Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance

What happens when prophecies fail? Timothy Jenkins' re-reading of Leon Festinger''s classic work on "cognitive dissonance" seeks to answer this question by studying a 50s doomsday group. This volume explores the relations between anthropology and psychology, and between social scientific and natural scientific accounts of human behavior.