Belief perseverance

Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism) is maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it. Such beliefs may even be strengthened when others attempt to present evidence debunking them, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect (compare boomerang effect). For example, journalist Cari Romm, in a 2014 article in The Atlantic, describes a study in which a group of people, concerned of the side effects of flu shots, became less willing to receive them after being told that the vaccination was entirely safe.'Even when we deal with ideologically neutral conceptions of reality, when these conceptions have been recently acquired, when they came to us from unfamiliar sources, when they were assimilated for spurious reasons, when their abandonment entails little tangible risks or costs, and when they are sharply contradicted by subsequent events, we are, at least for a time, disinclined to doubt such conceptions on the verbal level and unlikely to let go of them in practice.' Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism) is maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it. Such beliefs may even be strengthened when others attempt to present evidence debunking them, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect (compare boomerang effect). For example, journalist Cari Romm, in a 2014 article in The Atlantic, describes a study in which a group of people, concerned of the side effects of flu shots, became less willing to receive them after being told that the vaccination was entirely safe. Since rationality involves conceptual flexibility, belief perseverance is consistent with the view that human beings act at times in an irrational manner. Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller holds that belief perseverance 'deserves to rank among the fundamental 'laws' of nature'. According to Lee Ross and Craig A. Anderson, 'beliefs are remarkably resilient in the face of empirical challenges that seem logically devastating'. The following experiments can be interpreted or re-interpreted with the aid of the belief perseverance concept. The first study of belief perseverance was carried out by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. These psychologists spent time with a cult whose members were convinced that the world would end on December 21, 1954. After the prediction failed, most believers still clung to their faith. When asked to reappraise probability estimates in light of new information, subjects displayed a marked tendency to give insufficient weight to the new evidence. In another study, mathematically competent teenagers and adults were given seven arithmetical problems and first asked for approximate answers by manual estimation. Then they were asked for the exact answers by use of a calculator rigged to produce increasingly erroneous results (e.g., yielding 252 × 1.2 = 452.4, when it is actually 302.4). In reflecting on their estimation skills or techniques, about half the subjects went through all seven problems without once letting go of the conviction that calculators are infallible. Lee Ross and Craig A. Anderson led some subjects to the false belief that there existed a positive correlation between a firefighter's stated preference for taking risks and their occupational performance. Other subjects were told that the correlation was negative.  Subjects were then extensively debriefed and given to understand that no correlation existed between risk taking and performance. These authors found that post-debriefing interviews pointed to significant levels of belief perseverance. In another study, subjects spent about four hours following instructions of a hands-on instructional manual.  At a certain point, the manual introduced a formula which led them to believe that spheres are 50% larger than they are. Subjects were then given an actual sphere and asked to determine its volume; first by using the formula, and then by filling the sphere with water, transferring the water to a box, and directly measuring the volume of the water in the box. In the last experiment in this series, all 19 subjects held a Ph.D. degree in a natural science, were employed as researchers or professors at two major universities, and carried out the comparison between the two volume measurements a second time with a larger sphere. All but one of these scientists clung to the spurious formula despite their empirical observations.