Festinger's 'When Prophecy Fails' reinterpretation

In this festive descent into methodological despair, Chris and Matt convene a secret cabal of elite psychology podcasters within the Decoding Cloister, operating under the distant yet reassuring gaze of Arch-Wizard Paul Bloom, whose role is largely ceremonial but nonetheless morally binding.

Joining them are Dave Pizarro (Very Bad Wizards) and Michael Inzlicht (Two Psychologists Four Beers, emeritus), for what can only be described as an end-of-year audit of social psychology’s moral character.

What follows is a mixture of intense hubris, disciplinary self-loathing, and revolutionary insights, delivered via one of the most sadistic Christmas quizzes ever devised. The quiz format allows the episode to do what psychology does best: create the feeling of measurement while hovering dangerously close to intuition.

Alongside the quiz, we engage in some meta-commentary and sensemaking reflections on audience capture and the state of psychology-themed podcasts in 2025. In other words, it’s Christmas, so naturally everyone is discussing perverse incentives, damaged reputations, and the slow moral corrosion of institutions.

So join us, won’t you? For the first International Congress on Psychology-Themed Podcasting and Gurus…

Links

• Mickey's Substack
• Mickey's Work and Play Lab
• Two Psychologists Four Beers
• Very Bad Wizards
• Uhlmann, E. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Diermeier, D. (2015). A person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(1), 72-81.
• Ovsyannikova, D., de Mello, V. O., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans. Communications Psychology, 3(1), 4.

References

• Alter, A. L., Oppenheimer, D. M., Epley, N., & Eyre, R. N. (2007). Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(4), 569–576.
• Aarts, H., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2003). The silence of the library: Environment, situational norm, and social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 18–28.
• Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). On the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cognition, 2(2), 243–256.
• Resnick, B. (2018, June 13). The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. Vox.
• Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.
• Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425.
• Schimmack, U. (2018, January 20). My email correspondence with Daryl J. Bem about the data for his “Feeling the Future”. Replicability Index.
• Merton, R. K. (1973). The normative structure of science. In The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations (pp. 267–278). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1942).
• Hauser, M. (2012). Evilicious: Why we evolved a taste for being bad. Basic Books.
• Kay, A. C., Wheeler, S. C., Bargh, J. A., & Ross, L. (2004). Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 95(1), 83–96.
• Macfarlane, B. (2024). The decay of Merton’s scientific norms and the new academic ethos. Oxford Review of Education, 50(4), 468–483.
• Vaidis, D. C., Sleegers, W. W. A., van Leeuwen, F., et al. (2024). A multilab replication of the induced-compliance paradigm of cognitive dissonance. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 7(1).
• Kelly, T. (2026). Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 62(1), e70043.