The Effectiveness of Supportive and Refutational Defenses in Immunizing and Restoring Beliefs

Previous studies (2, 5) have shown that merely giving a person arguments supporting his belief, without even a mention of possible counterarguments against the belief, has little efficiency in making that belief resistant to persuasion. The present study is designed to show that supportive defenses, when employed in specified ways, can contribute appreciably to belief maintenance. The hypotheses of both the previous and the present studies derive from the "selective exposure" postulate—that people tend to defend their beliefs by avoiding exposure to counterarguments rather than by developing positive supports for the beliefs. As a consequence of the ideological *'asepUc" environment that results, the person tends to remain highly confident about his beliefs, but also to be highly vulnerable to strong counterarguments when forced exposure to them occurs. The previous findings, that prior exposure to supportive arguments fails to reduce the vulnerability, are consonant with the above analysis: the person's selective exposure has left him overconfident of his belief's invulnerability. Hence, he regards the supportive defense as belaboring the obvious, and is little motivated to utilize it seriously. The finding that a prior defense-by-refutation does produce considerable immunity to persuasion is also consonant with the selective exposure hypothesis. (The term ''refutational defense" will be used in this paper to refer to defenses which involve pre-exposing the person to the mention of counterarguments against his beliefs together with a detailed refutation of these counterarguments.) Such pre-exposures, analogous to inoculating with a weakened virus a person who has been raised in a germ-free environment, would be expected to stimulate the person's belief defenses, thus making him better able to resist the subsequent massive exposure. This analysis is particularly appropriate when the beliefs involved are cultural truisms, since the selective exposure tendency is especially likely to have been successfully carried out as regards such beliefs. For this reason, the present study utiliies cultural truisms as the experimental beliefs. The preceding theoretical analysis suggests some techniques for enhancing the belief-maintaining effectiveness of the supportive defenses. The first