SOC 104 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Santa Barbara City College, When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger
Document Summary
The benefit of observational study is that the people whose behavior is being evaluated do the things they do every day, and may not even realize that their behavior is being studied in certain situations. In a book leon festinger and his collaborators recorded an early observational study that made an important contribution to understanding human behavior. The novel, entitled when prophecy fails, has published an observational study of a "doomsday" cult members. The members of the cults believed they had received information, supposedly sent from a planet called "clarion" through "automatic writing," that the world was about to end. More precisely, the group members were persuaded that the planet would be destroyed sometime before dawn on december 21, 1954, as a result of a massive flood. Once festinger heard about the cult, he figured it would be a fascinating way to study how people in groups interact with each other in order to strengthen their extreme beliefs.
