Just as we want to think of ourselves as good decision makers, we want to think of ourselves as good belief formers. When a belief is challenged, our first impulse is to bolster it in order to maintain our belief in our earlier intelligence. We want to have been right all along—whereas it would be more reasonable to want to be right in the present (even if that means admitting error). This is what makes us into lawyers, hired by our earlier views to defend them against all accusations, rather than detectives seeking the truth itself.
Jonathan Baron - on one of our most common and damning faults from his book Thinking and Deciding
