March 14th 2024

Belief Perseverance is a cognitive bias in which individuals maintain their initial Beliefs even in the face of contradictory information. Characteristics include confirmation bias and emotional influence, leading to closed-mindedness and resistance to change. While providing consistency and emotional comfort, it can hinder adaptability and lead to unwavering beliefs in various domains, like politics, religion, and investments.

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Characteristics:

Cognitive Bias: Belief perseverance is characterized by the cognitive bias where individuals persistently cling to their initial beliefs even when presented with contradictory evidence. This bias can lead to a resistance to change one’s views.
Confirmation Bias: A key component of belief perseverance is confirmation bias, which involves the selective seeking and interpretation of information that supports existing beliefs while disregarding or rationalizing away information that contradicts those beliefs.
Emotional Influence: Emotional attachment to beliefs plays a significant role in belief perseverance. Emotional investment in a particular belief can cloud objective evaluation and make it challenging to consider alternative viewpoints.
Selective Exposure: People tend to engage in selective exposure, preferring to seek out information that aligns with their pre-existing beliefs. This selective exposure reinforces and perpetuates those beliefs.

Use Cases:

Belief perseverance is observable in various aspects of human life:

Political Beliefs: Many individuals hold steadfast political views despite exposure to opposing arguments or changing political landscapes. Belief perseverance can contribute to political polarization.
Religious Convictions: People often maintain their religious beliefs even when confronted with challenges to their faith. This is particularly evident when individuals continue to have faith in the absence of empirical evidence.
Investment Decisions: In the realm of finance, belief perseverance can be seen when investors persist in holding onto specific stocks or investment strategies, even in the face of negative market indicators.

Benefits:

While belief perseverance has its drawbacks, it also offers certain benefits:

Consistency: It promotes consistency in one’s worldview and identity. For some individuals, this consistency provides a sense of stability and security.
Emotional Comfort: Holding onto cherished beliefs can provide emotional comfort and a sense of belonging, especially when these beliefs are deeply ingrained in one’s identity.
Identity Reinforcement: Steadfast beliefs contribute to a stronger sense of identity, which can be important for self-esteem and a sense of purpose.

Challenges:

However, belief perseverance comes with its own set of challenges:

Closed-Mindedness: One of the primary challenges is closed-mindedness. Belief perseverance often leads to an unwillingness to consider new perspectives and possibilities, hindering personal growth and learning.
Inflexibility: Individuals who exhibit belief perseverance may resist adapting to changing circumstances or incorporating new information into their belief systems, potentially leading to poor decision-making.
Disconfirmation Bias: Belief perseverance can result in a disconfirmation bias, where individuals ignore or dismiss evidence that contradicts their held beliefs, further entrenching those beliefs.

Examples:

Climate Change Denial: Individuals who deny the reality of climate change may persist in their beliefs despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the existence of climate change and its human causes.
Conspiracy Theories: Belief perseverance is often evident in those who subscribe to conspiracy theories. Even in the absence of concrete proof, believers may maintain their convictions, dismissing evidence to the contrary.
Stock Market Enthusiasts: Investors who remain committed to specific stocks or investment strategies, even when faced with negative economic indicators, exemplify belief perseverance in the financial context.

Belief Perseverance: Key Highlights

Definition: Belief Perseverance is a cognitive bias in which individuals maintain their initial beliefs even in the face of contradictory information.
Characteristics:
- Cognitive Bias: Persistently clinging to initial beliefs despite contradictory evidence.
- Confirmation Bias: Seeking and interpreting information that supports existing beliefs while ignoring contrary evidence.
- Emotional Influence: Emotional attachment to beliefs influencing objective evaluation.
- Selective Exposure: Preferring information that aligns with pre-existing beliefs, reinforcing them.
Use Cases:
- Political Beliefs: Holding steadfast political views despite opposing arguments.
- Religious Convictions: Maintaining religious beliefs despite challenges to faith.
- Investment Decisions: Persisting in investments despite negative market indicators.
Benefits:
- Consistency: Belief perseverance promotes consistency in one’s worldview and identity.
- Emotional Comfort: Holding onto cherished beliefs provides emotional comfort.
- Identity Reinforcement: Steadfast beliefs contribute to a stronger sense of identity.
Challenges:
- Closed-Mindedness: The unwillingness to consider new perspectives and possibilities.
- Inflexibility: Resistance to adapt to changing circumstances and evidence.
- Disconfirmation Bias: Ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts held beliefs.
Examples:
- Climate Change Denial: Continuing to deny climate change despite scientific evidence.
- Conspiracy Theories: Unwavering belief in conspiracy theories despite lack of proof.
- Stock Market Enthusiasts: Holding onto stocks despite negative economic indicators.

Connected Thinking Frameworks

Convergent vs. Divergent Thinking

Convergent thinking occurs when the solution to a problem can be found by applying established rules and logical reasoning. Whereas divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. Where convergent thinking might work for larger, mature organizations where divergent thinking is more suited for startups and innovative companies.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking involves analyzing observations, facts, evidence, and arguments to form a judgment about what someone reads, hears, says, or writes.

Biases

The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.

Second-Order Thinking

Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.

Lateral Thinking

Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.

Bounded Rationality

Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.

Lindy Effect

The Lindy Effect is a theory about the ageing of non-perishable things, like technology or ideas. Popularized by author Nicholas Nassim Taleb, the Lindy Effect states that non-perishable things like technology age – linearly – in reverse. Therefore, the older an idea or a technology, the same will be its life expectancy.

Antifragility

Antifragility was first coined as a term by author, and options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragility is a characteristic of systems that thrive as a result of stressors, volatility, and randomness. Therefore, Antifragile is the opposite of fragile. Where a fragile thing breaks up to volatility; a robust thing resists volatility. An antifragile thing gets stronger from volatility (provided the level of stressors and randomness doesn’t pass a certain threshold).

Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a holistic means of investigating the factors and interactions that could contribute to a potential outcome. It is about thinking non-linearly, and understanding the second-order consequences of actions and input into the system.

Vertical Thinking

Vertical thinking, on the other hand, is a problem-solving approach that favors a selective, analytical, structured, and sequential mindset. The focus of vertical thinking is to arrive at a reasoned, defined solution.

Maslow’s Hammer

Maslow’s Hammer, otherwise known as the law of the instrument or the Einstellung effect, is a cognitive bias causing an over-reliance on a familiar tool. This can be expressed as the tendency to overuse a known tool (perhaps a hammer) to solve issues that might require a different tool. This problem is persistent in the business world where perhaps known tools or frameworks might be used in the wrong context (like business plans used as planning tools instead of only investors’ pitches).

Peter Principle

The Peter Principle was first described by Canadian sociologist Lawrence J. Peter in his 1969 book The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people are continually promoted within an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.

Straw Man Fallacy

The straw man fallacy describes an argument that misrepresents an opponent’s stance to make rebuttal more convenient. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, defined as a flaw in the structure of an argument that renders it invalid.

Streisand Effect

The Streisand Effect is a paradoxical phenomenon where the act of suppressing information to reduce visibility causes it to become more visible. In 2003, Streisand attempted to suppress aerial photographs of her Californian home by suing photographer Kenneth Adelman for an invasion of privacy. Adelman, who Streisand assumed was paparazzi, was instead taking photographs to document and study coastal erosion. In her quest for more privacy, Streisand’s efforts had the opposite effect.

Heuristic

As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.

Recognition Heuristic

This post first appeared on FourWeekMBA, please read the originial post: here