Rationalization (psychology)
Encyclopedia
In psychology
and logic
, rationalization (or making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism in which perceived controversial behaviors or feelings are logically justified and explained in a rational or logical manner in order to avoid any true explanation and made consciously tolerable by plausible means. Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly subconscious
(e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt
).
People rationalize for various reasons. Rationalization may differentiate the original deterministic explanation of the behavior or feeling in question. Sometimes rationalization occurs when we think we know ourselves better than we do
.
It is also an informal fallacy
of reasoning.
, rationalization occurs "when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for his or her own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self serving but incorrect explanations."
). Common excuses made are:
was 'the man who, appropriately, contributed the term "rationalization" to psychoanalysis (in 1908) - "the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized"'. Although Jones 'had not coined the term - the Oxford English Dictionary records the year of its first use as 1846' - he was the first to employ it in the context of psychoanalysis: 'No one will admit that he ever deliberately performed an irrational act, and any act that might appear so is immediately justified by...providing a false explanation that has a plausible ring of rationality'.
The term was taken up almost immediately by Sigmund Freud
to account for the explanations offered for neurotic symptoms - 'a process which (borrowing a useful term from Ernest Jones [1908] we may describe as "rationalization"' - and was later developed further by his daughter Anna Freud
.
However the concept itself (as opposed to the term) can be traced back millennia earlier, to Quintilian
and classical rhetoric
: 'The "pat excuse" is the color, a frequent technical term among the rhetoricians for any approach that would present an action in the most favourable possible light'. By the eighteenth century, it was almost a commonplace that, were a man to consider his actions, 'he will soon find, that such of them, as strong inclination and custom have prompted him to commit, are generally dressed out and painted with all the false beauties [color] which, a soft and flattering hand can give them'.
What psychoanalysis added was the specific idea of the motives that were glossed or colored being unconscious, a point developed further by Lundhold, "Repression and Rationalization", in 1933, and by Hollitscher, "The Concept of Rationalization" in 1939. By the 1940s Fenichel
could distinguish 'various types of rationalization...Emotional attitudes become permissible on condition that they are justified as "reasonable"', but equally 'Defensive attitudes and resistances, which seem irrational because their real purpose is unconscious, frequently are "rationalized" by the ego's foisting other secondary purposes upon them'.
For a near-determinist like Eric Berne
, one's 'important decisions are already made...in early childhood': thereafter 'other decisions...are "directed" decisions rationalized on spurious grounds'. Once a decision has been made on unconscious grounds, 'without the individual's being aware of the real forces behind it. he takes upon himself the task of finding justifications for it..."rationalization"'.
Lacan
in his concept of meconnaissance came very close to the same idea: 'everything that the ego neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues...everything that it ignores, exhausts, and binds in the significations that it receives from language'.
Some later psychoanalysts might take a more positive view of the process, suggesting that 'Intellectualisation and rationalisation...bridge the gap between immature mechanisms and those of maturity'; but to object relations theory
it could be part of a more sinister process whereby the mind 'detaches feelings from their true locus and attaches them to the exact reverse; it falsifies judgement; it splits intellect from feeling and enslaves reason...a process called rationalization'.
One answer to the discomfort of the situation is that 'their minds rationalize it by inventing a comfortable illusion'. Thus for example 'people who start to smoke again after quitting for a while perceive smoking to be less dangerous to their health, compared to their views when they decided to stop' - thereby averting their 'post-decisional regret' through their new rationalization.
In a similar way, acts of aggression
will often be seen as 'reasonable, well justified, even necessary...rationalizing their self-interest in these ways'; so that, to cite 'Martin Luther King, Jr...."It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their act"'. The same may be said of the collective scale. 'When groups commit aggression, they, too, rationalize their acts with high-sounding words...rationalizing their own self-interested desires', so that, for example, 'The own God is the right God. The other God is the strange God....Our own soldiers take care of the poor families; the enemy rapes them'.
Such collective rationalizations come close perhaps to the communal illusions of which Freud wrote as 'derived from human wishes...Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well? and...may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature?'.
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, rationalization (or making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism in which perceived controversial behaviors or feelings are logically justified and explained in a rational or logical manner in order to avoid any true explanation and made consciously tolerable by plausible means. Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly subconscious
Subconscious
The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....
(e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt
Guilt
Guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. It is also a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that...
).
People rationalize for various reasons. Rationalization may differentiate the original deterministic explanation of the behavior or feeling in question. Sometimes rationalization occurs when we think we know ourselves better than we do
Introspection illusion
The introspection illusion is a cognitive illusion in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable...
.
It is also an informal fallacy
Informal fallacy
An informal fallacy is an argument whose stated premises fail to support their proposed conclusion. The deviation in an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in the path of reasoning that links the premises to the conclusion...
of reasoning.
DSM definition
According to the DSM-IVDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders...
, rationalization occurs "when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for his or her own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self serving but incorrect explanations."
Examples
Based on anecdotal and survey evidence, John Banja states that the medical field features a disproportionate amount of rationalization invoked in the "covering up" of mistakes (here, medical errorsMedical error
A medical error may be defined as a preventable adverse effect of care, whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailment.-Definitions:As a general...
). Common excuses made are:
- "Why disclose the error? The patient was going to die anyway"
- "Telling the family about the error will only make them feel worse"
- "It was the patient's fault. If he wasn't so (obese, sick etc), this error wouldn't have caused so much harm"
- "Well, we did our best. These things happen"
- "If we're not totally and absolutely certain the error caused the harm, we don't have to tell."
Psychoanalysis
Ernest JonesErnest Jones
Alfred Ernest Jones was a British neurologist and psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud’s official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world where, as President of both the British Psycho-Analytical...
was 'the man who, appropriately, contributed the term "rationalization" to psychoanalysis (in 1908) - "the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized"'. Although Jones 'had not coined the term - the Oxford English Dictionary records the year of its first use as 1846' - he was the first to employ it in the context of psychoanalysis: 'No one will admit that he ever deliberately performed an irrational act, and any act that might appear so is immediately justified by...providing a false explanation that has a plausible ring of rationality'.
The term was taken up almost immediately by Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
to account for the explanations offered for neurotic symptoms - 'a process which (borrowing a useful term from Ernest Jones [1908] we may describe as "rationalization"' - and was later developed further by his daughter Anna Freud
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis...
.
However the concept itself (as opposed to the term) can be traced back millennia earlier, to Quintilian
Quintilian
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing...
and classical rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
: 'The "pat excuse" is the color, a frequent technical term among the rhetoricians for any approach that would present an action in the most favourable possible light'. By the eighteenth century, it was almost a commonplace that, were a man to consider his actions, 'he will soon find, that such of them, as strong inclination and custom have prompted him to commit, are generally dressed out and painted with all the false beauties [color] which, a soft and flattering hand can give them'.
What psychoanalysis added was the specific idea of the motives that were glossed or colored being unconscious, a point developed further by Lundhold, "Repression and Rationalization", in 1933, and by Hollitscher, "The Concept of Rationalization" in 1939. By the 1940s Fenichel
Otto Fenichel
Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation".Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already as a very young man, when still in school, he was attracted by the circle of psychoanalysts around Freud...
could distinguish 'various types of rationalization...Emotional attitudes become permissible on condition that they are justified as "reasonable"', but equally 'Defensive attitudes and resistances, which seem irrational because their real purpose is unconscious, frequently are "rationalized" by the ego's foisting other secondary purposes upon them'.
For a near-determinist like Eric Berne
Eric Berne
Eric Berne was a Canadian-born psychiatrist best known as the creator of transactional analysis and the author of Games People Play.-Background and education:...
, one's 'important decisions are already made...in early childhood': thereafter 'other decisions...are "directed" decisions rationalized on spurious grounds'. Once a decision has been made on unconscious grounds, 'without the individual's being aware of the real forces behind it. he takes upon himself the task of finding justifications for it..."rationalization"'.
Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
in his concept of meconnaissance came very close to the same idea: 'everything that the ego neglects, scotomizes, misconstrues...everything that it ignores, exhausts, and binds in the significations that it receives from language'.
Some later psychoanalysts might take a more positive view of the process, suggesting that 'Intellectualisation and rationalisation...bridge the gap between immature mechanisms and those of maturity'; but to object relations theory
Object relations theory
Object relations theory is a psychodynamic theory within psychoanalytic psychology. The theory describes the process of developing a mind as one grows in relation to others in the environment....
it could be part of a more sinister process whereby the mind 'detaches feelings from their true locus and attaches them to the exact reverse; it falsifies judgement; it splits intellect from feeling and enslaves reason...a process called rationalization'.
Cognitive dissonance
A rather different, but perhaps complementary, approach to rationalization comes from cognitive dissonance. 'In 1957. Leon Festinger...argued that when people become aware that their attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs ("cognitions") are inconsistent with one another, this realization brings with it an uncomfortable state of tension called cognitive dissonance '.One answer to the discomfort of the situation is that 'their minds rationalize it by inventing a comfortable illusion'. Thus for example 'people who start to smoke again after quitting for a while perceive smoking to be less dangerous to their health, compared to their views when they decided to stop' - thereby averting their 'post-decisional regret' through their new rationalization.
In a similar way, acts of aggression
Aggression
In psychology, as well as other social and behavioral sciences, aggression refers to behavior between members of the same species that is intended to cause humiliation, pain, or harm. Ferguson and Beaver defined aggressive behavior as "Behavior which is intended to increase the social dominance of...
will often be seen as 'reasonable, well justified, even necessary...rationalizing their self-interest in these ways'; so that, to cite 'Martin Luther King, Jr...."It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their act"'. The same may be said of the collective scale. 'When groups commit aggression, they, too, rationalize their acts with high-sounding words...rationalizing their own self-interested desires', so that, for example, 'The own God is the right God. The other God is the strange God....Our own soldiers take care of the poor families; the enemy rapes them'.
Such collective rationalizations come close perhaps to the communal illusions of which Freud wrote as 'derived from human wishes...Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well? and...may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature?'.
See also
Further reading
- Tsang J Moral rationalization and the integration of situational factors and psychological processes in immoral behavior Review of General Psychology 6(1):25-50,2002
- Brian P. McLaughlin/Amelie Rorty, Perspectives on self-deception (California 1988)