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The Richards Effect is a psychological effect identified, essentially as an aside, by the psychologist Professor Christina Richards in The Psychologist. It states that people who have held a certain set of beliefs which later prove to be false are less likely to alter them in the face of counterfactuals if they have:


 * 1) Invested significant time or effort into the beliefs.
 * 2) The outcome of the beliefs has proven to be dangerous to themself or others.

The cognitive dissonance caused by the tension between the elements above and the newly available facts is resolved by the person irrationally defending their beliefs as the alternative of accepting that they have so much wasted effort and/or historic dangerous practice is untenable.

Richards gives the examples of people being unwilling to change upon learning that they have been belaying incorrectly when rock climbing; and of mental health staff who become aware that they have unwittingly been practicing poorly.