[JohnMK]

I think we can generalize this further.

Humans like certainty, we like answers to our questions, especially those that don't require a thousand provisos and digressions -- so basically: simple, black and white answers. These are very comforting -- to be sure is to be self-confident, and self-confidence is dopaminergically rewarding. We build up some of our cognitive processes around whatever particular set of answers we have adopted (usually the black and white variety); one's intellectual framework can become hemmed in, in other words. We basically stop thinking as rationally as we could otherwise. Quick heuristics are adopted, they are like highly-gravitational black holes in the mind, unavoidable, leading to other black holes, cascading and recursing down to a conclusion that you wanted all along, one arrived at through such radical G-forces that to regard the conclusion as stillborn might actually be a useful heuristic. Escaping these (preconceived (il)logical pathways) can be extremely painful and difficult. When these are challenged, we experience uncomfortable emotions (such as fear and anger) that overwhelm reason; it can be very subtle and we might delude ourselves into thinking it's not happening at all, but objective science indicates that it does. We rotate the offending idea around in four dimensions to find the hole that we can ram our reptilian-limbic spear through. Kill the veracity of the idea, preserve our black and white answer, preserve our self-confidence, then Pavlov gives a bit of dopamine pleasure in the nucleus accumbens. Rinse, repeat, and enjoy.

Naturally this is all tendency. This cognitive style is so addictive though . . .