Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die
Lester is clinical and consulting psychologist for more than 25 years. Lester is the one of a few professionals who is qualifies to specialize in the most difficult behavior, which called “Personality Disorder”. In addition to holding a university faculty position, Dr. Lester has authored five books, has published research and articles in publications such as “The Journal of the American Medical Association” and “The Skeptical Inquire”. One of his articles is “Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die.” In this article Lester explaining why a person's beliefs, bad or good or even trivial beliefs, are so hard to change. Lester argues that the human brain has a system for developing beliefs and that this system has survival value because it is independent of the sensory …show more content…
Grigory W. Lester states in the start of the article “Because beliefs are designed to enhance our ability to survive, they are biologically designed to be strongly resistant to change.”
Lester started his article with the main question-thesis “How, we wonder, are people able to hold beliefs that contradict the data?” In order to answer this question more clearly he divided his article to a few separate parts and named them. This structure of the text let the author to bring reader’s attention to his main points. In the first paragraph “Biology and Survival” Lester explains that the main purpose of our brain is to keep us alive. He says that whenever the brain has a choice between survival and consciousness, survival always comes first. In the next part “Senses and Beliefs” author states that “One of the brain’s primary tools for ensuring survival is our senses.” Author explains that for people it is more safe to believe in danger in order to be ready to an action to keep us safe. In