Maybe you remember the scene from The Big Chill where one of the characters praises the importance of a good rationalization. (Can you get through a day without one?) Rationalization, the art of justifying behavior that may not really be easily justifiable, is explained as a way for us to live comfortably with our decisions even in the face of evidence that they might have been flawed.
Being aware of facts that undermine the wisdom of a decision we’ve made—noticing a house in your price range in a better location, for example, right after you’ve closed on what you thought was your dream house—gives rise to cognitive dissonance, the effects of trying to hold onto two competing ideas about what we’ve done. So we banish the evidence against our decision, and decide to be happy with what we’ve got.
The assumption has been that this is a fairly complicated cognitive process that we’re more or less aware of, but this article from the New York Times describes some recent research that indicates we share the process with very young children and capuchin monkeys. Rather than assume more complicated mental gyrations in these less mentally sophisticated thinkers, the conclusion seems to be that perhaps our own acts of rationalization are less conscious and more automatic than we realized. Incidentally, I really like the graphic at the top of the article.
I like the proposed metric for determining how a decision affects values. It seems so far researchers have been using to determine whether or not groups posess this weakness for rationalization. I am more interested to turn this into a metric for use in a personality test. Are certain individuals more or less susceptible to this form of rationalization? Perhaps changing the context changes the results as well?
It certainly seems to me that the complex mental process is the ability to hold the cognitive dissonance in your head and still function without diminishing the dissonance.
Good point! I thought about personality differences myself after I posted this. I was thinking of the way someone once explained the difference between the P and J designations in the Myers-Briggs personality typology: Ps are happy before a decision is made, and Js are happy afterward. I’m a P and my mechansm for preventing buyer’s remorse and other sad ruminations about past decisions sometimes seems remarkably weak.