[WS:] This is not just about being right or wrong but about power, status and rewards that come with it, cushy positions, speaking engagements, awards etc. If you are a celebrity figure you cannot be publicly humiliated by being shown wrong. John Kenneth Galbraith spent considerable effort criticizing this - e.g. in "Affluent society". Of course not every academic falls for this, but a good number of academic celebrities do, especially in disciplines where there are no objective criteria for falsifying the established wisdom (e.g. in economics and social sciences more generally.)
Wojtek