I have
blogged before about the phenomenon of cognitive resonance. This is when we explain something we have
done so that it makes rational sense, even when the real reason might not have
been all that rational. This is not a
conscious thing (well, at least it doesn’t have to be). It is just a natural way our brain works.
This makes
sense from a long term adaptability perspective because we often make decisions
or behave in ways that are based on emotion, instant gratification, and other
suboptimal reasons but it is better not to think of ourselves as
irrational. For our brains to naturally
do this and not even let our ego know about it works pretty well.
The most
famous (at least among us behavioral science geeks) example is a study where people
were asked to do a really boring task, either for free or for $20. Then they asked them about the
experience. Which ones do you think
thought it was most boring? Their
hypothesis was that the $20 people would because of the reward. But the opposite happened. The $20 people knew that they did it just for
the money so it was OK for it to be boring.
But the people who got nothing had no justification. So their
unconscious cognitive resonance retroactively convinced them that the task was
not so boring, allowing them to feel better about having done it.
As a
behavioral engineer, my job is to figure out how to use research results like
this to design better systems, jobs, consumer products, or whatever. And as usual, a comic strip says it better
than I ever could.