Leon Festinger (1919–1989)

Well, it's a flipping epistemological clusterfuck, isn't it - rigorous empiricism gets a lot less rigorous as its data are mediated. You end up saying "trust us, we're rigorous empiricists" to people who aren't ever going to get to book time on the accelerator or the array and who aren't ever going to be able to check your maths. People whose best (political) protection - freedom of expression and information and thought, also fills their minds with the white noise of the millions of show more energetic cranks and prolific fraudsters who hammer away at their keyboards night after night.. Not to mention plausible shills, lobbyists, etc., etc.

I can’t believe what some science contributors advocate; it looks like some kind of Simon Cowell extravaganza to communicate science - make it glitzy and we'll all be experts in quantum mechanics? Perhaps it would be more instructive if some effort was put into understanding the psychology of how the non-scientific amongst us process such information.

One of the fundamental problems facing those endeavouring to disseminate any form of factual data is one of cognitive dissonance. For example, the conflation of astrology with science and a belief in the equivalence of their methodology.

It is immensely tiresome to read that it is all the fault of scientists that the general public has a poor understanding of its various disciplines. It turns scientists into villains, and naysayers into victims fighting to defend their version of the "truth" against the deceitful and malign intelligence of the experts.

I find it hilarious that the deniers go on and on about "how consensus isn't science" and yet starting from the 90s the deniers were the ones complaining that "the verdict is still undecided". Hence the scientific community, in many independent, peer-reviewed, ways showed that climate scientists agree on one side of the climate change coin more than the other. So the term "consensus".

The deniers really want their cake and eat it too. show less

I read this as research for my next novel in which I'm planning to write about an end of the world cult. Strangely I'd written an essay on Festinger for my very first assignment in my Open University degree some time in about 1994. Years later when a friend told me about cognitive dissonance theory I didn't make the connection. Even stranger, it was on December 21st 2012, when everyone was talking about the Mayan calendar so called end of the world ( show more target="_top">http://www.aquarius-atlanta.com/articles/?issue=06-2012&i=1460&article=2... ), that I was looking up end of the world cults and discovered this book. The ultimate irony is that the people Festinger was writing about were predicting the end of the world on December 21st 1954 exactly 59 years to the day that the Mayan calendar apparently predicted the end of the world. Of course that's a coincidence but let's not get into all that coincidence nonsense right now.

So the book was a fascinating read. There was a vast amount of information on the cult itself and the way the people behaved. I'm going to have to develop my ideas quite a bit as the material is so good that, had I not read this my version of the cult would have been very flat indeed. From an academic point of view I'm not so sure. I saw another book listed at the same time as this that appeared to claim that Festinger's case was in some way flawed. As a psychology graduate half a century later I would imagine that the methodology would be questioned by everybody from ethics committees to general academics who would suggest that you simply cannot collect data in this way without contamination.

On the whole it was a fascinating read, a real eye opener and well worth the effort and I really hope my version of these totally bonkers people will be even half as entertaining. show less

I heard the contents of this book described when I was in high school and tried to identify and find it for decades afterwards. It was well worth the quest: one of the most interesting and entertaining non-fiction books I have ever read. A classic of participant observation.

When I read this five years ago, I didn't review it, but didn't like it. Despite being up my alley, something seemed off. Now I know why:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/when-prophecy-fails-cognitive-disso...

"Kelly’s paper not only undercuts the researchers’ claims and their application of the theory developed from them, but also alleges they committed scientific misconduct, including “fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare show more investigation.” show less