen.
- [54:17]
B
Oh God.
- [54:18]
C
But there is this crazy. There is this part in some of the research notes of two of the assistants in East Lansing who. And they're like, you know, after this is done, we should really have a debrief about the ethical challenges of getting so involved in these people people's lives. Was one of the research assistants there had essentially become the nanny to like the cult lieutenant's like young daughter. And so they were, they were really enmeshed. But at the same time, even when she was having some like, maybe abstract thoughts about ethics, she was very frustrated with the psychologist who was starting to look into the child welfare investigation of the cult deputies family. She was like, doesn't she realize this is a major study? Why doesn't she appreciate the importance of social science?
- [55:01]
A
Wow.
- [55:02]
B
So a lot of conflicting impulses there. But it does sound interesting that the person who's the nanny is the one who really clues into. Wait, how. Just how intrusive are we being here?
- [55:12]
C
Yeah.
- [55:13]
B
So Festinger grows up in a leftist and an atheist family. His father is a Russian radical immigrant who is very passionate about the irrationality of religion. And in a personal note, you found that Festinger is transparent about his father's influence in this area. But prior to when prophecy fails, Festinger isn't particularly focused on religion. So do you have the sense that running into the Martin story, like, really brings his skills and passions and maybe grievances together?
- [55:47]
C
Yes, that's definitely the read I have. If you just like read the book When Prophecy Fails, it's a funny book, but there's also a real smugness towards it, towards religion and also towards Martin's groups in particular. To some extent it's hard not to share. I don't think if other people go and read these archives, they're not going to be like impressed by like the thinking of the cult. Like they're not, you know, they're going to think these people are, have very unusual beliefs. Right. And they're probably going to think that you evaluate evidence or signs pretty poorly. But they really are just like gleeful about how silly these people are and how easily fooled they are.
- [56:29]
B
Storytelling mode for this one. There is a key ethical disaster that you cover that is central to the production of this book and this is that all of the researchers, as we've said, are embedded in Martin's group. They're pretending to be devotees. And then hen Reichen, who is operating under the very influential moniker of Brother Henry, specifically manipulates the events that he later reports on by fabricating psychic messages and deliberately shaping the climactic response of the group to the failed prophecy. So that's a quote from your paper. What the hell did this guy do?
- [57:11]
C
So from the beginning, the cult members and the cult leader Dorothy Martin are very impressed with Brother Henry. And from the out from the records, it's not really clear what he did. Maybe he was extraordinarily charismatic or good looking in person. But like you see this from Henry's perspective, from Leon's, from other people's. They, most people just go by their first name, but everyone always talks about him at Brother Henry or they're like, brother Henry, do you have a message for us today? And so he's held in very high range guard by everyone. They think he's like spiritually ascended. And on the night the prophecy fails, you know, they're all, they're the ones that have gathered at the cult leader's house, at Martin's house, are waiting for the aliens to come. They don't come. They wait some more, they still don't come. People are like starting to get like a little worried that maybe they're wrong or something, something's happened. And Henry starts to needle them a little like, hey, like, do you think it's like we were wrong all along? Like, you know, how would you feel now? He's kind of trying to interview them in his way answer the book. And Dorothy Martin, you know, she let.
- [58:22]
B
Me just pause there. He's trying to interview them in the process of their prophecy failure. He's asking them. He's asking them questions about how they're going to respond to what will become the subject of his book.
- [58:35]
C
Yes, yes, yes. So there's, like, notes about, like, who looks upset, who doesn't, you know, and so some people have actually already gone home at this point. So for instance, they had, like, a teenage follower who had a curfew, but they didn't think it was a big deal because the aliens were going to come before the curfew happened. And then the aliens don't come, so he has to leave to not get in trouble with his parents. So, like, they group's already, like, dwindled a little. And so he's. He's like, being like, hey, what do you think this means, you guys? And then Martin is like, oh, I'm getting a message. And unfortunately, we don't have this message, but Henry thinks it's really stupid. Like, a lot of these channeled messages are very vague. There's just, like, lots of references to, like, light and guidance, and it's, like, hard to say what they mean. And my guess is this is one of them because she's like, I'm getting a message. And according to her, she's like, I'm getting a message from. From, like, the fifth density. And he's like, oh, this is really dense. All right. And Dorothy is just really upset that brother Henry would talk to her like this, and she's just devastated.
- [59:36]
A
Wow.
- [59:37]
C
And then he, like, leaves the house in a huff. And Charles Lawhead, essentially the second command of the call, who's a physician, follows him outside. And Charles is like, hey, Henry, how are you? And. And Henry's like, you know, I don't want to be, like, a disbeliever. I don't want to doubt, but I'm really struggling to maintain my beliefs. Can you help me?
- [60:01]
B
Oh, my God.
- [60:02]
C
Right? And then Charles gives him this long speech about the importance of, like, sticking together and maintaining faith. Charles compares themselves, like, to the apostles. You know, like, they were persecuted, but they held on. We can do the same. And so in the book, they really reproduce this, and it's like, look how desperately they were rationalizing it. But, like, this whole speech was, like, explicitly asked for for Henry, who had broken character.
- [60:29]
B
Yeah, he had broken character for the first time. He had actually upset the leader by going from the Golden Child devotee to somebody who actually made a snarky comment, which must have been, like, quite jarring.
- [60:42]
C
Yes. And then Henry Goes back inside the house and he tells Mark. He's like, oh, all my doubts are gone. I really believe now, thanks to Charles. And then Dorothy Martin is thrilled. And then she starts writing the message that's like her official rationalization, which is like, we were such good people. Like, the light we released prevented the flood, so the aliens didn't need to prevent it. So the core rationalization examples are that the cult came up with this new theological teaching via Dorothy Martin, but it was directly, like, triggered by Henry saying, like, hey, just so you know, I've overcome my doubts. And then she's like, okay, now. And then she replaces the message he denounced with one that's like, more pleasing.
- [61:29]
B
It's incredible. And I just want to say, as somebody who is in two different high demand groups, the allure of the new recruit, who's extremely charismatic and especially if they are well read, if they seem to be intelligent, if they are urbane, if they are well dressed, if they seem to represent some kind of social capital, they are irresistible to a group that may be sort of struggling financially, they may be struggling in terms of their sense of cultural legitimacy. So I think there's something not only intrusive about what you're describing, but there's also a really heavy dialectical enmeshment of these social needs. Right. Because we're talking about a group that's in a fairly rural place that has a very strange set of ideas, and suddenly they're getting very positive feedback from the very academics who are going to tell them that they're idiots.
- [62:28]
C
Yes. So even the authors did note this happened at least once in When Prophecy Fails. And their notes provide some more detail. So for when the nanny who joined, she like, showed up at the door of the lawhead's house and they were like, what brought you here? And she's like, I had a dream about like a flood. And they were like, wow, this is psychic vindication of the message we already have. Right.
- [62:51]
B
That's totally fake. Right?
- [62:53]
C
Right.
- [62:54]
B
So she knew she was given that line beforehand.
- [62:56]
C
Right? Right. It was horrific. She didn't know how to enter the group. Right. But this is like, really exciting to them. She's like, they're like, oh, like you've been sent by the Space Brothers too. Right. And they're just really enmeshed in so many ways. For instance, the leader makes up a special ring called Perique, which is something spiritual, like, very good, very like, of high standing. And there's three of them, according to her, and two of them are genuine members but the third one is yet another research assistant who's joined the group. So they really can't be, you know, they make a substantial share up of the believers.
- [63:41]
B
You know, having said that, I do also want to say that the manipulation can also. Often it also goes the other way, because in one of my experiences, one of the things that actually locked me into a group as somebody, I think, who is well spoken and somebody who is probably culturally desirable for the group, the leader at a certain point pointed at me and he said, oh, so the Buddhist has arrived. Let's see what he has to say about all of this. And actually, that was part of my story, but I had no idea of how he knew that. And I only found out years later that somebody had slipped that information to him before. And so it's like, in a strange way, these researchers go in to debunk a cultic situation or to criticize it, and they wind up not only intruding upon a set of processes, but they wind up mimicking some of the deceptions that they're trying to protect society against. In a way, they seem to really.
- [64:46]
C
At least, Henry, because other researchers mentioned it, he thinks it's really fun. He thinks this whole experience is really enjoyable. And then at the end of the study, to get some exit interviews with the believers, he explicitly tells them, yes, the space brothers sent me here. I was sent to be the earthly verifier, is what he said. So you now all have to sit down for an interview with me and answer me honestly. And so these interviews conducted under the auspices of Alien Direction, are then some of the evidence that these people maintained their beliefs.
- [65:22]
B
I want to wrap up the sort of disaster, the research disaster of this before getting to the legacy a little bit. Here's my summary so far. So we have a set of cowboy esque, overconfident, smug psychologists who ride into East Lansing, Michigan to check out the local weirdos. They lie to the group to gain access. They're waiting to see what the crazy people will do. But they're also provoking them deceptively. And in the aftermath, they actively and knowingly ignore everything that would just confirm their story, especially around when the proselytization is happening in the group. Is that fair?
- [66:00]
C
Yes, I think so. Although one caveat I'll add is they did note it a couple of times in their research notes that they were observing proselytization happening before prophecy failed. So they weren't just internally ignoring evidence. They, like, observed some things and then chose not to write about it. So for instance, they were aware that the local PTA hated Dorothy Martin, but she was always trying to talk to the kids. Aliens.
- [66:29]
B
She was reaching out. She was reaching out to the local high school. Pretty soon after When Prophecy Fails is published, Festinger hardens in and locks up his biases as he publishes his full theory of cognitive dissonance. Now how does that happen? Like how does he sort of really lock it in?
- [66:52]
C
Custinger had been working on this concept for a while. So he goes into the cult study with many of these ideas already formed that when people have conflicting beliefs, you're going to try to like integrate them and that will sometimes cause them to behave like earlier irrationally, like doubling down on debunked beliefs.
- [67:10]
A
Right.
- [67:10]
C
So he already had this theory and he was kind of looking for evidence for it. So he publishes When Prophecy Fails comes out in 1956 with Rican and Shasta. And then 1957, out comes a theory of cognitive dissonance which contains evidence or supposed evidence from when Prophecy Fails and then some small scale lab studies and some like surveys. Right, right. When Prophecy Fails is not like the only source of evidence for this theory, but it's like, it's like the flagship, it's the fun story that makes it like really emblematic and easy to remember. And When Prophecy Fails, then outside of the theory of cognitive dissonance goes on to influence religious studies and like New Testament studies.
- [67:56]
B
Right. Well that's what I want to get to. What do you think the fallout will be on everything downstream of this original research on cognitive dissonance? Do you think researchers will be vulnerable to cognitive dissonance as they parse this out?
- [68:12]
C
So it's possible that cognitive dissonance of a paradigm or as experimental findings could be true and honest, even if it was originally inspired by a very bad study mind Prophecy Fails. So there's, there's ongoing debate about cognitive dissonance. I'm pretty skeptical of the framework as a whole. There was a year ago, there was a very large replication by Vitus et al that tried to replicate some of the findings of cognitive dissonance across like a bunch of different labs with a large sample size. They're like, hey, we don't really find evidence for this. I think there's lots of evidence from outside lab settings that cast out on this. If you are interested. I have a preprint at Soc Arcscy, but I hope people are interested in the history of the story itself and the dangers of trusting a singular account of events. Especially we can go back and fact check It. Right. It's true. We can say, like, the archive was sealed for decades and decades, but Dorothy Martin was not, like, a quiet person. Like, there were lots of people wrote about her in the following years. So she had all these opportunities to regather her cult or, like, defend her beliefs, and she refused to.
- [69:20]
B
She denounced them, actually.
- [69:22]
C
Right. In 1956, she walks them back. She's like, I never really expected to be physically picked up by aliens. It's like, okay, that's like a. That's a big change. And then when she moves to the American Southwest shortly thereafter, she's like, you know, she's still worried about the apocalypse. She never becomes a normal person.
- [69:37]
B
Right.
- [69:38]
C
She never becomes a normal person. But she's like, just so, you know, like, you can never know when the apocalypse is coming. That's wrong. It's against the New Testament. It's against the Bible. And then later, she kind of forms, like, another cult, but she refuses to talk about what happened in the 50s. Right. Like, she. She, like, rewrites her life story about how she gained her powers to channel. She refused. You know, there's no defense. There's no ongoing belief or proselytization on behalf of what was wrong. Right.
- [70:07]
B
And. And just one last point, which I think you go into in your essay, which is that one of the legacy impacts of the cognitive dissonance theory, as it goes into religious studies and biblical studies, is that researchers of Christianity, for example, begin to apply it to an argument for why Christianity actually survives the death of its leader. And because. Because it's like, if this guy is the son of God, if he's supposed to be magical or immortal, or if he can perform miracles, then why is he actually gone? Can you speak just a little bit about what's at stake there and how that argument has been mobilized?
- [70:54]
C
Yeah. So there's kind of this. Christianity is the world's biggest religion, and there's kind of this historical or sociological puzzle at the start of this. If you read, for instance, Paula Fredrickson's the First Generation When Christians Were Jews, she puts it like this. She's like, it's a little strange that after their leader gets killed, you have all these people from, like, Galilee that instead of, like, dispersing or giving up, they go to Jerusalem where they were just persecuted and become, like, fanatical about, like, trying to spread, like, their message. Right. It's very weird. Like, so there's this very weird thing at this beginning of this very mass movement, and it's like, what can explain their behavior. And when she writes this, she thinks when prophecy fails can be the explanation, right? She's like, hey, this is one way that when they're faced with this extreme cognitive dissonance, they think Jesus is like the Messiah or like, maybe God or something. They're like, wait, why is he dead? And the ants. And then one X explanation is that confronted between, like, they obviously saw him get killed or knew he was killed and they thought that wasn't supposed to happen. And they like, rationalized, like, the resurrection and there are now specific teachings. But when prophecy fails, I would say can't explain the origins of any religion because, like, it's like a fake study.
- [72:14]
B
The argument made that you just, that you just outlined what it would seem to sort of sideline is the possibility that early Christians didn't need to resolve cognitive dissonance so much as they had. They felt they had a political and sort of theological position that they really thought was important and that they wanted to bring to the center of their civilization. Is that a notion that gets edged out by the theory of cognitive dissonance?
- [72:45]
C
I think the popularity of the theory of cognitive dissonance in New Testament studies comes because, like, it's an alternative to, like, you know, like what, you know, like what a believing Christian would say because they'd be like, well, like the apostles did as they saw Jesus come back to life and was like, right, go spread my message. Right? So. So if you're not sympathetic to that interpretation, then it's like, oh, like, can we have, like, a clear social science example, right? Like, can we make. Can we just say, like, Christianity, the early Christians are just another example of this, like, standard phenomenon. And so people thought that maybe this theory would let them explain it that way.
- [73:21]
B
Thomas Kelly, thank you so much for your time. It's amazing research. I think you're going to get all kinds of emails and, you know, lots of people looking sideways when they think about Dorothy Martin now and Leon Festinger, too.
- [73:35]
C
All right, thank you so much. It was great to be on here, Sam.