Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

"Every man confuses the limits of his mind for the limits of the world"
Schopenhauer
What does it mean to perservere? In a dictionary, you might find a definition that says it means to be persistant. For most of us this word has a positive connotation. We think of a person who, against all odds, persevered.

The Perseverance effect, however, deals with the negetive side of perseverance. It is a term to describe the phenomenom of how a person's beliefs persist even after the evidence that supports said belief is shown to be false. For example, if a person insisted on believing the world was flat after it was proven to be spherical.

You can see evidences of this in ourselves and in the world around us. In politics, it abounds. Many people still believe false things about presidential candidates long after they are discredited. I think it is most evident about the war in Iraq. Most people by now have noticed that there have been numerous attempts at justifying the war. First it was weapons of mass destruction. Long after it was said that there was no WMD in Iraq, people continued to use it for reasoning.

This example shows why I think that the perserverence effect happens. We don't like to be wrong. When we are, we either keep on insisting that what we believe is right, or we find a way to justify why we believed it. That is to say, I think it ties in rather well with self-esteem. We need to find some self-justification for why we beleive something and, in the case that we fail, we perservere.

Weird.