Are irrational or emotional beliefs more strongly defended, psychologically?

I hope some folks will be able to point me toward resources in psychology and cognitive science regarding this phenomenon.

I recently had 2 experiences which put me in mind of a theory that I seem to recall from years back.

1. A coworker spams the office with an email regarding a blizzard up North, in which everyone fires up the woodstove, shovels out, and no one requests FEMA aid, compared unfavorably to the whining and crying that went on after Katrina. I respond with the observation that he might want to try firing up the woodstove and shoveling his house out from under 20 feet of water. He replies that he was only trying to make a point about folks in Louisiana using the hurricane as an excuse to get federal money. I reply with an attachment: a copy of the request by the Northern governor for FEMA aid. He becomes furious -- the only time I have seen him get this mad -- saying he was only trying to make a point. (I did not reply that a point supported by lies is no point at all.)

2. My aunt says that people who are not Christian should not immigrate to the US, because this is a Xian country, founded by Xians on Xian values. I point out that the founders were not Xians, for the most part, and they went out of their way to assert that our government is in no way based on Xian doctrine. This is a topic I have to confront frequently, so I had concrete evidence that took less than a minute to explain. She literally dropped what she was doing, became red in the face, and declared "I am just saying..." <insert repeat of what she said before>. My uncle had to calm her down.

Is there scientific evidence that irrational or emotionally-based beliefs are more vigorously defended, psychologically, in the face of counter-evidence, than other sorts of beliefs?

I cannot imagine either of these people getting so worked up if, say, they claimed that the Titanic had sunk intact and I cited evidence that it had broken up, or if they had claimed that Richard Nixon was Methodist and I pointed out that he was Quaker.

My aunt, btw, is an outspoken fundamentalist evangelical, and the coworker is an outspoken "conservative" who is vehemently critical of the "welfare state".

I wonder how your coworker would respond to the corporate welfare state? It exceeds social welfare. A blizzard is a bit different than being under 20 feet of water. One can't light up the wood stove to solve that problem

I think the less logical your argument the more emotional you have to be to defend it.

Perhaps people who become less emotional during arguments are more able to digest the
criticism, and thus have fewer irrational beliefs.

A kind of "which came first question."

Walter Wayne said:

Perhaps people who become less emotional during arguments are more able to digest the
criticism, and thus have fewer irrational beliefs.

A kind of "which came first question."

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It wouldn't seem so, given my experience with these 2. It was only when their demonstrably incorrect beliefs, on issues they emotionally identified with very strongly, were challenged with direct evidence that they became visibly upset and rushed to defend those beliefs. This was rare behavior which neither seems generally prone to.

But that's strictly anecdotal, which is why I'm wondering if there are studies.

We can't escape our 'animal' way of thinking, unfortunately. Millions of years of being hunter-gatherers in small social groups versus a few thousand years of modern civilisation with emphasis on making decisions logically? The former will win out.

Emotions make sense in the absence of critical thinking; associating information with moments of feeling good and secure means you will seek out that sort of information again and again, because it's probably going to benefit you. Most of the time, this is true. Of course, often it isn't, but it would have been beneficial when we didn't have the luxury of extra time and energy enabling us to contemplate our universe.

Therefore, I'd imagine we will defend emotionally-inspired beliefs over logically deducted ones. As for there being any studies, there are none I'm aware of.

Athon

I am a cognitive psychologist planning some research into individual differences in reasoning and belief formation, and there is a huge body of research that relates in some way to that question although I don't know of any that use 'vigour of defence' as a dependent variable. You can't just design a study to see if 'irrationally based' beliefs are more defended without a way to define and measure 'irrationally based beliefs' that is non-circular (ie doesn't depend on resistance to change as a measure of irrationality).

There is quite a lot of research on the effects of individual differences and emotional investment on belief bias.

There are also dual-process models of reasoning that distinguish between heuristic/intuitive/magical thinking and analytical/rational thinking, arguing that the former type does not involve evidence evaluation and is therefore more resistant to change. Beliefs based on the former type of thinking have the function of making the world seem more understandable and predictable and therefore any threat to them tends to provoke an emotional response.

There is also work on individual differences in accuracy orientation versus belief maintenance.

It sounds as though both the cases you cited are examples of somebody constructing a rationalisation to meet their emotional needs (ie feeling superior or wanting to avoid people with different values) and that sort of rationalisation is not intended to be part of an accurate or logical model of the world.

Interesting stuff Elaedith.

Any cites and/or links?

I'm not sure emotion plays a part in what we defend in the face of contradictory evidence. But emotion is why we defend it.

People don't like to be wrong, even when they are. You see it all the time in these forums. Show and/or tell someone they are wrong and you get a thread going back and forth over every detail. Sometimes there is talking past each other or both are correct but talking about different things (the limits of language). But sometimes people just can't say, "OK. you're right."

And ever notice when people tell you a fantastic story that it "happened to their friend or cousin" or they had some other personal experience that supports the credibility when in reality the story is bogus so someone is making something up? My son and I always joke when we hear the, "It happened to my cousin" reference since it usually means the story is merely one being passed on.

Why not say, I heard from someone? Why is there a need to pretend you have personal knowledge of an event? Because the person telling the story has a need to be believed, even when there is nothing riding on being believed except maybe someone else's perception of how gullible you are.

For whatever psychological benefit, we have a need to be right and a need to be believed.

Piggy said:

I cannot imagine either of these people getting so worked up if, say, they claimed that the Titanic had sunk intact and I cited evidence that it had broken up, or if they had claimed that Richard Nixon was Methodist and I pointed out that he was Quaker.

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I've noticed that people often get angry when you start to get through to them, when a little doubt creeps in, or they feel their position being undermined because it has no foundations. Many positions are based on assumptions which derive from prejudice. Point out that an assumption is invalid and they have nowhere to turn. Your conservative assumed that the rugged Northerners didn't appeal to FEMA - because rugged northerners don't do that sort of thing - then used that supposition to "prove" his prejudice. He probably didn't think of it himself, he more likely heard it on his favourite radio station, but it wouldn't occur to him to question it. He liked it so much he felt inspired to spread the message. Then you ruined his day. In the end he was left to defend his "point" which, as we all know, is zero-dimensional. When you're left defending a point you've surrendered all territory.

My aunt, btw, is an outspoken fundamentalist evangelical, and the coworker is an outspoken "conservative" who is vehemently critical of the "welfare state".

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Dripping with prejudice. Your aunt assumes that the US is a Christian foundation because it's a good place (or was before ...), ergo Christian. For the WASP, see above.

An aunt of mine married a Christian. I think the Christian did it because he wanted a serious cross to bear, and she got into it because of the judgemental element. My aunt I can get on with, she knows me and despises just about everybody so we have plenty of overlap. Her husband will not give up on me, but nor will he be angered. That's how committed he is. It drives me wild. He comes out with some drivel, I point out it ain't so, and he's, like, "Oh". Down the line, some other drivel. How do you defeat a foe like that?

Another aunt is a dedicated airhead, made a fair living out of head-shops but believes it all herself, which infuriates me. She knows me, and we talk about music and drugs and retailing. No ologies.

We're a pragmatic family, all in all.

Piggy said:

Interesting stuff Elaedith.

Any cites and/or links?

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There wouldn't be anything directly on the question you asked, its more a case of putting the pieces together across large bodies of research. I'll look through what I have when I go in to work next week. I have been reading a lot of work by Stanovich which is not directly to do with emotions but does look at individual differences in various types of reasoning error and bias. http://leo.oise.utoronto.ca/~kstanovich/reasoning.html

The work on accuracy orientation was from a unpublished dissertation by Mary Polstra in 2005, titled 'Individual differences in processes of motivated reasoning: Goals, prior beliefs, and the collection and evaluation of evidence' and is cited from Dissertation-Abstracts-International:-Section-B:-The-Sciences-and-Engineering. Vol 65(8-B) 2005, 4330.

I think frustration plays a part when you can't think of a logical argument, but still feel somehow that you're "right". That would tend to get you worked up and agitated, which is something I'm sure we've all experienced at one point or another.

Godmode said:

I think frustration plays a part when you can't think of a logical argument, but still feel somehow that you're "right". That would tend to get you worked up and agitated, which is something I'm sure we've all experienced at one point or another.

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The trick is, of course, to stay calm and examine your own opinion to see if there are any unsupportable assumptions behind it. You must be prepared to be wrong.

The two examples Piggy brings us are clearly too dependent on their prejudices, too invested in their beliefs, to reconsider them. Contrary information or arguments are either not heard, or are met by such responses as "Well, you're a liberal, you would say that".

Here is an old article from Skeptical Inquirer discussing belief systems, and how they are tied to our survival instincts, possibly explaining the seemingly excessive emotions you encountered when you "attacked" those beliefs.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html

Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die
Because beliefs are designed to enhance our ability to survive, they are biologically designed to be strongly resistant to change. To change beliefs, skeptics must address the brain's "survival" issues of meanings and implications in addition to discussing their data.

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Godmode said:

I think frustration plays a part when you can't think of a logical argument, but still feel somehow that you're "right". That would tend to get you worked up and agitated, which is something I'm sure we've all experienced at one point or another.

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Y'know, I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I think that in both cases there was a sense of, "Well, even if I chose a bad example, I'm still RIGHT!" or "Well, even if you can show that some of these quotes aren't accurate and you can dredge up other citations that seem to point in the other direction, I'm still RIGHT!"

There's an old "Mother Goose and Grimm" cartoon I've kept for years. Dog thinks "E=MC2"; dog says "ARF!"; dog thinks "This is very frustrating".

I know that feeling very well. It was especially acute during my first months living overseas. I had perfectly rational and perhaps even eloquent points to make, but it came out sounding like Injun Joe from the old Tom Sawyer shows.

I'm sure they were feeling that. They wanted me to understand the ideas they were trying to convey, while I seemed to be focused on the small details instead.

But as others have said, it's the dogmatism of the belief that underlies that feeling in these cases.

For instance, earlier this week, that coworker came to me with what seemed to be an error which had been caught by another department. I looked over the document and spotted a required reference in an earlier paragraph -- the apparent error wasn't an error after all. He said, "Ok" and that was that. He did not have to change the document, and that was good.

In this case, there was no underlying dogma being threatened, so demonstrating that his belief was incorrect did not result in an emotional response. No frustration, because there was no psychological investment in having to be right.

A couple of thoughts about this interesting topic:

• In both examples provided in the OP there is an obvious moral component, and it is possible to see them as mostly moral judgements about human groups: group X (the Northerners, the Christians) is morally 'better' than or 'superior' to group Y (the Southerners, the non-Christians). And yes, discussing people values or moral convictions with cold-logical, rational arguments tend to render them emotional. In a sense, for many people it is sort of a category error in casual discussions...
  
  
• Decades of observation of mores in Academia in my country made me certain that people can become very emotional about boringly rational topics and arguments.

You know, I find it really frustrating when I make a very well reasoned argument to which someone has no response, and then they come back with, "well, you might be better at arguing about this/know more about this than me, but that doesn't mean you're right!"

The funny thing is though, they're right. I can remember times when exactly that has happened. When I've had a very well reasoned position, and the other party admitted to being incapable of arguing against it, but still refused to admit that they were wrong. And in the end, it turned out that I was wrong.

Of course that doesn't mean that we should ignore rational thought or just blind ourselves to the arguments of others when our emotions won't accept them. After all, while there are cases where the ideas that we grasp against reason turn out to be vindicated (perhaps because of missing information), I think there are far more cases wherein the opposite is true.
I just think that we should realise that people's emotions are usually pretty smart. Which is one of the reasons that they (we) so often trust them.

There are times when that breaks down however. Not really sure what I'm trying to say, just seemed like it should be said.

Politics is a big one here. Possibly bigger than religion, which is saying something. If someone identifies themselves as either Republican or Democrat, they will defend tooth and nail anything their party does, even if in other circumstances they would have insulted the other for such a stupid action.

My parents raised me to be a rational thinker but they are both devoutly republican (yes I meant to use that word) and it took 6 years to finally convince them that maybe GW isn't the greatest president we have ever had. I still can't talk with them about politics unless it is an issue that the republican party does not have a solid stance on. Its like hitting a brick wall repeatedly.

Both of my parents are very rational people not prone to fanciful arguments or underthinking a situation, but when it comes to politics they become very hard headed.

Roboramma said:

You know, I find it really frustrating when I make a very well reasoned argument to which someone has no response, and then they come back with, "well, you might be better at arguing about this/know more about this than me, but that doesn't mean you're right!"

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I recall one poor soul who snapped at me "It's easy for you, you have all these facts!". The discussion was about some sort of woo, and included the ever-popular "We only use 10% of our brains".

Piggy said:

Y'know, I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I think that in both cases there was a sense of, "Well, even if I chose a bad example, I'm still RIGHT!" or "Well, even if you can show that some of these quotes aren't accurate and you can dredge up other citations that seem to point in the other direction, I'm still RIGHT!".

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isn't the interesting bit what comes next?

arguably Einstein was in this position for most of his life; he kept on coming up with the absurd implications/contradictions implied by quantum mechanics (the experiments kept coming up with absurd results). he advanced our understanding of the hypothesis he attacked, to its benefit.

one of the neat things about science is that very effective, devastatingly deep insights can work against your position. i wonder if the frustration (for most of us) of not being able to formulate those critical questions is greater or less than the frustration at seeing the experiments come out the "other" way?