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308 Conversion

everyday life. in politics, people tend to access news sources that concur with
their beliefs more often than sources that contradict them. A scientist whose
favorite theory is falsified by a study from a rival laboratory is more likely
to respond by running a series of supporting studies than by changing his
theory. Although the addition of new grounds for a belief is a type of growth
mechanism – the belief base is extended with new content – bolstering, like
discrediting the source, minimizes change because the prior beliefs are not
revised and the contradictory information is not accepted as true. Dissonance
is not eliminated, only reduced in intensity.

Differentiation/exception
Yet another way to sweep cognitive dirt under the conceptual rug is to differ-
entiate the contradicted belief into a general case and an exception, and then
decree that the anomalous information holds only for the exception. This move
incorporates the new information into the belief base but minimizes its impact;
see Figure 9.3 for a graphical explanation of this process. There are endless vari-
ations of this move in reasoning about ethnic groups. Consider a person who
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holds a negative belief about group X; perhaps he believes that they beat their
children. if the person comes into frequent contact with members of group X,
he is likely to observe some cases of exemplary parenting behavior. To escape
the contradiction between his prejudice and his observations, he can add the
auxiliary belief that education, strict law enforcement, religion or some other
factor has the power of curing members of X from their child-beating tenden-
cies. if those members of X who are educated, scared of the law or deeply devout
are few, the observations of exemplary parenting behavior can be accepted at
face value without any change in the belief about X in general. The core belief
that (typical) members of X are disposed to beat their children can be kept
without revision and without cognitive dissonance. in network terms, differ-
entiation replaces the node that represents the initial belief about X with three
nodes: a node representing the overarching concept all members of group X
and two nodes that represent the two subsets, typical members of X and mem­
bers of X who are educated (or law abiding; or religious; etc.). This is a genuine
growth mechanism. The new information is incorporated into the belief base
and accepted as true. Differentiation nevertheless blunts the impact of the con-
tradictory information by limiting its scope to special cases.

Mediation/abduction
The idea that a contradiction between a belief base {B} and a contradictory
piece of information true(P) can be resolved by inventing a mediating belief