Cognitive Dissonance

Motivated Reasoning is a Cognitive bias - we tend to accept/believe more easily and with less scrutiny things we think are correct. If we encounter an idea that we think is wrong, we subject it to more scrutiny - it has a higher bar to

There is a social aspect to belief, such that we may discount even the evidence of our own senses if we think that our beliefs are not in harmony with those around us. Peer pressure works. Just as we seek to have harmony within our own bel