Disconfirmed expectancy was famously illustrated in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.
The book gave an inside account of a doomsday cult led by Dorothy Martin (given the alias "Marion Keech" to preserve her privacy), of Chicago.
Festinger and his researchers took the chance to pretend to be a part of the cult in order to observe its behaviors and reaction when the flood failed to occur.
Furthermore, Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, which would be published the following year, predicted that the failure of the prophecy would not break the cult.
[4] Research on these other groups formed around prophetic revelations suggests that their survival following disconfirmation is a more complex matter than When Prophecy Fails describes it.
[4] In addition to proselytization there are other adaptive strategies including reaffirmation and rationalization which are influenced not only by in-group social support, but also decisive leadership, sophistication of ideology, vagueness of the prophecy, ritual framing, and organization.
[7] Newtson concluded that participants in this study were attending more closely and forming more detailed causal analyses when the actor's behavior deviated from expectation.
[6] Though people are more likely to engage in causal processing when there is a discrepancy between belief and outcome, there is a strong bias towards expectancy confirmation.
[8][9] Similarly, disconfirming behavior can be discredited in many ways, including but not limited to selective attention to confirmatory evidence and biased labeling.
Experimenters can do this as Festinger and his researchers did, i.e. join a cult and observe the impending disconfirmation,[2] though this can also be achieved by pre-testing participants and grouping them based on their responses.
To reduce this disparity and alleviate psychological discomfort the consumer is likely to bring expectations in line with product performance.
[1] This statement has been contested[12][13] and some evidence against is given in a classic paper showing that attitudes tend to further polarize when the conflicting information falls outside of the individual's latitude of acceptance.
He notes that "there is a point beyond which consumers will not accept increasing disparity between product claims and actual [negative] performance".
[15] At this point, which Muzafer Sherif would label the edge of one's latitude of acceptance, reasonable consideration is no longer given towards product performance and the individual is further polarized towards rejection.
[15] Pizam and Milman (1993) show that expectancy disconfirmations are good predictor of satisfaction among first-time visitors to a destination.
This can work in the opposite direction as well, and a positive deviation from a negative expectancy has a stronger effect on evaluations than confirmations do.