Rationalisation was described by Freud biographer and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones as an unconscious maneuver to provide plausible explanations for unacceptable behaviour, motives, or feelings.

Children as young as ages four to six demonstrated this tactic in experiments by Bar-Ilan University’s Avi Benozio and Gil Diesendruck.

The research team found that young children learned to “reframe” disappointing circumstances.
This approach is often used by older people to reduce uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, described in classic studies by New School’s Leon Festinger.

In Benozio and Diesendruck’s experiments, children ages three, four, five and six years old completed tasks in exchange for stickers that varied in attractiveness to each age group.

Participants could invest considerable effort or minimal work in activities and could choose to keep these prizes or give them to another person.

Six year olds who invested substantial effort to obtain attractive rewards were less likely to relinquish stickers to others.

When six year olds applied significant effort to obtain less desirable rewards, they also distributed fewer to others, but their reasoning differed.

They adjusted their appraisal of the less attractive stickers, judging these prizes as more appealing.
In contrast, four year olds discarded stickers rather than bolstering the value of the stickers.

These differences suggest that children learn to rationalize by age six and continue using this strategy into adulthood, and validated by Stanford’s Elliot Aronson and the U.S. Army’s Judson Mills.

Their studies validated Aesop‘s observation of “sweet lemons” and “sour grapes” in the well-known fable The Fox and the Grapes.

To evaluate a possible relationship between cognitive dissonance and rationalization, UCLA’s Johanna M. Jarcho and Matthew D. Lieberman with Elliot T. Berkman of University of Oregon conducted fMRIs while participants responded to measures of attitude change linked to cognitive dissonance.

Brain activity showed significantly increased rapid reappraisal pattern used in emotional regulation, suggesting that rationalization may be an automatic coping mechanism rather than an unconscious defense mechanism.

Benozio and Diesendruck noted that this adaptive capacity could lead to complacence instead of working to change negative circumstances, articulated in the well-known Serenity Prayer attributed to Yale’s Reinhold Niebuhr:

…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

-*To what extent is rationalisation a logical error?
-*How effective is rationalisation as an emotional regulation strategy?

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©Kathryn Welds