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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:
- Whether we're just still missing something obvious anyhow. Maybe our fourth counter-example, who consented to answering gobs of questions and trying experiments for us, was a fluke? (Try asking people yourself, please; don't just say that it must be experimental error because you don't work that way)
- Whether they don't rationalize, or just don't notice themselves rationalizing. (Fourth datapoint seemed to maybe actually never make up reasons for choices; don't have data on the others really).
- What exactly the boundaries are on "rationalizing" -- what exactly it is, that a sizable portion of the folks we've talked to never notices themselves doing.
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Much thanks for collecting this data. What example did you use? And what sorts of examples did you get back?
"I'm trying to give up chocolate. Last weekend I saw a delicious cake and I found myself telling myself the only reason I wanted it was to boost my energy levels, hahaha you know the feeling, right?" If they didn't immediately chime in with examples I'd prompt them with "and you know, its not just food, I rationalise all the time" and ask them if they do as well.
Over than half of them immediately came up with their own diet-related rationalisations. Of the other 4 I had the "calling my mum" one above, a couple of people who said they often caught themselves coming up with reasons for why they weren't doing their work, and one "the dog wouldn't like to be taken for a walk in this cold weather".
The reason I mentioned guilt is that a few of them (I didn't count) explicitly used the word "guilty" (like, I'm too tired to work, so I don't have to feel guilty that I'm out drinking) and one person talked about trying to make himself feel better.