Speaker
Dr. Betty M. Bayer (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Women’s Studies)
Title
Threshold of Revelation: When Prophecy Fails and the History of Psychology, Religion and Spirituality
Abstract
When Prophecy Fails is considered a major social psychological work of the twentieth century American psychology. Published in 1956, the book narrates the story of a small group of believers waiting out the prophecy channeled by Dorothy Martin (given the alias of Mrs. Keech in the book) from the viewpoint of three social psychologists (Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter) who along with several graduate students observed the group close-up under disguise. Dorothy Martin’s prophecy came to the social psychologists’ attention through a newspaper story. The story’s appeal lay with how Dorothy Martin and her small group of believers presented what seemed nothing short of a ready-made testing ground for Festinger’s budding theory of cognitive dissonance. At its heart, cognitive dissonance was conceived of simply as the experiential phenomenon arising from having one’s beliefs come into direct contact with unequivocal opposing evidence. To these social psychologists, observing a group waiting out the prophesied end-of-the-world presented as near an ideal situation as one could wish for study of cognitive dissonance in situ.
Widely regarded as a milestone in the study of small apocalyptic groups and in social psychological theory, the book and the theory have since become virtually household words. Crossing disciplines and moving from the corridors of academe to those of everyday life, When Prophecy Fails has held a grip on collective imagination for over five decades. From a range of disciplines (religious studies, philosophy of science, economics, political science, legal theory, sociology) through to a variety of spiritual groups, religious sects and cults (including ufology), the book and Mrs Keech have served as muse to fiction writers and a television mini-series (in the UK), the concept of cognitive dissonance has become a tool of media activism and popular culture and come to stand as sign of our age, and the pseudonymous name Mrs. Keech has come to serve as sign and symbol of new age spirituality and ufo beliefs.
When Prophecy Fails thus embodies tensions in two opposing natures – the spiritual and the rational – tensions that underlie the story of prophecy and the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. At another level, these tensions lie behind a larger historical struggle amongst the science of psychology, religion and spirituality, one played out at least a half century earlier between William James and G. Stanley Hall on the nature of medium Mrs. Leonora Piper (Coon, 1992). Together, these tensions invite us to rethink the history of psychology in relation to the history of spirituality, asking how they have served one another historically in the formation of ideas of what counts as the rational, the spiritual, and more largely as the terrain of the psyche. This history thus asks what psychology traded off in its repudiation of the spiritual over the rational, and how this repudiation served to naturalize the sacred in cognitive psychology as much as it enabled a sacralizing of psychological cognition in religion and spirituality. This talk thus also inquires into ways to study the spiritual that go beyond the standard treatment of the spiritual as foe to the rational, a line of argument assuming spirituality’s self-evident nature as quackery or madness, end of story. But in asking more deeply about the interplay of psychology and spirituality, this talk ultimately invites all of us into a critical rethinking on the entanglements of psychology and spirituality in the formation of kinds – spiritualists, psychological rationality, and so on.