How stubborn are factual beliefs in political disagreements?
Factual beliefs — like whether climate change is real or how many immigrants live in a country — are not neutral pieces of information. They are tightly wrapped up in political identity. One analysis found that 84% of Democrats accept the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, while only 43% of Republicans do [1]. That is a 41-percentage-point gap on what should be a straightforward factual question. This suggests that for many people, 'facts' are adopted or rejected based on whether they fit their political values, not on the evidence itself.
When people are directly confronted with counterevidence, do they update their factual beliefs? Two experiments (total 576 participants) tested exactly this, exposing left- and right-wing participants to new information that contradicted their prior beliefs on both political and non-political issues. The result: there was no significant difference between the two groups in how much they changed their beliefs [2]. In other words, neither side was more open to changing factual beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence. This finding challenges the common assumption that one political side is more rigid than the other.
Why values and facts are hard to separate in political disagreement
The reason factual beliefs are so resistant to change is that they are often proxies for deeper values. Research on fake news believability found that conservative individuals and collectivists (people who prioritize group harmony) were more likely to believe false content shared on social media [4]. This suggests that cultural values — not just political ideology — shape what people accept as fact. When a factual claim threatens a person's values (e.g., 'immigrants are good for the economy' vs. 'immigrants threaten our culture'), rejecting the fact can feel like defending their identity.
A broader review of belief change research confirms that political beliefs are notoriously difficult to shift, whether they are factual or value-based [5]. Strategies to correct false beliefs often fail because people are motivated to maintain beliefs that align with their political identity. The same review notes that identity politics and polarization create barriers to updating both factual and value-based beliefs [5]. So the question 'which is easier to change?' may be the wrong framing — the real challenge is that facts and values are so intertwined that changing one almost always requires addressing the other.
Can anything make factual beliefs easier to change?
One intriguing line of research looks at whether psychedelics can change beliefs. A review of this work found that psychedelic experiences can sometimes lead to profound and lasting belief changes, but the mechanism is not about replacing false facts with true ones [3]. Instead, psychedelics seem to change how much weight people give to emotions and to others' suggestions when forming beliefs. Importantly, the review notes that a person's baseline beliefs (e.g., what they expect psychedelics to do) can color the effects [3]. This means even a powerful intervention is filtered through existing values and expectations, reinforcing how hard it is to change factual beliefs in isolation from values.
The takeaway: no simple intervention has been shown to reliably make factual beliefs easier to change than values in political disagreement. The evidence points to a more complex reality where facts and values are mutually reinforcing, and both are resistant to change when they are tied to political identity [1][2][4][5].
About These Sources
This answer is built on 5 peer-reviewed studies — published from 2022 to 2024, 1 from 2024 or later, 2 in Q1–Q2 journals, collectively cited 131 times — selected as the most relevant from 5 studies that passed quality screening, drawn from 41 papers retrieved from a database of over 500 million.
Sources used in this answer
Political Polarization Over Factual Beliefs
Shows massive partisan gaps in factual beliefs: 84% of Democrats vs. 43% of Republicans accept climate science, and similar divides exist on immigration and inequality, arguing factual belief polarization is a core pillar of political division.
Political ideology and belief change in the face of counterevidence
In two experiments (total N=576), found no significant difference between left- and right-wing participants in how much they changed prior beliefs when presented with counterevidence on political and non-political issues, contradicting the political asymmetry hypothesis.
Do psychedelics change beliefs?
Reviews evidence that psychedelics can change beliefs, but argues they do not create new beliefs from scratch; instead they alter how affect and social suggestion influence belief formation, and baseline expectations shape the effects.
Fake news believability: The effects of political beliefs and espoused cultural values
Using a repeated-measures design with participants in the US and India, found that conservative individuals and collectivists are more likely to believe fake news, showing cultural values and political beliefs jointly influence factual belief acceptance.
Changes in Political Beliefs
Reviews the interdisciplinary literature on political belief change, concluding that false beliefs (e.g., vaccines cause autism) are resistant to correction due to identity politics, polarization, and motivated reasoning, with implications for societal challenges like climate change and inequality.