Backfire Effect
Show someone proof they're wrong and they might believe it even harder. Welcome to the most frustrating feature of the human mind.
The backfire effect is what happens when correcting a false belief actually strengthens it. You present facts, evidence, data — and instead of updating their view, the person doubles down. It sounds irrational, and it is. But it happens because being wrong about something you care about doesn't feel like an intellectual error. It feels like an attack on your identity.
When a belief is tied to who you are — your politics, your religion, your tribe — evidence against it triggers a defensive response. Your brain treats the correction the same way it would treat a physical threat. Fight back. Protect the territory. The fact that the "territory" is just an opinion doesn't matter to the part of your brain running the defence.
This is why fact-checking, while important, is not the silver bullet people hope for. Sending someone a link to a debunking article can make them more certain of the very thing you're trying to correct. The act of being challenged activates motivated reasoning, and the conclusion gets reinforced rather than revised.
If you want to actually change someone's mind, confrontation is usually the worst approach. But more importantly — notice when it's happening to you.
References
- Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
- Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber — The Enigma of Reason (2017)
- Dan Kahan et al. — Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus (2011)