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The Formation of Belief 311

information by creating new beliefs and in that sense are growth mechanisms.
However, the function of the added beliefs is to minimize the impact of the
new information. Discrediting the source and bolstering avoid incorporat-
ing the contradictory information altogether. Differentiation accepts the new
information as true but limits its scope to exceptions. Mediation (abduction)
also accepts the new information, but at the price of adding one or more aux-
iliary, mediating beliefs that may or may not have any independent grounding.
A complete theory of these mechanisms would specify exactly how the added
beliefs are created, but however fleshed out, they produce peripheral changes
that prevent change from propagating up the center-periphery gradient and
affecting core beliefs.

Discussion
The empiricist attitude to belief formation is that observations that contra-
dict a belief ought to cause conversion of that belief, but this principle fares
poorly as a psychological hypothesis. Fundamental assumptions are often held
unconsciously. A reader or listener might not detect a conflict between his
own and an author’s or speaker’s point of view but blithely assimilate the lat-
ter’s discourse to his own prior beliefs, distorting its message in the process.
When the conflict between prior beliefs and new information is detected, the
mind can protect core beliefs by calling upon a repertoire of processes that
limit the impact of the new information to the periphery of the relevant belief
system by introducing auxiliary assumptions or protective distinctions. The
epistemological analyses by Duhem, Quine and Lakatos, the center-periphery
principle proposed by rokeach, and the process hypotheses advanced by cog-
nitive consistency theorists like Abelson and Festinger and by cognitive sci-
entists like Darden, Chinn and Brewer combine seamlessly into a coherent,
relatively complete and rather satisfactory theory of resistance to contradic-
tory information. The confluence of these diverse contributions would count
as one of the great success stories of cognitive science, if only cognitive scien-
tists could be bothered to claim it.
Does the reality of resistance imply that people are irrational? Dissonance-
reducing processes sometimes produce veridical extensions to a belief base
and sometimes not, but their function is not to increase veridicality but to
reduce dissonance. The changes they produce cannot be justified as responses
to evidence. nevertheless, slapping the insult “irrational” on those cognitive
moves is problematic. suppose, for example, that newton’s theory of mechan-
ics is contradicted by the result of an experiment. The rational response is