can someone explain the psychology behind the reluctantly to admit when you’re wrong?
In: Biology
An aspect that the answers so far offered haven’t touched on is “[Cognitive Dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance)”.
When something challenges what you assumed to be true, it’s a deeply uncomfortable sensation. This discomfort is a motivation behind some rather odd behaviours, but the main thing is that it makes people reluctant to change their minds – instead ignoring or undermining whatever has challenged their beliefs.
It’s easier to think of some way to make the new information seem irrelevant (e.g. [special pleading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading)) / unreliable / untrue than to re-evaluate everything in your life that’s based on whatever it challenges – especially if the discomfort of cognitive dissonance is helping you to not think too deeply about how well you’re doing at inventing ways to discard the challenge.
There are a *lot* of [Cognitive Biases and Logical Fallacies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) are available to recruit into this process, but the motivation is generally the Cognitive Dissonance.
There are additional motivations, such as saving face (worrying that people will judge you negatively for changing your mind) or the [Sunk-Cost fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect) (worrying about the wasted costs incurred by the belief) that might be significant depending on the individual & circumstances.
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