Rationalization (psychology)

Quintilian and classical rhetoric used the term color for the presenting of an action in the most favourable possible perspective.[5] Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century took up the point, arguing 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".[6]

According to the DSM-IV, rationalization occurs "when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for their own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self serving but incorrect explanations".[7]

Some scientists criticize the notion that brains are wired to rationalize irrational decisions, arguing that evolution would select against spending more nutrients at mental processes that do not contribute to the improvement of decisions such as rationalization of decisions that would have been taken anyway. These scientists argue that learning from mistakes would be decreased rather than increased by rationalization, and criticize the hypothesis that rationalization evolved as a means of social manipulation by noting that if rational arguments were deceptive there would be no evolutionary chance for breeding individuals that responded to the arguments and therefore making them ineffective and not capable of being selected for by evolution.[13]

Joshua Greene's 2008 article "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul"[14] argues that Kantian/deontological ethics is best understood as rationalization rather than rationalism—an attempt to justify intuitive moral judgments post-hoc. Several philosophers have written critical responses.[15][16][17][18][19]

Ernest Jones introduced the term "rationalization" to psychoanalysis in 1908, defining it as "the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized"[20]—an explanation which (though false) could seem plausible.[21] The term (Rationalisierung in German) was taken up almost immediately by Sigmund Freud to account for the explanations offered by patients for their own neurotic symptoms.[22][23]

As psychoanalysts continued to explore the glossed of unconscious motives, Otto Fenichel distinguished different sorts of rationalization—both the justifying of irrational instinctive actions on the grounds that they were reasonable or normatively validated and the rationalizing of defensive structures, whose purpose is unknown on the grounds that they have some quite different but somehow logical meaning.[24]

Later psychoanalysts are divided between a positive view of rationalization as a stepping-stone on the way to maturity,[25] and a more destructive view of it as splitting feeling from thought, and so undermining the powers of reason.[26]

Leon Festinger highlighted in 1957 the discomfort caused to people by awareness of their inconsistent thought.[27] Rationalization can reduce such discomfort by explaining away the discrepancy in question, as when people who take up smoking after previously quitting decide that the evidence for it being harmful is less than they previously thought.[28]

• McLaughlin, Brian P.; Rorty, Amélie, eds. (1988). Perspectives on Self-deception. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520061231.
• Tsang, Jo-Ann (2002). "Moral rationalization and the integration of situational factors and psychological processes in immoral behavior" (PDF). Review of General Psychology. 6 (1): 25–50. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.1.25. S2CID 3869738.