Belief perseverance
Belief perseverance is maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.
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." Several experiments can be interpreted or re-interpreted with the aid of the belief perseverance concept.
When asked to reappraise probability estimates in light of new information, subjects displayed a marked tendency to give insufficient weight to the new evidence.
Psychologists Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter joined 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.
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, mathematically competent teenagers and adults estimated answers to seven arithmetical problems, then were asked to check their answers with a rigged calculator, e.g., a calculator yielding the result: 252 × 1.2 = 452.4 (it is actually 302.4). About half the subjects went through all seven problems without once letting go of the conviction that calculators are infallible.
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.
...
Wikipedia