Inventing plausible reasons for doing things you know you shouldn’t do, or for not doing things you know you should do.

Examples

“Everybody else is doing it.”

“Just one can’t hurt.”

“If I go to the gym this evening, I’ll be tired for my early meeting tomorrow, so it’s better if I just stay on the couch and watch one more episode.”

“I was just following orders.”

Discussion

Rationalisation is the art of making bad ideas sound like good ideas—or good ideas sound like bad ideas—so that we don’t have to feel guilty about doing something we know we shouldn’t do. In other words: making excuses.

This is where our animal urges and our capacity for logic meet. We’d all like to think that the reasons we give for doing things are reasonable and logical, but the truth is they usually aren’t.

In truth, self-control takes a lot of effort and involves the discomfort of denying ourselves something we want. Nobody likes this, and so we avoid doing the right thing by convincing ourselves that the right thing is wrong and the wrong thing is right.

Rationalisation is the favourite tool for people of high intelligence whose self-image can’t tolerate the idea that they are doing something childish, short-sighted, and impulsive.

It’s fascinating, for example, to read through the justifications people give for burning hundreds of billions of dollars building so-called AI systems that are destroying the environment, threatening the economy, and ruining people’s minds. The arguments are often very sensible and eloquently formulated, but if you listen closely, what they’re actually saying is this:

AI is a really cool toy and I want to play with it.

In day to day life as well, the impulses our rationalizations justify are usually equally simple:

• I want it.
• I’m afraid of failing.
• I’m hungry/horny/bored.
• It’s too much effort.

Ask anyone with an expensive sports car why they bought it, and you will probably get a long list of justifications involving precision engineering, gorgeous design, and efficiency. None of these things are untrue, but the real reason you spend $100,000 on a car is:

VROOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM

This kind of reason-inventing is used to justify everything from alcoholism, to child abuse, to genocide, and it’s one of the most powerful tools we humans have for fending off guilt and shame. E.g. anyone who has ever said, “I was just following orders.”

Having a good excuse allows you to acknowledge a mistake or do something hurtful without the embarrassment of admitting that you knew better and did it anyway because you were angry, frightened, hungry, frustrated, or bored.