What really is Justification?
According to Wikipedia, In Christian Theology ( study of the nature of God), justification is God’s righteous act of removing the guilt & penalty of a sin, whilst declaring yourself to be righteous ( righteous meaning the nature of being right in relation to others, (being morally correct in view of society))
Justification vs Explaining
Describing something as true or good is justifying versus describing why something happened is Explaining.
The other day I was a having a conversation with an acquaintance at 3 in the morning, and I asked him,
“Do you wake up at 3 in the morning everyday? or is it that you go to to sleep this late everyday?”
The reply that I got for this question was,
”I love Web Development, and so I do this all the time”
Now is this person’s answer relevant to the question that I asked? (To give a small background of the discussion, we were speaking about internships and I looking to hire interns, and he looking to get an internship.)
(Will come back to this at the end of the article)
Where does a need to justify your actions come from?
To truly understand why we tend to justify our actions, we might require a brief of how the the human brain functions. It all comes down to cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950’s, proposed that human beings undergo psychological stress, if their thought process and actions are not in line with their internal core belief system.
People generally have a high self image of themselves, an image of being the most right at all time. A standard to live upto, and a level of maturity to always live by. This image usually forms our first principles, our belief system, our core values, basically, our conscience.
Human Beings like to have internal psychological consistency, to function in the real world. A person feels most fulfilled when all his actions fall in line with his core beliefs.
When there is resistance or contradictory ideas in his / her mind about anything that they do, it causes the mind to undergo some stress. The brain is a lazy organ. It will try and avoid work completely if given a choice.
Sitting at the same table with new ideas and core beliefs contradicting each other, takes the brain a lot of effort, which in turn converts into stress of the mind. To overcome this stress, we try to completely eliminate resistance between our core values and ideas and thoughts that our contradictory to each other.
There are three things that you will do, if you feel this psychological stress:
1. Change your behaviour.
2. Change your thinking / thought process.
3. Change your core belief.
To avoid getting this stress, we either change our behaviour, or try to justify our thoughts and actions, so that they fall in line with our core beliefs, or fall in line with moral societal beliefs.
How can we reduce psychological dissonance?
Take Smoking as an example. We are taught not only in school, but by everyone around us that smoking is bad for health, and the least it can do is cause cancer. Smoking is by far the worst thing you can do as a human being and not be punished for it by society. That is the kind of stigma that society has created around smoking.
Researchers studied the behaviour and attitudes of heavy smokers who attended a smoking cessation clinic but then relapsed into smoking again.
What do you think they found?
The heavier smoker you were, the more likely, you would change your core belief to match your thought process, and the not the other way round.
A heavy smoker’s thought process would be something like:
“Smoking is cool, I have to do these things to fit in”, or “My relative is 75 years old and has been smoking throughout his life, and nothing’s happened to him. The whole smoking gives you cancer scenario is just a fad.” Or “ All my friends smoke, nothing happens to them, why shouldn’t I?” or “ I have smoked so much and nothing’s happened to me yet, I’m sure nothing really will going forward” or “Smoking calms me down, it gives me the strength to fight my battles, reduces my stress”.
A heavy smoker who tried to quit and failed, managed to lower his / her perceptions of the dangers of smoking.
These justifications might seem completely nonsensical to the non-smoker, but that is the point!
People who do not want to give up smoking, will discredit reality and try and distort it, to reduce the effects of the stress caused by internal beliefs and contradicting thought processes. The person’s mind now, has no work to do, because his internal belief that smoking does not really cause me any harm and his thought process of actually smoking are in line with each other, indicating no resistance between the two.
Here, the habit is so strong, that it has become a part of your belief system. And to bring your mind to give you less stress about it, it is not this belief that you might change, but your thought process towards smoking has now become acceptable, by your standards.
This person is now guilt free, because according to them, there’s nothing wrong in it, which gives them the strength to explain themselves.
The brain gives out a feel good emotion, when there is least resistance. There is a reason that you feel fulfilled, when you are guilt free, because the brain has no work to do in this scenario. So it gives you a positive feedback, to continue what you’re doing.
Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that to help yourself feel better about your thoughts, you will do some unconscious mental work to try to reduce the dissonance. (Stress caused by contradicting views of core beliefs and thought processes)
There is a big difference between self-justification & lying or making excuses. Self-justification is the strength to convince yourself that your actions were the most suited ones in those scenarios and in fact it was the most right thing to do.
It all comes down to your conscience. As I said earlier, people usually have a stable, positive self-image of themselves. Self-Justification is a portrayal of being loyal to the image that a person has created about herself / himself. It shows that despite the signs and stated goals and desires, the person will not be interested in the truth, but rather self-preservation, like a defense mechanism.
Admitting your fault, that you are incorrect, might save relationships, lives, even war, but it will also force you to admit that the image that you have created about yourself is wrong. Depending on how dedicated you are to this image, you might be unable to see that you have made a mistake, let alone confront it.
Who do you think feels more dissonance (psychological stress)? The person with a higher self esteem or the person with lower self confidence?
When a person with high self esteem and a high self image, commits to behaving in an irrational way, behaves in a way which contradicts their own high morale self image and core values, he / she will work harder to get this behaviour in line with with these beliefs, as against a person with a lower self esteem.
A person with a lower self esteem will think that his improper actions lay in sync with his personality, because his personality is that of an underachiever and a person that always does the wrong things.
Now we have established, that justification comes from one’s self image, core beliefs, which are to each their own.
But,
What triggers this Justification? When is Dissonance at its peak?
The decisions that you take on a daily basis will determine your dissonance. Your Pre decision & Post decision thought process.
A study was conducted, wherein consumers in a super market were asked to rate a set of appliances kept on display in a super market.
Once a consumer had bought an appliance, he / she was once again made to rate the appliances that were kept on display.
What they found was that people who bought an appliance, 9 times out of 10 gave a higher rating to the appliance they had just bought, than in the original test.
What this means is that, once your decision is final, you will convince yourself that the decision you have made is the right one.
When do you think this person will be happier? Ten minutes before the purchase? Or Ten after the purchase? Why do we feel so fulfilled and nice when we buy an extremely expensive item, or buy something which is non refundable?
Like the example of the fox who could not reach the grapes that he craved for, and so decided that it was better that he could not reach them as they most probably had been sour.
We tend to think about the positives of the decision made and the negatives of the discarded decision to convince ourselves of the fact, that we have made the right choice.
If the supermarket had an exchange policy, to use and return the appliance after 30 days, what kind of ratings would we have gotten then?
Since there is room for malleability, there is room to change your decision, it is certain that for the 30 day return offer, the person’s ratings for the purchased item would be similar to any other shelf appliance.
Thus,
If the decision is a permanent one, we feel more dissonance, which leads us to justify our actions, and hence give a higher rating to the appliance that we have bought. This makes our action of buying the appliance come in line with our core belief of why we bought the appliance in the first place.
It follows the “Do what you love, love what you do” theory, wherein, doing what you love is your core value. But when you start loving what you do, it means that however bad the stuff is to do, since you have taught yourself to love it, you have taught yourself to embrace your core belief, and thus your ideas, thoughts and finally actions will fall in line.
Justification of Effort.
Your justification might also depend on how much effort you take. Tendency of someone to increase liking of something that they have worked hard to attain is a common way of convincing oneself of the correctness of the emotion he / she feels towards the thing.
How do you turn boring people into interesting people?
If you work hard and slog to get yourself into a community of people, or an organisation, it is very likely that you will convince yourself of the good things that the community is made out of, even if it is the complete opposite.
If we motivate ourselves to find the goodness in people and things, irrespective of everything that they are made of, it is likely that we tend to transcribe their actions in a positive way.
The more effort we take, and the harder we work, the greater the need to convince ourselves, that our views are correct.
It took me two weeks to write this article. On the last day, I gave up, because I got fed up of how much more I had to write. I later convinced my self of the hard work that I had put in, to research about this topic, to get good content, to share my views with the world, which made me resume and finish this topic. I convinced my self of the hard work I had put in, to complete the task I had set out to accomplish.
You could try out this justification exercise for yourself.
You will find a lot of justification being thrown around you, at your place of work, with your friends, with your loved ones. It is a “taken for granted” human trait, that people do not feel the need to question.
Once you see this justification around you, you will know that there is some kind of resistance in the brain, some hypocrisy, some excuse or some stress that people are trying to overcome.
Also,
If you treat a person with kindness, or you treat another person with disgust, self justification will see to it, that your actions towards the person, match your emotions for that action and you will not treat the same person in the same way again.
What happens when you do a favor for someone?
Doing a favor, makes you have a higher self image of yourself. It puts you in a place where in your actions are in line with the core values that you have of being the most righteous. And most often than not, once you complete this favor for another person, even if you disliked the person before, you might just start having positive emotions towards them.
We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them — Leo Tolstoy , 1869.
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.” — Ben Franklin
So, if you want to build rapport with another person, start by asking them for help! This is what Ben Franklin also did, so many years ago!
(The opposite case is also believed to be true, namely that we come to hate a person whom we did wrong to. We de-humanize them to justify the bad things we did to them or want to do to them in the future.
This takes me back to the Black Mirror episode “Men against Fire”, wherein soldiers must protect frightened villagers from an infestation of vicious, feral mutants. Soldiers have an inplant in their mind to make their targets look worse, and scarier than what it really is, to elicit a reaction of hatred from the soldier. Their natural instinct to behave in this scenario is to shoot down these targets.)
Coming back to the first example covered in the article about the kind of answer that was given to a simple question.
The question “ “Do you wake up at 3 in the morning everyday? or is it that you go to to sleep this late every night?” is a straight forward one, which should really elicit a simple relevant answer.
What made this person answer in a way to justify his intentions first, without really answering the question?
(As mentioned earlier, regarding the background of the discussion we were speaking about internships and I looking to hire interns for my company, and he looking to get an internship.)
In this scenario, this person felt that his actions needed to be in line with society views. In trying to be most relevant to me, he gave me an answer which he felt would justify his noble intention of staying up that late.
His answer: ”I love Web Development, and so I do this all the time” , did not really answer my question, or what I hoped to learn from him.
If he did the right things according to his perception of society, his intentions would have been seen in his actions, which would not have led to him explaining his intentions. As I said earlier, this is the contradiction that he tried to overcome. And he did this by justifying his intentions!
Thus in conclusion,
I hope this article allows you to be more aware of the process of the mind. Next time, you feel that your actions are discriminated against, or you feel the need to explain your intentions, you can stop thinking of the perception of what people have of your actions and instead spend some time on how you think and what your core values are saying to you.
Lastly, something off topic,
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Thank you! ?
REFERENCES
( If you want to go deeper than what I have covered, feel free to check out the following links, that I used to research on this topic).
https://buildthefire.com/ben-franklin-effect/
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/letting-go-of-the-difficult-emotions-ebook-name-your-own-price/
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/why-we-feel-the-need-to-explain-ourselves-and-justify-our-choices/
https://exploringyourmind.com/why-do-we-justify-ourselves/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-just-vs-expl/
https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/2/0/5/0205796621.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226899037_The_Justification_Hypothesis