What it comes down to is whether holding a particular view has a tangible perceived impact on the person. Situations where people see direct cause and effect are easy for people to reason about. However, when the connection is not clear then it’s much harder for people to tell whether one set of beliefs is more correct than another. In these scenarios people will default to ideas that fit closer with their overall world view.
There’s a thermodynamics aspect to this too. Each idea that a person holds is part of an intricate web of other ideas and concepts that they’ve internalized. Invalidating an idea means reworking the whole graph of ideas associated with it. That takes a lot more energy than simply discarding the idea that doesn’t fit. In absence of some external pressure forcing the person to do this work, the existing beliefs will be generally preferred.
What it comes down to is whether holding a particular view has a tangible perceived impact on the person. Situations where people see direct cause and effect are easy for people to reason about. However, when the connection is not clear then it’s much harder for people to tell whether one set of beliefs is more correct than another. In these scenarios people will default to ideas that fit closer with their overall world view.
There’s a thermodynamics aspect to this too. Each idea that a person holds is part of an intricate web of other ideas and concepts that they’ve internalized. Invalidating an idea means reworking the whole graph of ideas associated with it. That takes a lot more energy than simply discarding the idea that doesn’t fit. In absence of some external pressure forcing the person to do this work, the existing beliefs will be generally preferred.