Riecken was born on November 11, 1917, and was raised in
Brooklyn. He obtained a bachelor's degree from
Harvard University in 1939, and completed a master's degree in psychology from the
University of Connecticut in 1941. Following his service in the
United States Army Air Forces in the midst of World War II, Riecken earned a doctorate from the Harvard University Department of Social Relations in 1949. He began teaching at Harvard upon finishing his doctoral studies and later joined the
University of Minnesota faculty.He is one of the co-authors of When Prophecy Fails, the pioneering study of a UFO cult that laid the groundwork for the theory of cognitive dissonance. Riecken left Minnesota for
Washington, D. C. in 1958, where he became the first director of the social science division of the
National Science Foundation. Between 1966 and 1968, Riecken was vice president of the
Social Science Research Council, and succeeded
Edward Pendleton Herring as president in 1968, serving in that position until 1971. The next year, Riecken joined the
University of Pennsylvania faculty. He taught at Penn as the Francis Boyer Professor of Behavioral Sciences until 1985. Riecken returned to Washington D. C. as adviser to the
Council on Library Resources and other nonprofit, educational organizations. He was a fellow of the
American Psychological Society and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Riecken was married to Frances Manson Brown from 1955 to her death in 2011. The couple had three children. Henry Riecken died of intestinal cancer on December 27, 2012, at an assisted living facility in Washington, D. C. He was 95. ==References==