> Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right. In one experiment, researchers selected people who ei- ther favored or opposed capital punishment and asked them to read two scholarly, well-documented articles on the emotionally charged issue of whether the death penalty deters violent crimes. One article concluded that it did, the other that it didn’t. If the readers were processing information rationally, they would realize that the issue was more complex than they had previously thought and would therefore move a bit closer to each other in their beliefs about capital punishment as a deter- rent. But dissonance theory predicts that the readers would find a way to distort the two articles. They would find reasons to clasp the confirming article to their bosoms and hail it as a highly competent piece of work. And they would be super- critical of the disconfirming article, finding minor flaws and magnifying them into major reasons why they need not be influenced by it. This is precisely what happened. Not only did each side try to discredit the other’s arguments; each side be- came even more committed to its own. > > This frequently replicated finding explains why it is so diffi- cult for scientists and health experts to persuade people who are ideologically or politically committed to a belief—such as “climate change is a hoax”—to change their minds even when overwhelming evidence dictates that they should. People who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect. Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It’s much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework. > --- Source: Lord, Charles G., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper. “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence.” _Journal of Personality and Social Psychology_ 37, no. 11 (1979): 2098–2109. [https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098).