Belief Perseverance

The debriefing experiments

Festinger, Riecken and Schachter (1956) documented how members of a doomsday group, far from abandoning their belief after a failed prophecy, proselytized more actively, drawing attention to the persistence of disconfirmed beliefs. Ross, Lepper and Hubbard (1975) gave participants the task of distinguishing real from fake suicide notes, randomly providing false feedback that they had done well or poorly. Even after being clearly told that the feedback had been predetermined and fake, participants who had received success feedback still rated themselves as good at the task. Observers likewise retained their impressions of the actor's ability. This residue of belief after its basis was removed was called belief perseverance.

Why beliefs persist

Anderson, Lepper and Ross (1980) presented participants with fictitious cases suggesting a relationship between risk-taking and success as a firefighter. After learning the cases were fabricated, participants largely retained the relationship they had come to believe, and those who had written explanations of why it held retained it more strongly. The researchers concluded that self-generated causal explanations remain in memory independently of the original evidence and sustain the belief. Johnson and Seifert (1994) demonstrated the continued influence effect, in which corrected misinformation keeps affecting later inferences, an effect especially strong when no alternative causal explanation replaces the misinformation. Nickerson (1998) classified this as one of the many guises of confirmation bias.

Debiasing strategies and meta-analyses

Anderson (1982) showed that counterexplanation, having people explain the opposite conclusion, reduces belief perseverance. Lord, Lepper and Preston (1984) reported that a consider-the-opposite strategy, asking people to imagine how they would judge if the opposite were true, worked better than simply instructing them to be fair. Synthesizing research on correcting misinformation, Lewandowsky and colleagues (2012) concluded that corrections are most effective when they provide a coherent alternative explanation to replace the false information. Chan and colleagues' (2017) meta-analysis found debunking messages effective but less so for people who had generated more explanations supporting the misinformation, and Walter and Tukachinsky (2020) likewise reported that a substantial influence of misinformation remains after correction. Ecker and colleagues (2022) reviewed the cognitive and social drivers of this resistance. Belief perseverance is discussed alongside cognitive dissonance theory, motivated reasoning and research on misinformation.

FAQ

What is belief perseverance in simple terms?

Once you come to believe a rumor, you may keep half-believing it even after it is shown to be false, because the impression and the plausible reasons you formed stay with you.

Has research found ways to reduce belief perseverance?

Yes. Strategies such as considering the opposite or explaining why the opposite conclusion might be true have been reported to help. When correcting misinformation, many studies find it more effective to offer an alternative explanation that fills the gap rather than simply saying the claim is wrong.

Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26

References

1. Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2. Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 880–892.
3. Anderson, C. A., Lepper, M. R., & Ross, L. (1980). Perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1037–1049.
4. Anderson, C. A. (1982). Inoculation and counterexplanation: Debiasing techniques in the perseverance of social theories. Social Cognition, 1(2), 126–139.
5. Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231–1243.
6. Johnson, H. M., & Seifert, C. M. (1994). Sources of the continued influence effect: When misinformation in memory affects later inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(6), 1420–1436.
7. Kuhn, D. (1991). The Skills of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.
9. Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106–131.
10. Chan, M. S., Jones, C. R., Hall Jamieson, K., & Albarracín, D. (2017). Debunking: A meta-analysis of the psychological efficacy of messages countering misinformation. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1531–1546.
11. Walter, N., & Tukachinsky, R. (2020). A meta-analytic examination of the continued influence of misinformation in the face of correction: How powerful is it, why does it happen, and how to stop it? Communication Research, 47(2), 155–177.
12. Ecker, U. K. H., et al. (2022). The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(1), 13–29.