A woman has been hypnotized. She is on the ground, barking like a dog, in front of an audience of hundreds. The hypnotist snaps, she comes to, and the hypnotist asks, “Why were you on the floor?” The woman, without missing a beat, replies, “Oh, I was looking for my contact.”
People will reactively reject or explain away anything that doesn’t fit into their existent schema. For example, if someone doesn’t believe in ghosts and late one eve, they see a flash of white out of the corner of their eye, they’ll reason, “Oh, that must have been the cat.” It would take a lot of flashes and a whole lot of terror to change this person’s gut exclamation to, “Casper?!” People will even reject foreign knowledge or systems that benefit them. It’s like Stockholm syndrome but for ideas. Someone with an extremely high self-concept will not register evidence of their self-centeredness. If someone highlights it, they’ll rationalize: “Oh, you’re just jealous.”