can someone explain the psychology behind the reluctantly to admit when you’re wrong?
In: Biology
An awful lot of people view themselves as being the hero of their own stories, and heroes don’t mess up. The gift of self-aware consciousness, as well as modern religion, leads people to believe that they were put here for a purpose, that “God has a plan for them.” Couple that with the “every child is a special snowflake” crap of the self-esteem movement that has taken over child-rearing, and you’ve got one hell of a recepie for narcissism.
There’s are some very interesting physiological and psychological studies from the last 10 years that get into a potential chemical element.
But for ELI5: stubborn people feel rewarded for sticking to what they believe more so than they do for learning and adapting to new information.
Some of this relates to the reward of belonging to a group over the desire to objectively evaluate the accuracy (or moral values) of that group.
This is also why such people will self-victimize, a way to validate their group and belonging by preemptively attacking an often imagined foe, which also often has traits the group itself has but is very insecure about.
I’m sure it’s something more complex than what I’m gonna say but
We are taught for the first several years of our lives that being wrong is equal to failure, and that failure isnt just bad, but that it also decides your future.
So at a certain point it probably just gets easier to dig in and say your right then deal with the shame we’re told to feel about being wrong.
Cause you know shame is painful and shit
To admit that your wrong about a specific thing or things could mean that everything you have done up to that point was wrong, so your stupid, old people or people in general don’t like feeling that they’re stupid.
An example is that some people grew up being taught that god exist, then when your an adult you would realize the fallacy of the religion and its basically complete bullshit. But your 20-30 years in too deep, to admit that a supernatural god does not exist means that everything you believed up to that point is a lie. It would cause unbearable emotional distress, therefore people suppress facts and logic to go along with the narrative that a almighty being created this universe and bless us all with his holy juices.
An aspect that the answers so far offered haven’t touched on is “[Cognitive Dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance)”.
When something challenges what you assumed to be true, it’s a deeply uncomfortable sensation. This discomfort is a motivation behind some rather odd behaviours, but the main thing is that it makes people reluctant to change their minds – instead ignoring or undermining whatever has challenged their beliefs.
It’s easier to think of some way to make the new information seem irrelevant (e.g. [special pleading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading)) / unreliable / untrue than to re-evaluate everything in your life that’s based on whatever it challenges – especially if the discomfort of cognitive dissonance is helping you to not think too deeply about how well you’re doing at inventing ways to discard the challenge.
There are a *lot* of [Cognitive Biases and Logical Fallacies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) are available to recruit into this process, but the motivation is generally the Cognitive Dissonance.
There are additional motivations, such as saving face (worrying that people will judge you negatively for changing your mind) or the [Sunk-Cost fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect) (worrying about the wasted costs incurred by the belief) that might be significant depending on the individual & circumstances.
We are social beings and evolutionarily traits that are successful jn such a surroundjng will flourish. Anything that stains your reputation is to be avoided and anything that improves your standing in your circles sought after. Also why people’s opinions gravitate towards the opinions of their active social circles or why people love calling others out to signal their moral superiority.
Because humans are spawn of the old fallen gods. Whom were evil,and corrupt. Humans are like their fathers, if their fathers were evil so they will be.
We lie rather than tell the truth becuase we are corrupt, and mix up what is right and what is morally wrong. You lie to cover your ass but really actually hurt yourself more than having been honest. Earth is Satan’s kingdom not Gods.
According to Freud’s psychodynamic theory, denial of a situation such as when you are in the wrong is a [defence mechanism](https://www.simplypsychology.org/defense-mechanisms.html), which prevents you from having to deal with the emotions that will arise when you finally do confront the reality.
I think I come to this a bit from a different angle. How tied you are to the Ego, will likely play a role. For example, if you’re self aware and can see your actions, even if you don’t like them, you might eventually start changing a behavior like this. As you identify more with the part of you that sees this, and doesn’t like it, the defenses will dissolve quicker and you won’t have to protect the Ego as much. Because it’s dissolving too.
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