Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

Take, for example, your average undergraduate around the time I hand out grades. Students who get As are thrilled, they're happy, and they accept their grades with pleasure, even glee. People with C's are, as you might imagine, less enthusiastic, dwelling for the most part not on what they did wrong, but what / did wrong. (Question 27 on the exam wasn't fair, we never talked about that in class, and how could Professor Marcus have taken off three points for my answer to question 42?) Meanwhile, it never occurs to the keeners in the front that I might have mistakenly been too generous to them. This asymmetry reeks, of course, of motivated reasoning, but I don't mean to complain; I do the same thing, ranting and raving at reviewers who reject my papers, blessing (rather than questioning) the wisdom of those who accept them. Similarly, car accidents are never our fault — it's always the other guy.

Freud would have seen all this self-deception as an illustration of what he called "defense mechanisms"; I see it as motivated reasoning. Either way, examples like these exemplify our habit of trying to fool the thermometer. Why feel bad that we've done something wrong when we can so easily jiggle the thermometer? As Jeff Goldblum's character put it in The Big Chill "Rationalizations are more important than sex." "Ever go a week without a rationalization?" he asked.

We do our best to succeed, but if at first we don't succeed, we can always lie, dissemble, or rationalize. In keeping with this idea, most Westerners believe themselves to be smarter, fairer, more considerate, more dependable, and more creative than average. And — shades of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" — we also convince ourselves that we are better-than-average drivers and have better-than-average health prospects. But you do the math: we can't all be above average. When Muhammad Ali said "I'm the greatest," he spoke the truth; the rest of us are probably just kidding ourselves (or at least our happy-o-meters).

Classic studies of a phenomenon called "cognitive dissonance" make the point in a different way.* Back in the late 1950s, Leon Festinger did a famous series of experiments in which he asked subjects (undergraduate students) to do tedious menial tasks (such as sticking a set of plain pegs into an plain board). Here's the rub: some subjects were paid well ($20, a lot of money in 1959), but others, poorly ($1). Afterward, all were asked how much they liked the task. People who were paid well typically confessed to being bored, but people who were paid only a dollar tended to delude themselves into thinking that putting all those pegs into little holes was fun. Evidently they didn't want to admit to themselves that they'd wasted their time. Once again, who's directing whom? Is happiness guiding

*The term cognitive dissonance has crossed over into popular culture, but its proper meaning hasn't. People use it informally to refer to any situation that's disturbing or unexpected. ("Dude, when he finds out we crashed his mother's car, he's going to be feeling some major cognitive dissonance.") The original use of the term refers to something less obvious, but far more interesting: the tension we feel when we realize (however dimly) that two or more of our beliefs are in conflict.

us, or are we micromanaging our own guide? It's as if we paid a sherpa to guide us up a mountain — only to ignore him whenever he told us we were going in the wrong direction. In short, we do everything in our power to make ourselves happy and comfortable with the world, but we stand perfectly ready to lie to ourselves if the truth doesn't cooperate.