| Summary/Abstract |
More than 40 years ago, Columbia University's Robert Jervis argued that political officials “are apt to err by being too wedded to the established view and too closed to new information, as opposed to being too willing to alter their theories. He emphasized this theme still more strongly in later work. “It is striking,” he wrote in 1976, “that people often preserve their images in the face of what seems in retrospect to have been clear evidence to the contrary. We ignore information that does not fit, twist it so that it confirms, or at least does not contradict, our beliefs, and deny its validity.
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