How Beliefs Persist Amid Controversy: The Paths to Persistence Model

On controversial issues from abortion to vaccination, we frequently know that millions disagree with us, yet remain firmly rooted in our beliefs. What enables this capacity to sustain controversial beliefs? To answer this question, we connect insights across the social sciences to develop the Paths to Persistence Model (PPM). The PPM outlines four causes of persistence: People may perceive disagreeing others as ignorant, biased, or stupid (informational), consider the issue to be subjective or unknowable (ontological), expect changing their beliefs to have bad social or personal consequences (functional), or lack the cognitive resources to update their beliefs (computational). We explain how the PPM integrates previous theories across disciplines into interacting ‘paths’ that jointly explain persistence. We then present a pre-registered study with a sample quota-matched to the U.S census on race and sex (N = 1,250) investigating responses to societal disagreement on 96 issues spanning science, politics, morality, and religion. We find that most participants persist in their beliefs amid controversy—even when they learn that they vastly underestimated the extent of societal dissent. Moreover, we find that the paths jointly predict whether people persist, and that the paths are associated with important social outcomes, such as people’s willingness to befriend disagreeing others. Four additional pre-registered open- and close-ended studies support these findings (total other N = 1,921) and our theoretical model.