Belief Perseverance: A Climate Denier’s Best Friend

Published by Clara Scheutz on

Let’s face it, us humans don’t like to be wrong. In fact, we sometimes go to extremes to stand by our original assertions in attempts to avoid admitting to our faulty logic. This phenomenon is known as belief perseverance and can pose a major threat to attitude change. Within the realm of sustainability, a field that relies heavily on attitude change to move society in a more environmentally-, economically-, and socially-conscious direction, it can be difficult to counter belief perseverance, particularly involving polarized topics such as climate change. In fact, belief perseverance is so powerful that it leads people to continue denying climate change despite the overwhelming data pointing to the warming of the atmosphere!

Learning about this topic in class validated so many of my frustrations regarding conversations I have held with climate deniers. As a youth activist in my home state of Indiana, no matter how much convincing evidence I presented, these people were firm in their assertions about climate change being irrelevant and unrelated to human activity. Turns out, there is a psychological concept that perfectly describes this seemingly stubborn attachment to scientifically incorrect beliefs!

So if we know that people have these tendencies to stick with their initial beliefs, how on Earth are we supposed to change their perspectives?


Categories: Module 2

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