Craig Anderson demonstrated that changing people's beliefs works best by providing them with causal explanations for the new belief. We find it hard to suspend judgment or accept new data without a theory that explains those data. Confirming versus disconfirming Our beliefs, attitudes, theories influence how we perceive and judge the world. The influence of prior theories on new information leads us to a confirmation bias. A variation on this theme is the feature positive effect .
Logicians use a trick to encourage falsification.
They call it a reductio ad absurdum, in which a theorem is proven by showing that its opposite leads to contradictions. To be critical about our judgments, then, we should sometimes assume the opposite of our opinion and see whether or not it accounts at least as well or better for the evidence at hand.