When Prophecy Fails

By: Leon Festinger

Narrated by: Ellis Freeman

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a landmark work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which was published in 1956.

The book examines the case of a UFO cult in Chicago called the Seekers, their expectation of an imminent apocalypse, and their coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. The cult had taken strong actions to demonstrate their commitment to the belief, quitting their jobs, leaving their spouses, and giving away their possessions in eager anticipation of a flying saucer coming to fetch them.

Festinger built his theory of cognitive dissonance on his observations of the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations experienced by cult members.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

interesting inside account of a flying saucer cult

the narration was tolerable but not well done; nasal intonation, several mispronunciations and out-of-place pauses.

PLEASE Do Not Buy!

The writing itself is fascinating, important, and really grabs your attention. However, the reader is uneven, inarticulate, and usually has an audible sneer. It is the worst audiobook reading I have ever heard and I cannot believe a human editor signed off on it.

There is another version of this book, which I will have to try, but that only makes me angrier that I wasted money on this one.

Mispronunciations marred my enjoyment

Before books are recorded, it would be really nice if the narrator would be careful about pronunciations not only of simple words like mimeograph (pronounced mim e o graf) but also place names such as Schenectady and Allegheny. There were other errors as well in pronunciation. The other thing I did not appreciate were the various voices to delineate the characters. At times, the intonation seemed very disrespectful to me, almost mocking. Neutrality might be a better position when narrating subjects of this nature.

Narration could have been better

Overall, this book is very interesting and well researched. Festinger, et al.'s work is cited extensively in literature on cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning for good reason.

I feel like I'm being generous giving this narrator two stars though. The narration could have been much better. The narration was very choppy. Some of this could be because the authors were comma happy, but with so many sound bites obviously spliced together in several places, I suspect this was primarily the narrator's fault. The narrator also came off as disrespectful to the study's research subjects on more than one occasion when he was clearly stifling laughter about their belief system. There's no reason that should have been left in this sort of production.

Narrator laughed!

The narrator kept laughing at the behavior of the study subjects. I thought it was inappropriate. If you are able to read the book vs listen to this audiobook I would. For various boring reasons I can't read books right now, so I am not sorry I listened to it. The content is very valuable.