I discovered that one of my friends has something similar - perhaps the same thing - going on in her brain, such that she doesn't rationalise. What we managed to sort out, sort of, was that anything was a justification for her: so when she doesn't eat cookies because it would make her gain weight, and also when she doesn't like Brad Pitt "because he's ugly", and also when she doesn't like a book series because it's chauvinistic, and also when she "doesn't like babies", but her friend's baby "is an exception because it's [friend]'s", these all feel like the same thing to her; she can't or won't tell the difference between what I see as a strong reason or a weak reason or a made-up flimsy reason.

A wild theory appears! In probably the deepest moment of introspection for her in that discussion, she said she thinks she might be like this because it gives her 100% confidence in whatever she's doing. Thinking on that, I'm in the mind of the "70% blue, 30% red balls in the urn" game where some human guessers approximate a 7:3 ratio of blue/red guesses, whereas the best strategy is to guess blue all the time. There might be two kinds of people in this... (read more)

Since rationalizations are usually employed to repair cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance is strongest when image preservation is necessary, one hypothesis would simply be that these people have self-images that don't need much preserving.

Possible test: do these people have an unusually high tolerance for situations and/or self-disclosures that most people would find shameful, humiliating or embarrassing? This might explain a lack of need to rationalize, regardless of the reason for the high tolerance. (For example, we should expect sociopaths to not see any need to rationalize their actions to themselves.]

[Edit to add: not to imply that any of the people in your experiences are sociopaths; just noting that it's another situation where somebody would have a low need for self-image preserving rationalizations.)

In response to the folk suggesting that our questions were just unclear, etc.:

I notice rationalization all the time too (in myself and in others); but there totally seem to be people who don't ever notice it in themselves. Lots of them. Including both folks who seem never to have trained in rationality-type-stuff at all, and folks who have. I ignored my first counter-example, and my second, but not my third and forth; especially after the fourth counter-example kindly allowed us to cross-examine them for some hours, to go try accosting strangers with weird questions and see if they noticed themself rationalizing while approaching said strangers, etc.

Mercurial, and Eliezer, both suggested an analogy to the "thinking in words" vs "thinking in images" thing; some do one and others do another, and many tend to assume that everyone must experience life that way. We all updated toward thinking that there is some actual thing going on here -- something we were initially not modeling.

But, I'm still confused about:

1. Whether we're just still missing something obvious anyhow. Maybe our fourth counter-example, who consented to answering gobs of questions and trying ex

It seems introspectively plausible that when you ask people questions like "how do you know when you're rationalizing", they feel like they've been asked a "when did you stop beating your wife" question, and feel initially tempted to react with an "oh yeah, well maybe I don't" regardless of whether it's true.

For anosognosia to be a common failure mode, and for the split brain patient's peculiar left side's behaviour, the rationalization got to be a common mode of thought. Perhaps there's a module in the brain that prepares speech but has very little impact on the beliefs and decisions; I ask you why your hand is not scratching your back, and it says, because my back is not itching, and that happens to be correct, but it would say same if the arm was paralysed and back was itching and it wasn't 'told' (by the part doing actual thinking) that arm was paralysed.

When you say you aren't rationalizing, perhaps that module still works by rationalization, it just happens to be quite plausible. Maybe that's how construction of sentences works in the first place when talking about nearly anything.

Some of these people show signs of being rather high-level rationalists overall, although some don't.

I wouldn't necessarily expect there to be a super-strong connection between not rationalizing and being a "high-level rationalist". There are other ways to go systematically wrong than through goal-directed rationalization. As a possibly overlapping point, your concept of "high-level rationalist" probably sneaks in things like intelligence and knowledge that aren't strictly rationality.

I don't think I rationalize to any significant extent. Even the examples I came up with for Anna's thread concern inefficient allocation of attention and using zero-information arguments, not something specifically directed to defense of a position. I admit being wrong or confused on simple things, sometimes incorrectly (so that I have to go back to embrace a momentarily-rejected position). It's possible I'm completely incapable of noticing rationalization and would need a new basic skill to fix that, but doesn't seem very likely.

(Alternatively, perhaps "rationalization" needs to be unpacked a bit, so that problems like those in the examples I referred to above can find a place in that notion. As it is, they seem more like flaws in understanding unbiased with respect to a favored conclusion, unless that conclusion is to be selected in the hindsight.)

One data point: I notice myself rationalizing, or starting to rationalize, many times a week.

I might task inexpensive virtual assistants (from third-world countries) with finding YouTube clips of people rationalizing on TV (the easiest candidates are probably Fox News people, politicians, etc.)

In a word: compartmentalization.

Since that's not helpful, I will say that it doesn't even seem to be possible for there to be people who don't rationalize. (Or enough that you're at all likely to find them.)

Some of these people show signs of being rather

"Some", "signs", "rather". These words all show signs of being rather belief in belief. I notice you don't say, "Some of these people are high-level rationalists," just that they show warning signs of being so. What does this really mean? Are you referring to the ... (read more)

The cues people have for noticing their rationalizations are things they notice before they're done thinking. They have not rationalized; they had a thought that could lead to rationalization or a feeling they associate with rationalizing. And then they stopped. But there was a large enough time between when they started arguing for a conclusion and when they decided to think about it that they noticed their rationalization. Having a reflex to think about a question fast enough compared to the reflex to rationalize can cause someone to not notice their arg... (read more)

I tend to agree that anyone who denies the tendency to rationalize is either in denial or has a different definition for the word "rationalize". In fact I would argue that rationalization is the default for human beings, and that anything else requires either focused effort or serious mental re-programming (which is still probably only partially effective).

One possible way to try to elicit an understanding for any given individual's capacity for rationalization is to ask them about the last time they did something they knew was a bad idea (perha... (read more)

But in several of our test sessions for teaching rationality, a handful of people report never rationalizing and seem to have little clue what Tarski is for.

Don't you have exercises designed to catch people rationalizing? If not, you ought to, if yes, did you catch them rationalizing?

I haven't remembered a dream in years. There are three that I have had in my life which I can recount even a bit of (all of which were nightmares, interestingly). I'm pretty sure that I have them all the time because I sometimes wake up with strange images in my head. But these images disappear very quickly and I can't tell someone what I was dreaming about even minutes after waking.

I notice that I sometimes catch myself rationalizing in simple ways, like offering some justification for a shortcoming that I have. But I notice also that I can only think of ... (read more)

"I have goofed" is hardly a rationalization, is it?

Or "I did this, because all the elephants are flying." is not making an excuse, IF you really believe that they are indeed flying - either. No matter that at least some elephants are not flying. You just have a wrong belief.

A rationalization is (in the sense of "making excuses"), when you are rationalizing with a knowingly wrong reason.

Would you call THIS comment "a rationalization"?