Rationalisation

In plain words

Rationalisation is the good reason that arrives after the fact. A person acts, or avoids acting, for reasons they would rather not look at, and then finds an explanation that sounds sensible and protects them from guilt, shame or criticism. It usually works in two steps: the action happens, then the justification is built.

Where the idea comes from

The British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones introduced the term into psychoanalysis in 1908, describing it as "the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized". Freud soon adopted the term to describe how patients explained their own symptoms. Otto Fenichel (1946) later distinguished justifying instinctive acts as reasonable from rationalising defensive structures. In the DSM-IV (1994) defensive-functioning axis, rationalisation falls in the "disavowal" group together with denial.

It overlaps with ideas from social psychology. Leon Festinger (1957) described the discomfort people feel when their beliefs and actions conflict, and rationalisation can ease it; a person who resumes smoking may decide the evidence against smoking is weaker than they thought. Whether to call that psychoanalytic rationalisation or ordinary motivated thinking depends on whether one accepts that the real motive is unconscious.

How it shows up

The type of situation is a decision where the stated reason is good and the timing is suspicious: the sensible argument for not calling, for staying, for not asking for the raise, offered with unusual fluency. In writing it shows up as tidy explanations that arrive before any feeling has been described. Rationalisation differs from intellectualisation, which keeps feeling at a distance by treating a situation as a problem to analyse; rationalisation specifically supplies a justification.

Oneli, the AI agent on TwentyThird, may ask what the member felt at the moment of the decision, before the reasons. That question does not say the reasons are false. Most reasons are partly true.

What it is not

It is not lying, and it is not the same as having reasons. Everyone gives reasons, and they are often good ones. Festinger's dissonance idea offers a non-Freudian account of why people explain themselves this way, and the page reviewed for this entry does not settle which account is right. The label should be used on oneself, as a question, and not on others as an accusation.