Steven Pinker writes, Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We’re curious.") Presumably, it’s because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."
I suspect that Pinker is more familiar with the story which he is citing and that the person in question persisted in claiming that he was at his home even after he made the remark about the elevator.
The second example is a bad one. The man in the elevator example isn't "rationalizing." He's making a clever joke to cover up the embarassment of being disoriented.
Otherwise an informative and thought-provoking article. Thank you for the link.
I suspect that Pinker is more familiar with the story which he is citing and that the person in question persisted in claiming that he was at his home even after he made the remark about the elevator.
The second example is a bad one. The man in the elevator example isn't "rationalizing." He's making a clever joke to cover up the embarassment of being disoriented.
Otherwise an informative and thought-provoking article. Thank you for the link.