Description

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The study reported in this volume grew out of some theoretical work, one phase of which bore specifically on the behavior of individuals in social movements that made specific (and unfulfilled) prophecies. We had been forced to depend chiefly on historical records to judge the adequacy of our theoretical ideas until we by chance discovered the social movement that we report in this book. At the time we learned of it, the movement was in mid-career but the prophecy about which it was centered had not yet been disconfirmed. We were understandably eager to undertake a study that could test our theoretical ideas under natural conditions.

That we were able to do this study was in great measure due to the support obtained through the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations of the University of Minnesota. This study is a project of the Laboratory and was carried out while we were all members of its staff. We should also like to acknowledge the help we received through a grant-in-aid from the Ford Foundation to one of the authors, a grant that made preliminary exploration of the field situation possible.

About the Author

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Leon Festinger (1919 - 1989) was an American social psychologist, perhaps best known for cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. His theories and research are credited with renouncing the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he perhaps most famously practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect (or propinquity). Festinger was the fifth most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Henry W. Riecken Jr. (1917-2012) received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1950, having studied in the Department of Social Relations, which enjoyed a well-known relationship with the Department of Psychology. A thought leader, and a follower and booster of interesting thoughts (more prescience), Riecken was the first director of the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Office of Social Sciences (later called a division) in 1959. As vice president and then president of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1966 to 1971, Hank led the development of the first state-of-the-art monograph on randomized controlled trials in the United States. Riecken was a member of the first Director's Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Medicine in 1969 (one of two social scientists) and, as a founding member, assisted in the challenging effort to create the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1971. Stanley Schachter (1922 - 1997) was an American social psychologist, who is perhaps best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal. Schachter also studied and published a large number of works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. Schachter was the seventh most cited psychologist of the 20th century.