Marginalium

Beliefs and the Unacknowledged Evidence:

Beliefs may withstand the pressure of disconfirming events not because of the effectiveness of dissonance-reducing strategies, but because disconfirming evidence may simply go unacknowledged

A rebuttal to the classic ‘cognitive dissonance’ account of why believers continue to believe after the failure of a prophecy. In this case, the culture makes the failure less salient. One wonders whether this kind of surrender to a culture that protects you from dissonance is not simply another mechanism for reducing cognitive dissonance.