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What seems really interesting is that not only are culturally ingrained beliefs hard to unseat, but it seems that if they are ultimately unseated, if something resembles the old beliefs it will be immediately dismissed by the new ingrained beliefs. Being close minded is ultimately the root cause of the failures in both scenarios.

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Care to give some examples?

I can think of a few general counterexamples:

* Fad diets (people flit from fad to fad, not outright reject all fad diets from then on)

* Losing your faith, but then being fascinated by a foreign religion (i.e. The trope of the ex-Christian falling in love with Buddhism)

Regarding fad diets, I can think of times when I've seen people (myself included) act biased toward new fad diets if they resemble older, popularly discredited fad diets in some way (even if it is only a superficial similarity).

I think the same can apply to religion; someone might be completely turned off of Abrahamic religions by their experiences with only one of them, regardless of whether this is a "fair" assessment.

Regarding GP's comment, then... is that type of closed-mindedness actually bad?

If they've finally changed their mind about a deeply seated belief, that means they must have had some pretty compelling reason to do so... why would they backtrack casually?

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