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cognition
Evidence against your belief makes you hold tighter.
Belief perseverance is the cognitive tendency to maintain a position even when the evidence supporting it has been clearly debunked.
Once you have formed an explanation for why a belief is true, that explanation becomes an independent structure in your mind. Even when the original source is removed, the structure persists and protects itself from contradictory information.
You do not hold your beliefs; your beliefs hold you.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard, 1975, Belief Perseverance
- What the check found
- The claim accurately captures the definition and primary mechanism of the well-established Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard (1975) debriefing paradigm experiment.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.