It’s difficult to get people to change their minds when they have a strongly held belief or opinion. Even when shown evidence that they are wrong, they insist that they are right. We all do this sometimes, and even when it’s obvious we are mistaken, we kid ourselves that we have good reason for our beliefs.

Stubborn beliefs

If we believe strongly in something, it’s difficult to persuade us that we are wrong, even if there is evidence to suggest it. Rather than change our minds, we tend to believe more strongly, and may even invent further “proof” that we are right.

Unshakable belief

Our beliefs are very important to us. The way we live our lives is based on the knowledge we have, and what we hold to be true. So when someone questions something we firmly believe, it makes us very uncomfortable. American psychologist Leon Festinger called this feeling of unease “cognitive dissonance.” Rather than just accepting that we are wrong, we often become more insistent that we are right. To get rid of the uncomfortable feeling, we justify what we believe and dispute any evidence that contradicts it. Therefore, Festinger realized, it is very difficult to change the mind of someone with strong beliefs: “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” To test his theory, Festinger and his colleagues met members of a cult who claimed to have received messages from aliens predicting the end of the world. When interviewed, the cult members all firmly believed the world was going to end on December 21 of that year. After the apocalypse failed to happen, the psychologists interviewed the members a second time. Rather than give up their story, they declared that the world had been spared because they were such firm believers. To accept that they had been wrong would have caused cognitive dissonance. Instead, their belief had strengthened, and they even claimed to have received another message thanking them for their dedication.

How embarrassing

Festinger noticed that the strongest believers were those who had given up the most for the cult—many had left their jobs and sold their houses. He concluded that the more time and effort someone devotes to something, the more likely they are to defend it. In an experiment, Festinger gave volunteers a series of tedious tasks. He then rewarded some volunteers with one dollar, and others with 20. When asked whether the task had been interesting, the participants who were paid more tended to say no. The poorly paid participants, on the other hand, were more likely to say yes because they needed to justify the amount of effort they had put into the task, for very little reward. In a similar experiment, Eliot Aronson and Judson Mills found that if a task involved some level of embarrassment, this also affected a person’s view. They invited female students to join a discussion group about the psychology of sex—something the students believed would be fun and interesting. Some students were simply accepted into the group, but others were asked to take an “embarrassment test,” in which they had to read aloud a list of obscene words and erotic passages from books—a very humiliating task. All of the participants then heard a recording of a boring discussion about the mating habits of animals, which they were told was the discussion they had volunteered to join. When asked how interesting and enjoyable they had found the talk, the students who had endured the embarrassment test rated it much more favorably than those who had not.

FLORAL FLIGHT

A group of people were asked to try to make a bowl of flowers levitate by concentrating on it. They didn’t know that the bowl was equipped with electromagnets, so that it would actually rise off the table. One participant claimed to have seen smoke wisping under the bowl, but another participant, a science teacher, denied that the bowl had risen at all.

Despite overwhelming evidence that smoking kills, smokers often try to justify their habit.