Belief Perseverance Examples

1. Belief perseverance, covered in Chapter 1, is the tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them. An example of this is my friend’s uncle. My friend’s uncle has been a smoker for the past twenty years and believes that cigarettes are harmless. Despite numerous studies and reports warning against the dangers of smoking, my friend’s uncle still refuses to believe that smoking is harmful. This is an example of belief perseverance because he stuck to his initial belief that smoking is harmless even when evidence contradicts it.
2. The emotional reasoning fallacy, covered in Chapter 1, is the error of using our emotions as guides for evaluating the validity of a claim. I saw an example of this when my friend gave