Glossary
Belief Perseverance
What is belief perseverance?
Belief perseverance is the persistence of a belief after evidence supporting it has been discredited. More broadly, the term describes insufficient updating in response to contrary evidence. Maintaining a belief is not automatically a bias: new evidence may be weak, irrelevant or unreliable.
History and measurement
One experimental approach first gives people information on which to form a belief, then discredits that information and measures what they still believe. The question is whether the belief survives the loss of its original support.
False-feedback experiments associated with Ross and colleagues found that self-perceptions could persist after participants learned that performance feedback was fabricated. A later replication and extension found important limits: discrediting both the test and the feedback eliminated perseverance, and persistence after standard debriefing concerned task-specific judgments.
Belief perseverance versus confirmation bias
Confirmation bias concerns selective search or interpretation; belief perseverance concerns continued belief. They can be related without one being a necessary cause of the other. Stable survey answers alone do not show perseverance unless there is a relevant basis for expecting revision.
Belief perseverance example: why it matters
Consider a student who receives a poor score and concludes that they lack ability. Later, they learn the score was assigned at random. Do they abandon the conclusion, or keep an explanation they built around it? This illustrates the problem studied in false-feedback research.
Similar questions can arise when correcting a classroom misconception, an impression of a product, or a judgment based on discredited evidence. Check what the person understood the correction to mean.