People's beliefs about others are often impervious to new evidence: we continue to cooperate with ingroup defectors and refuse to see outgroup enemies as rehabilitated. Resistance to updating beliefs with new information has historically been interpreted as reflecting bias or motivated cognition, but recent work in Bayesian inference suggests that belief maintenance can be compatible with procedural rationality. We propose a mentalizing account of belief maintenance, which holds that protecting strong priors by generating alternative explanations for surprising information involves more mentalizing about the target than nonrational discounting. We review the neuroscientific evidence supporting this approach, and discuss how both types of processing can lead to fitness benefits.

中文翻译：

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动机与理性印象更新的心理学

人们对他人的信念往往不受新证据的影响：我们继续与内群体叛逃者合作，并拒绝看到外群体敌人得到改过自新。对用新信息更新信念的抵制历来被解释为反映偏见或有动机的认知，但最近贝叶斯推理的工作表明，信念维持可以与程序理性兼容。我们提出了一种信念维持的心智化解释，它认为通过对令人惊讶的信息产生替代解释来保护强先验涉及比非理性折扣更多地对目标进行心智化。我们回顾了支持这种方法的神经科学证据，并讨论了这两种处理方式如何带来健康益处。