Originally Posted by chasm54

People's attachment to their beliefs is very strong, and their inability to process information that conflicts with those beliefs is well-documented. You might be interested to read Margaret Heffernan's Wilful Blindness - why we ignore the obvious at our peril. It is full of examples of people reacting to information not by changing their views, but by reinterpreting the data to make it appear consistent with those views, no matter how convoluted that reinterpretation has to be.

I think my favourite of her stories relates to a millenarian cult who had decided the world was going to end on a given day. They sold all their stuff and gathered together on the day to await the end of the world. When the world didn't end, they did not decide they had been mistaken, they decided that God had been so impressed by their display of faith that he had changed his mind!