Stereotypes actively reaffirmed become deeply rooted beliefs that resist contradiction

Evidence

That people are ready to invest resources to keep with their initial views and feel compelled to work hard when unexpected evidence pops up is not only detailed in work on person memory, hypothesis confirmation, and stereotype change. This pattern has been reported in many other areas, such as attribution and persuasion. All in all, social-cognition work is thus strongly compatible with the idea that perceivers have a vested interest in the inertia of their beliefs. In line with lessons from attitude change research, our prediction is that stereotypes are likely to be even more resistant if they survive a stage of thorough examination during which perceivers actively reaffirm them. It would thus seem that stereotypes can emerge in two rather different contexts. Besides being handy interpretations of the evidence, highly susceptible to being abandoned or modified whenever more attention is devoted to the stimulus information, they may also result from a thorough rationalization process and should then be seen as deeply rooted beliefs likely to resist most contradictory facts. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1179

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clearly distinguishes two types of stereotypes: situation-dependent interpretations versus rationalized deep-rooted beliefs.
• XREF: Connects to motivated reasoning and confirmation bias literature; also to the persistence of beliefs despite disconfirming evidence familiar from Kuhn on paradigm resistance.