The rationale for an irrational species rationalizing rationales

It’s called “cognitive dissonance”, which means disagreeing with something you know and understand differently. Hence the instinctive ability to rationalize anything into an acceptable form. Self-delusion is another description.

Social psychology, which has made the world what it is today, is attempting to understand this human obsession. Except it's not only humans who think this way. Apparently capuchin monkeys have the ability to revalue their decisions like humans. There’s now some evidence that adults, children, and capuchin monkeys take much the same approach, according to Yale researchers. The New York Times has researched the history of the experiments on cognitive dissonance. The first experiment was in 1956. Given a choice of items, subjects were told to rate them in terms of preferences. The subjects were then told they could take home one of two items they’d valued the same. Then they were asked to rate all the items again. Of the two special items, the one not chosen was devalued in the second assessment. The capuchin monkeys, confronted with a choice of different color M&Ms, did the same thing. According to the New York Times, researchers took their own thinking a bit further:

"… people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.

Of course, when you see others engaging in this sort of rationalization, it can look silly or pathological, as if they have a desperate need to justify themselves or are cynically telling lies they couldn’t possibly believe themselves. But you don’t expect to see such high-level mental contortions in 4-year-olds or monkeys."

From which perspective came the logical question: why do adults, children, and monkeys have the same behavior patterns? Even amnesiacs demonstrated similar behavior and responses. That was important, because the issue of “rewriting history” was thought to be a factor in the retesting phase. The conclusion so far is that there isn’t a lot of rational thought process involved. So, being irrational is really a natural product of a behavior that didn’t have a rationale. It sounds very much like cognitive dissonance is a self-editing process, which is why a rationale is required. Despite appearances, it might even be a useful ability. Using Aesop’s fox as an analogy this observation was made about an evolutionary function for self-delusion: As the New York Times reports:

"Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal."

They may just be rationalizing their findings based on a rationale that irrational rationalization has to have a rational cause… but if you were to suppose an “irrationale”, as in this case, you wouldn’t need to rationalize the results. Well, not rationally, anyway.