Do you think it's possible to believe in things you know are not true?
Yes. Belief and doubt coexist all the time, in many different ways. People get good at justifying things to themselves to see what they want to see even when they know better. I think you could argue the definition of belief and at what point it crosses to nonbelief, but here are some ideas as example of belief and doubt coexisting.
Under the category of "making an active effort to believe something that you on some level know is not true," we have situations like:
Trying to keep faith or reconnect with faith despite an event that has shattered it
My relative's "meat comes from packages" mantra, from the cognitive dissonance era before she went vegetarian -- of course she KNEW meat came from slaughtered animals, but she was lying to herself to stave off the horror of reality
Choosing to believe that just because someone has not said no, they are consenting, despite being at least superficially familiar with how consent actually works
Convincing yourself that you are going to be okay to cope with an untenable situation
Another type of situation could look like holding a belief which remains unexamined and therefore intact while cognitively acknowledging contradictory information.
IM STEONGLY OPPOSED TO MUSTARD ON TGE INNER SEAMS OF ONES PANTS
My first reflex when you sent this question was to look up relevant studies. I have not reviewed its method or anything like that, and it does not quite answer the question you asked, but I found one about the perceived roles of faith and science that I found interesting.
"When science mindset is high but faith is low, people may be especially likely to think of Religion and Science as being in conflict. In contrast, when both science and faith mindsets are high, people report minimal conflict. Our pair-wise comparisons of group means (see Table 3) provided another demonstration that people who are low in faith and high in science mindsets, on average, have the highest conflict (and the lowest dialogue) ratings."
Via ScienceDirect
But what do you think?
