Refuting someone’s core beliefs on facts is often perceived as a personal attack
Evidence
In politics, it is usually considered an ideal to argue hard on the merits but fair on a personal level. Given the psychological effects described in Sect. 2.​2 it can be extremely treacherous to follow this ideal in practice. The fact that one wants to distinguish between the factual level and the personal level, and possibly does so from a sober semantic point of view, does not mean that the addressee will understand it that way. If you want to refute a central conviction or even a set of beliefs of a person on a factual level, for example, you have to break through the person’s confirmation tendency and trigger a cognitive dissonance, which in many cases will be perceived as an attack on the person. If one criticizes such a belief not from a substantive but from an ethical point of view, the danger that this will be understood as a (fundamental) criticism of the person is even considerably greater. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 223
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to cognitive dissonance literature and confirmation bias work in psychology (Sect. 2.2 referenced within the book). — connects to: Studying conspiracy beliefs itself triggers defensive backlash from believers. — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 154; Motivated reasoning makes people reject information threatening their values and beliefs. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 89
Related
- Studying conspiracy beliefs itself triggers defensive backlash from believers. (similarity 0.83)
- Motivated reasoning makes people reject information threatening their values and beliefs. (similarity 0.81)
- Ideologues pair extreme doubt toward disfavored facts with total credulity toward favored ones (similarity 0.79)