[NoHaveMSG]

Originally Posted by Captain Snooze

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
"In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.


“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”"


New Yorker

I had just read a similar study to this not that long ego about an end of the world cult. When the date came and went for "the end", instead of questioning their beliefs, many of them doubled down on them too.

Edit: Cognitive Dissonance is what it was about.