The Women's Health Initiative findings surprised many people in medicine because they flew in the face of the entrenched belief that estrogen protected postmenopausal women from heart disease.

The women are supremely aware of the irony, though they have no illusions about immediately changing years of entrenched beliefs.

These can be used to sharpen skills of inference and to focus on underlying attitudes, prejudices and entrenched beliefs, about which even the subject himself may not have been fully conscious.

This story, as well as the story of the Last Supper, led to one of the most entrenched 13-related beliefs: You should never sit down to a meal in a group of 13.

One was that voters, when their minds are wonderfully concentrated, will probably put the burden of proof on those proposing a departure from civilization's deeply entrenched belief that doctors should not kill.

But he also sometimes quietly raged at them for their entrenched belief in passivity.

The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

Some British explorers claimed to be motivated by national rivalry, and an entrenched belief that it was Britain's right to be first.

As audiences by now expected, Ibsen's next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against society's mores, but against overeager reformers and their idealism.