Do beliefs yield to evidence? Examining belief perseverance vs. change in response to congruent empirical findings

Research on belief perseverance often suggests that people maintain or even strengthen their beliefs in response to disconfirming evidence. However, many studies demonstrating belief perseverance have presented participants with mixed evidence. The present research investigated whether people maintain their beliefs in response to a single pattern of findings. Across four studies, participants consistently shifted their beliefs in response to the evidence, even when it challenged their views on religion (Studies 1-3), politics (Study 3), gun control (Study 3), and capital punishment (Studies 3-4). Participants were also receptive to mixed evidence, shifting their beliefs in response to the first study presented and shifting back in response to the second (and overall, depolarizing in response to the evidence). Participants not only updated their beliefs about the research question but also sometimes their position on the issue. In some cases, bias emerged in participants' evaluations of evidence, but not in others. Evaluations of evidence quality generally predicted belief change in response to the evidence and did not largely explain the degree of belief maintenance participants exhibited. These findings suggest that people may be receptive to counter-attitudinal evidence when the findings are clear, and highlight the importance of further examining the conditions under which biased assimilation and belief perseverance (vs. change) occur.