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Defenses

Rationalization

Rationalization is explaining what you did, or what you feel, with reasons that sound good and feel true but aren’t the real ones. The explanation is plausible, often reassuring or flattering. The actual motive stays out of sight. The person usually believes the explanation, which is what separates rationalization from a conscious excuse.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person deals with conflict or stress “by devising reassuring or self-serving but incorrect explanations for his or her own or others’ behavior” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). A plausible reason is substituted while, to an outsider, “a motive that is more self-serving or difficult to acknowledge is evident.” The hidden motive isn’t always selfish. It “may also involve caring or loving feelings which the subject finds uncomfortable.”

Rationalization protects against guilt and shame, and it preserves the picture of oneself as a reasonable, decent person. The cost is that the real motive goes unexamined, so the same pattern can keep repeating, while the people around you can often see what you can’t.

Where It Sits

Rationalization belongs to Level 3, the Disavowal Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. Disavowal defenses refuse to acknowledge some unacceptable part of inner or outer reality, and they may misattribute a problem to another source or reason, “further covering up internal reality.” Rationalization is a clear case of that second move. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places rationalization at the same disavowal level, alongside denial and projection.

Among the immature defenses, rationalization is grouped with the non-depressive defenses, which protect self-esteem by disavowing reality rather than turning distress against the self.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify rationalization:

Examples

Franklin and the cod

As a young man, Benjamin Franklin had resolved not to eat meat, and regarded catching fish as “a kind of unprovoked murder.” On a voyage from Boston, becalmed off Block Island, the crew fried up a catch of cod, and it “smelt admirably well.” Torn between principle and appetite, Franklin remembered seeing smaller fish in the cod’s stomachs and reasoned, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” He ate heartily. Writing about it years later, he saw what had happened: how convenient it is to be a “reasonable creature,” since “it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” The moment at the frying pan is a textbook case of rationalization. The older Franklin’s wry hindsight is something else, closer to self-observation and humor.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (written 1771), ch. IV

Hamlet’s shifting reasons

In his study of Hamlet, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones pointed out that the reasons Hamlet gives for delaying his revenge keep changing. At one moment he calls himself a coward, at another he doubts the ghost, and when the chance finally comes he decides the time is wrong. None of these reasons, Jones argued, “will stand a moment’s serious consideration.” His rule of thumb: “When a man gives at different times a different reason for his conduct it is safe to infer that … he is concealing the true reason,” whether he knows it or not. Jones explicitly read Hamlet’s excuses as examples of “evasion and rationalisation.”

Ernest Jones, Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis (1923), pp. 29–31

Sour grapes

In Aesop’s fable, a famished fox tries every trick to reach a bunch of ripe grapes and fails. She turns away, “hiding her disappointment and saying: ‘The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought.’” The fox’s new opinion of the grapes spares her the sting of failure, which is exactly the kind of reassuring but incorrect explanation the DMRS describes.

Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes,” in Three Hundred Aesop’s Fables (G. F. Townsend, trans., 1867)

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Intellectualization
Both can sound thoughtful and articulate. Intellectualization talks about the real issue in abstract, general terms to keep the feeling at bay. Rationalization offers a specific, plausible reason that happens to be the wrong one.
Denial
In denial, the person disputes that the act or feeling is there at all. In rationalization, the act is admitted and the motive is disguised.
Projection
Rationalization may point to other people’s contributions to shrink one’s own role. Projection goes further, attributing one’s own unacknowledged feelings or motives to someone else.
Conscious excuses
Someone who knows the real reason and offers a more presentable one is making an excuse, not using a defense. In rationalization, the person is usually unaware, or only dimly aware, of the true motive, and sees only the substituted reason.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count rationalization among their characteristic defenses:

History

The psychoanalyst Ernest Jones proposed the term in “Rationalisation in Every-Day Life,” a paper read at a congress in Salzburg on April 27, 1908, and published later that year. Jones argued that everyone “feels that as a rational creature he must be able to give a connected, logical and continuous account of himself,” so that any irrational act is justified by “a false explanation that has a plausible ring of rationality.” He separated “evasions,” false explanations formed mainly for oneself, from “rationalisations,” formed mainly with an eye on the opinions of one’s circle, while admitting there was no sharp line between them. His example was medical: valerian was still prescribed for hysteria long after the original reason for it had been discarded, and teachers of neurology had supplied a respectable-sounding new one, calling it an “antispasmodic.”

Jones soon applied the idea to literature, in his study of Hamlet’s delay, first published in 1910.

Rationalization was later formalized for research. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) placed it at the disavowal level, and J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales defines it and places it at Level 3.

In Di Giuseppe and Perry’s (2021) sample therapy session, a patient complained about his relationship with his girlfriend and “justified his anger as the result of feeling too much pressure and low empathy at the same time.” Raters found rationalization among his predominant defenses. In a 2021 study of 254 non-clinical adults using a self-report questionnaire, Kampe and colleagues found that grandiose narcissism was associated with rationalization, among other defenses.

Sources