Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off with a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier this season: The Poisoning the Well Fallacy. Now, you may want to hit pause real quick & see if you can remember what the Poisoning the Well Fallacy is! Feel free to do that now and turn it back on to see if you got it right! A person is said to Poison the Well when they bring up unfavorable information about a person that could be true or false in an attempt to discredit anything they may say in the future. The unfavorable information they bring up could have nothing to do with the claims the person may make in the future, it’s simply brought up to cast doubt on everything they say later on.
The question to ask yourself when you encounter someone who is poisoning the well is this: “Is that really a valid reason to disregard everything this person is saying?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, check out Episode 63.
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Alright, today’s new fallacy is Rationalization. Rationalization happens when someone gives reasons for doing or believing something that aren’t REALLY their reasons for doing or believing it.
A simple example of Rationalization is a woman going shopping for new shoes and saying she HAD to get them because of an upcoming special event when the reality is, she had lots of shoe options she could have worn at home in her closet but she just like the color of these new shoes & wanted to get them. So, she’s using the upcoming special event as the excuse or justification for buying the new shoes rather than the real reason that she just liked the color.
Now, another common scenario where people will use Rationalization is when they just don’t want to do something but they don’t want to SAY that they just don’t want to, so they’ll offer another, hopefully more acceptable reason for why they can’t do that thing. For example, say someone invites me to see the latest Spiderman movie and I’m just not a Spiderman fan, I may say something like, “Oh man, that sounds so fun, but I really need to catch up on laundry that night. Bummer!” Ok, so that’s kind of a silly example, but it really is a good example of offering a different excuse for why I can’t go than just saying that the real reason is that I flat-out don’t want to go. Maybe I did need to do laundry but that’s not the real thing keeping me home. .
Or, another example would be the high school grad who didn’t have good enough grades to attend the college he really wanted to go to, but he’s embarrassed to tell people that, so he says that he’s going to the local community college because it’s closer to home and costs less than the other school. Those things may be true, but they’re not the REAL reason he’s attending the local school.
The problem with Rationalization is that it’s misleading at best and downright deceptive at worst. Sometimes people use rationalization to mis-lead themselves, which we would call self-deception, and sometimes it’s used to fool others. This can make it hard to get to the bottom of what’s really happening when someone is rationalizing because they typically really believe what they’re telling you is true. And it may have some truth to it, but it’s not the WHOLE truth, and it may not even be the REAL truth behind their motivations. The person might try offering a reason that they think is more ‘acceptable’ or ‘believable’ or they may be embarrassed of their real motivations and want to cover it up. So when you ask the person whether what they’re saying is true or not, they’ll very likely be absolutely convinced that it is true! The thing that’s kind of crazy and even scary is that humans are capable of rationalizing little, seemingly innocent, inconsequential things like not going to see Spiderman almost as easily as they can rationalize huge, horrible things like war and even genocide.
Another example of rationalization would be someone who avoids paying their taxes and says the reason they didn’t pay their taxes is because the government just wastes money anyways, when the real reason is that they don’t have the money to pay their taxes because they wasted it all gambling. In this case, maybe they do believe the government wastes money, but the REAL reason they’re saying that is because of the shame they feel for having lost all the money gambling.
So, the question to ask yourself if you’re on the committing or the receiving end of the Rationalization fallacy is this: “What’s the real motivation here?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
