Why Do We Cling to Beliefs When They’re Threatened by Facts?

Courtesy of Cathleen O’Grady @ Arstechnica:

People hold beliefs for a complex variety of reasons. Some of these beliefs may be based on facts, but others may be based on ideas that can never be proved or disproven. For example, people who are against the death penalty might base their belief partly on evidence that the death penalty does not reduce violent crime (which could later be shown to be false), and partly on the notion that the death penalty violates a fundamental human right to life. The latter is an unfalsifiable belief, because it can’t be changed purely by facts.

According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, unfalsifiability is an important component of both religious and political beliefs. It allows people to hold their beliefs with more conviction, but it also alows them to become more polarized in those beliefs.

Currently, very little is known about why certain worldviews gain more mindshare in some populations, while others remain on the fringes. We also currently know only a little about how and why people continue to hold a belief in the face of contradictory evidence. Sometimes people argue on the basis of fact, questioning the quality of the evidence against their position, for example.

But it seems that people can also resort to emphasizing unfalsifiable reasons for holding a belief. This “defensive” function of unfalsifiability plays a role in both religion and politics; people can also use the unfalsifiability of their beliefs to defend them when they are threatened. The researchers also look at what they call the “offensive” function of unfalsifiability, which increases the strength of people’s religious and political beliefs.