Editing Leon Festinger (section)

===Later life===
Writing in 1983, four years after closing his laboratory, Festinger expressed a sense of disappointment with what he and his field had accomplished:

:Forty years in my own life seems like a long time to me and while some things have been learned about human beings and human behavior during this time, progress has not been rapid enough; nor has the new knowledge been impressive enough. And even worse, from a broader point of view we do not seem to have been working on many of the important problems.<ref>Festinger, 1983, p. ix</ref>

Festinger subsequently began exploring prehistoric archaeological data, meeting with [[Stephen Jay Gould]] to discuss ideas and visiting archaeological sites to investigate primitive toolmaking firsthand.<ref>Gazzaniga, 2006, pp. 91–92</ref> His efforts eventually culminated in the book, ''The Human Legacy,'' which examined how humans evolved and developed complex societies.<ref>Festinger, 1983</ref> Although seemingly the product of a disillusioned, wholesale abandonment of the field of psychology, Festinger considered this research as a return to the fundamental concerns of psychology. He described the goal of his new research interests as "see[ing] what can be inferred from different vantage points, from different data realms, about the nature, the characteristics, of this species we call human,"<ref>Festinger, 1980, p. 253</ref> and felt bemused when fellow psychologists asked him how his new research interests were related to psychology.<ref>Schachter, 1994, p. 106</ref>

Festinger's next and final enterprise was to understand why an idea is accepted or rejected by a culture, and he decided that examining why new technology was adopted quickly in the West but not in the Eastern [[Byzantine Empire]] would illuminate the issue.<ref>Gazzaniga, 2006, p. 92</ref> However, Festinger was diagnosed with cancer before he was able to publish this material. He decided not to pursue treatment, and died on February 11, 1989.<ref>Schachter, 1994, p. 106</ref>