Meadowchik wrote:People will find ways to accomodate their beliefs especially when they don't have alternative. So things like this make me wonder what link is missing for these individuals?
There are probably as many answers to this question as there are people who have ever believed falsehoods. Nonetheless, psychologists have shown that a relatively small set of cognitive biases or mental shortcuts can explain a lot about how false notions take root. One of the most agreed-upon ideas in the field of psychology is that people routinely use mental shortcuts to understand what happens around them. All kinds of things occur in the world around us, and we don't always have the time or energy to sit down and carefully examine all of them. So, we tend to use quick and largely unconscious rules-of-thumb to determine what we should believe—and these shortcuts sometimes steer us in the wrong direction.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog ... ren-t-true
Emotional Reasoning
Whether we like it or not, all of us can be powerfully swayed by emotions. We'd like to think that our feelings are driven by logic and reason, particularly when it comes to our political beliefs. Unfortunately, this relationship is often reversed. Sometimes we end up using our reasoning ability to justify or defend a conclusion that we’ve already drawn based on our emotions. This phenomenon, called emotional reasoning, can lead us astray without our ever knowing. Psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck first noticed this in depressed patients. He observed that many patients drew obviously untrue conclusions about themselves based on how they felt, rather than the actual facts. "If I feel depressed,” one of his patients might say, "then there must be something objectively wrong with my job, my marriage, my children, or other parts of my life." But feelings are just feelings, even when they're powerful, and they can sometimes lie to us. Even in those of us who aren’t depressed, this tendency can affect our beliefs about virtually any emotionally charged topic, whether we’re talking about sexuality, religion, money, crime, or war. When we feel scared, angry, anxious, or even just uneasy about a topic, we can easily jump to the conclusion that the topic is somehow objectively bad or dangerous. Next time a topic makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s probably reason to keep an open mind, not to draw a conclusion.
Confirmation Bias
Once we have a belief, we tend to cling to it, even when it’s untrue. The confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe. We do this in two important ways. First, we tend to surround ourselves with messages that confirm our pre-existing opinions. This is why, in the United States, conservatives tend to get their news from sources like Fox, whereas liberals tune into MSNBC. Second, we tend to ignore or discount messages that disprove our beliefs. If we’re sure that climate change is a hoax and someone shows us a research study disputing this belief, we might dismiss the study’s findings by saying that the researcher is obviously biased or corrupt. This protects us from having to change our beliefs. When our ideas are true, this probably isn’t such a bad thing. Unfortunately, it also can keep us firmly believing things are false.