This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action
In Chris' recent Mother Jones article, he wrote of a case study in "motivated reasoning." The study involved a group of individuals called "The Seekers" whose members believed they were receiving an alien message that predicted the date that the end of the world would come: December 21, 1954. Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, identified the organization as a good candidate for a study of disconfirmation, the moment at which a strongly held belief is unequivocally refuted. Festinger wished to study the responses among the members of the group at the very moment when they were forced to acknowledge their mistake. To get the whole story, you can read Festinger's book When Prophecy Fails. Out of this research came the ...
