Choice blindness. What!?
Learned about this in a new book by @summerfieldlab:
One fascinating instance of this is the phenomenon known as choice blindness. In a study conducted in Sweden, people were asked to fill out question- naires about their political views. After submitting their answers, they received them back and were asked to verbally explain their views. Unbeknownst to participants, researchers switched the answer sheets, so that left-leaning people received right-leaning answers back, and vice versa. Of the 75% who failed to notice, many were happy to provide elaborate justifications for political positions opposing their own, apparently blind to the choices they had just made. Similar effects have been described with preferences about facial attractiveness and the taste of tea or jam. Choice blindness is an instance of post hoc rationalization, the tendency to invent motives in the light of actions, rather than choosing actions to satisfy motives.
See (Hall et al. 2010), (Johansson et al. 2005), and (Strandberg et al. 2020).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/natural-general-intelligence-9780192843883?cc=us&lang=en&
The take-home message for me, personally, from results like this has always been to stop, think, and be deliberate.
The circumstances of the experiment are designed to provoke this kind of automatic processing and justification so it can be studied, which is awesome.
But it doesn't mean that we're necessarily totally trapped in reflexive rationalization in all cases. It does mean that if you haven't cultivated the conscious habit to avoid some of these traps, you will probably fall into them. (Some you will probably fall into anyway.)
