Why Bigfoot Believers Don’t Change Their Minds |
Belief perseverance is the persistence of belief even after the evidence supporting them has been discredited.
People don’t simply abandon beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence. Instead, they often maintain them.
Beliefs are shaped by identity, experience, community, and story, and guide how we interpret new information.
The documentary Capturing Bigfoot premiered recently at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, and it’s already generating controversy for its claim that a famous piece of footage may actually be a hoax.
This is the feted Patterson-Gimlin film, the iconic 1967 footage of a “Bigfoot” trekking through the forest near Willow Creek, California. Shot by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, it depicts an unidentified hairy figure that the filmmakers claimed was a female Bigfoot. The film has long been touted as the “gold standard” of Bigfoot evidence.
The new documentary introduces an earlier video, a purported “dress rehearsal” filmed in 1966.
If authentic, this finding poses a direct challenge to the film’s credibility. Yet some Bigfoot believers have already been reluctant to accept the possibility that the Patterson–Gimlin film is a hoax, even without having seen the new footage, instead suggesting that the newly surfaced material must be fraudulent. For others, the controversy has only reinforced their belief in Bigfoot.
We’re not here to debate the existence, or nonexistence, of Bigfoot, but to examine something else: the persistence of belief.
Even if the most famous piece of Bigfoot evidence were conclusively proven fake, it is unlikely that belief in Bigfoot would disappear.
Why Belief Persists, Even When the Evidence Doesn’t
Psychologists call this phenomenon belief perseverance. This is the tendency for beliefs to persist even after the evidence supporting them has been discredited. Closely related to what researchers describe as the “continued influence effect,” it reflects a broader cognitive bias in how we process information.
Decades of research suggest that people don’t simply abandon beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence. Instead, they often maintain them, and in some cases, become even more committed to them, especially when those beliefs are personally meaningful or long-held (Anglin, 2019). Even clear attempts at correction can fail to dislodge the original belief.
Seen through this lens, the endurance of Bigfoot belief is not especially surprising. If anything, it offers a vivid illustration of belief perseverance in action: a case where disconfirming evidence does little to weaken conviction and may even strengthen it.
Why do beliefs persist even when they are directly challenged, or even discredited?
Psychological research offers a clear answer: We don’t evaluate evidence neutrally. People tend to judge information more favorably when it aligns with their existing beliefs, and to scrutinize or dismiss it when it doesn’t (Bryanov and Vziatysheva, 2021). More broadly, belief updating is shaped not just by evidence but by our prior beliefs, preferences, and identities, which influence how we interpret new information (Oeberst and Imhoff, 2023).
This helps explain why belief perseverance is such a powerful force. When a belief is challenged, what’s at stake is rarely just a single claim. It’s usually something more personal.
Belief perseverance is the psychological engine behind Bigfoot culture. For many Bigfoot believers, beliefs are not simply about facts. They may be grounded in lived experience, something seen, heard, or felt. They are reinforced through community, where belief fosters connection, shared purpose, and even status or expertise within the group. In this context, abandoning the belief isn’t simply a matter of “updating” one’s view in light of new evidence. It can feel like losing part of one’s identity.
There are other forces at work as well, including sunk cost. The more money, time, effort, and emotion people have invested, through research, travel, or years of engagement, the harder it becomes to let go. And then there is the power of narrative. A vivid, compelling story will often outlast attempts to correct it. Once established, these stories are remarkably resistant to revision.
Seen this way, the reaction to Capturing Bigfoot is not unusual. Faced with potentially disconfirming evidence, some believers double down rather than reconsider. The pattern is familiar, extending well beyond Bigfoot to conspiracy thinking, misinformation, and other enduring paranormal claims, from the Surgeon's Photograph of the “Loch Ness Monster” to the Cottingley Fairies, and the Shroud of Turin.
What this reveals is not just something about Bigfoot belief, but about human cognition more generally. We do not simply hold beliefs; we defend them, inhabit them, and, when challenged, we often work hard to preserve them.
What Belief in Bigfoot Reveals About Us
Even if the most famous Bigfoot footage were definitively proven fake by Capturing Bigfoot, belief would likely persist. Not because the evidence is strong, but because belief is not just about evidence.
Belief in Bigfoot offers a window into how we all think. Our beliefs are shaped by identity, experience, community, and story, and once established, they guide how we interpret new information. We don’t just hold beliefs; we see the world through them. And when they’re challenged, we often respond not by abandoning them, but by defending them.
That is why Bigfoot, real or not, is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Anglin, S. M. (2019). Do beliefs yield to evidence? Examining belief perseverance vs. change in response to congruent empirical findings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 82, 176–199. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.02.004
Bryanov K, Vziatysheva V. Determinants of individuals' belief in fake news: A scoping review determinants of belief in fake news. PLoS One. 2021 Jun 24;16(6):e0253717. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253717.
Oeberst A, Imhoff R. Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2023 Nov;18(6):1464–1487. doi: 10.1177/17456916221148147.
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