Cognitive Dissonance
Go Ahead, rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.
For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — whileRelated: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
our friends and family are saying,
“Well... ”
This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”
If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.
Comments
John Tierney is always interesting until he puts out some vaguely tenuous evolutionary explanation for a behavior, ignoring entirely linked alleles and physical constraints. Serious sociobiologists don't do that sort of thing anymore.
It is possible, for instance, to genetically engineer mice so that they are 'smarter' (i.e. they can run mazes faster), but the same modification also caused their kidneys to fail. (I can't find the study from a google search, though...) Perhaps, that is, the reason we rationalize behavior is that our kidneys would explode if we didn't.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/6/133825/425
Kucinich! Cheney! Impeachment!
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