One of the most difficult jobs we have as a human being who wants the truth is to disarm the ego. It tends to twist the facts into an agreement with our flawed hypotheses. The reasons this seems to be the default case when data doesn't correspond to our current beliefs are three fold.
1. Confirmation bias- selecting only the data that conforms to our existing belief that may be faulty
2.Intellectual insecurity-We become easily intimidated by the method's difficulty. It's hard to translate the unexpected into coherent new models which require us to be sternly rigorous and flexibly imaginative to create new theories that correspond to the data.
3. Magical thinking- We can engage magical thinking and since magic exists outside the material domain of science; it can't be tested by scientific experiment a fact that greatly pleases our ego!
It seems if we're too close to our survival needs we cannot disarm the ego. If we don't have any invested interest in the outcome then we are better scientific thinkers.
Note Wonderworks book Angus Fletcher