So it seems like Kelly’s critique is kinda self-defeating. If Dorothy Martin’s little UFO cult isn’t really an example of the mechanism Festinger popularized, in the way Kelly describes, then Festinger and his colleagues themselves are an even better example of it.
I think there is a huge difference between the two situations, for several reasons:
a large number of people sticking with a doomsday cult that’s been falsified, vs. a small number of authors fabricating evidence to advance their careers
a trivially-verifiable prediction that’s falsified, vs. a prediction that involves a lot of research and data and is hard to check (I’m assuming the debunking is correct but I don’t really know because I haven’t looked at any of the evidence presented)
as I understand, Festinger et al. did actually change their minds in response to evidence, but then they published findings they knew were false because it was in their personal interest to do so
Yes, that all seems fair. I was just struck by the parallels.
(It is not entirely clear to me exactly what if anything Kelly is claiming about the state of mind, and motives, of Festinger and his colleagues. He does say near the start “that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false”, but I don’t see much evidence in his article that the authors knew their central claims were false. He does offer evidence that the authors interfered more than they admitted, but that isn’t really the same thing.)
I think there is a huge difference between the two situations, for several reasons:
a large number of people sticking with a doomsday cult that’s been falsified, vs. a small number of authors fabricating evidence to advance their careers
a trivially-verifiable prediction that’s falsified, vs. a prediction that involves a lot of research and data and is hard to check (I’m assuming the debunking is correct but I don’t really know because I haven’t looked at any of the evidence presented)
as I understand, Festinger et al. did actually change their minds in response to evidence, but then they published findings they knew were false because it was in their personal interest to do so
Yes, that all seems fair. I was just struck by the parallels.
(It is not entirely clear to me exactly what if anything Kelly is claiming about the state of mind, and motives, of Festinger and his colleagues. He does say near the start “that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false”, but I don’t see much evidence in his article that the authors knew their central claims were false. He does offer evidence that the authors interfered more than they admitted, but that isn’t really the same thing.)