ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how resistance to changing our beliefs affects adaptation. Adaptation may be defined generally as the alteration of our thoughts, and behaviors, in order to more successfully adjust to our environment. If belief change is a characteristic of learning then resistance to belief change is an important impediment to learning, personal growth, and adaptation. By misdirecting attention to irrelevant cues irrational beliefs may impair adaptation and actually cause new problems to arise. Such beliefs inappropriately and unnecessarily limit the performance of their owner by restricting the range of options of which they are aware. The longer the self-limiting belief persists the longer it hampers adaptation and the greater the harm, or lost benefit. According to Albert Ellis, one of the defining characteristics of psychopathology is the tendency to be insufficiently responsive to the physical and social feedback that normally enables people to change irrational beliefs.
