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........