Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-nqrmd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-15T02:41:35.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rationalization is rational

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2019

Fiery Cushman Open the ORCID record for Fiery Cushman [Opens in a new window]
Fiery Cushman*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA02138cushman@fas.harvard.eduhttps://cushmanlab.fas.harvard.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Rationalization occurs when a person has performed an action and then concocts the beliefs and desires that would have made it rational. Then, people often adjust their own beliefs and desires to match the concocted ones. While many studies demonstrate rationalization, and a few theories describe its underlying cognitive mechanisms, we have little understanding of its function. Why is the mind designed to construct post hoc rationalizations of its behavior, and then to adopt them? This may accomplish an important task: transferring information between the different kinds of processes and representations that influence our behavior. Human decision making does not rely on a single process; it is influenced by reason, habit, instinct, norms, and so on. Several of these influences are not organized according to rational choice (i.e., computing and maximizing expected value). Rationalization extracts implicit information – true beliefs and useful desires – from the influence of these non-rational systems on behavior. This is a useful fiction – fiction, because it imputes reason to non-rational psychological processes; useful, because it can improve subsequent reasoning. More generally, rationalization belongs to the broader class of representational exchange mechanisms, which transfer information between many different kinds of psychological representations that guide our behavior. Representational exchange enables us to represent any information in the manner best suited to the particular tasks that require it, balancing accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility in thought. The theory of representational exchange reveals connections between rationalization and theory of mind, inverse reinforcement learning, thought experiments, and reflective equilibrium.

Keywords

rationalizationcognitive dissonanceself-perceptiontheory of mindinverse reinforcement learninghabitizationsocial learningreflective equilibriumuseful fictionrepresentational exchange

Information

Type
Target Article
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 43 , 2020 , e28
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ackley, D. H., Hinton, G. E. & Sejnowski, T. J. (1985) A learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines. Cognitive Science 9(1):147–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alicke, M. D. (2000) Culpable control and the psychology of blame. Psychological Bulletin 126(4):556–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arnold, M. B. (1960) Emotion and personality. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Aronson, E. (1968) Dissonance theory: Progress and problems. In: Theories of cognitive consistency: A sourcebook, ed. Abelson, R. P., Aronson, E. E., McGuire, W. J., Newcomb, T. M., Rosenberg, M. J. & Tannenbaum, P. H., pp. 5–27. Rand-McNally.Google Scholar
Badre, D. & Nee, D. E. (2017) Frontal cortex and the hierarchical control of behavior. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22(2):170–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baker, C. L., Saxe, R. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2009) Action understanding as inverse planning. Cognition 113(3):329–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Batchelder, W. H. & Alexander, G. E. (2012) Insight problem solving: A critical examination of the possibility of formal theory. Journal of Problem Solving 5(1):56–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayer, H. M. & Glimcher, P. W. (2005) Midbrain dopamine neurons encode a quantitative reward prediction error signal. Neuron 47(1):129–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beggan, J. K. (1992) On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62(2):229–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellman, R. (1954) The theory of dynamic programming. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 60(6):503–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bem, D. J. (1972) Self-perception theory. In: Advances in experimental social psychology, vol. 6, pp. 1–62. Elsevier.Google Scholar
Botvinick, M. & Weinstein, A. (2014) Model-based hierarchical reinforcement learning and human action control. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369(1655):20130480. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0480CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Botvinick, M. M. (2008) Hierarchical models of behavior and prefrontal function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(5):201–208.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J. & Henrich, J. (2011) The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108:10918–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brehm, J. W. (1956) Postdecision changes in the desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 52(3):384–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Browne, C. B., Powley, E., Whitehouse, D., Lucas, S. M., Cowling, P. I., Rohlfshagen, P., Tavener, S., Perez, D., Samothrakis, S. & Colton, S. (2012) A survey of Monte Carlo tree search methods. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 4(1):1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buckner, R. L. & Carroll, D. C. (2007) Self-projection and the brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(2):49–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Christensen-Szalanski, J. J. & Willham, C. F. (1991) The hindsight bias: A meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 48(1):147–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cialdini, R. B. & Goldstein, N. J. (2004) Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology 55:591–621.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cialdini, R. B. & Trost, M. R. (1998) Social influence: Social norms, conformity and compliance. In: The handbook of social psychology, ed. Gilbert, D. T., Fiske, S. T. & Lindzey, G., pp. 151–92. McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Cushman, F. & Paul, L. (in press) Are desires interdependent? In: The Oxford handbook of moral psychology, ed. Doris, J. & Vargas, M.. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cushman, F. A. & Morris, A. (2015) Habitual control of goal selection in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 112(45):13817–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daniels, N. (2003) Reflective equilibrium. In: Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (fall 2018 edition), ed. Zalta, Edward N.. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reflective-equilibrium/#pagetopright. (Online publication)Google Scholar
Davidson, T. J., Kloosterman, F. & Wilson, M. A. (2009) Hippocampal replay of extended experience. Neuron 63(4):497–507.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daw, N. D. & Dayan, P. (2014) The algorithmic anatomy of model-based evaluation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 369(1655):20130478.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daw, N. D. & Doya, K. (2006) The computational neurobiology of learning and reward. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 16(2):199–204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daw, N. D., Gershman, S. J., Seymour, B., Dayan, P. & Dolan, R. J. (2011) Model-based influences on humans’ choices and striatal prediction errors. Neuron 69(6):1204–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daw, N. D., Niv, Y. & Dayan, P. (2005) Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control. Nature Neuroscience 8(12):1704.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dayan, P. (2012) How to set the switches on this thing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 22(6):1068–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dennett, D. C. (1987) The intentional stance. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Deutsch, M. & Gerard, H. B. (1955) A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 51(3):629–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devine, P. G. (1989) Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56(1):5–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dezfouli, A. & Balleine, B. W. (2012) Habits, action sequences and reinforcement learning. European Journal of Neuroscience 35(7):1036–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dezfouli, A. & Balleine, B. W. (2013) Actions, action sequences and habits: evidence that goal-directed and habitual action control are hierarchically organized. PLOS Computational Biology 9(12):e1003364.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dezfouli, A., Lingawi, N. W. & Balleine, B. W. (2014) Habits as action sequences: hierarchical action control and changes in outcome value. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 369(1655):20130482.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dolan, R. J. & Dayan, P. (2013) Goals and habits in the brain. Neuron 80(2):312–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dutton, D. G. & Aron, A. P. (1974) Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30(4):510–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Elliot, A. J. & Devine, P. G. (1994) On the motivational nature of cognitive dissonance: Dissonance as psychological discomfort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(3):382–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Festinger, L. (1962) A theory of cognitive dissonance, vol. 2. Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Festinger, L. (1999) Reflections on cognitive dissonance: 30 years later. In: Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology, ed. Harmon-Jones, E. & Mills, J., pp. 381–85. American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. & Schacter, S. (1956) When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foerde, K., Race, E., Verfaellie, M. & Shohamy, D. (2013) A role for the medial temporal lobe in feedback-driven learning: evidence from amnesia. Journal of Neuroscience 33(13):5698–704.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foerde, K. & Shohamy, D. (2011) Feedback timing modulates brain systems for learning in humans. Journal of Neuroscience 31(37):13157–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gawronski, B., Rydell, R. J., De Houwer, J., Brannon, S. M., Ye, Y., Vervliet, B. & Hu, X. (2018) Contextualized attitude change. In: Advances in experimental social psychology, vol. 57, ed. Olson, J. M., pp. 1–52. Elsevier Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gazzaniga, M. S. (1967) The split brain in man. Scientific American 217(2):24–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendler, T. S. (2008) Alief in action (and reaction). Mind & Language 23(5):552–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gershman, S. J., Gerstenberg, T., Baker, C. L. & Cushman, F. A. (2016) Plans, habits, and theory of mind. PLOS ONE 11(9):e0162246.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gershman, S. J., Markman, A. B. & Otto, A. R. (2014) Retrospective revaluation in sequential decision making: A tale of two systems. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(1):182–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gershman, S. J., Zhou, J. & Kommers, C. (2017) Imaginative reinforcement learning: Computational principles and neural mechanisms. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 29(12):2103–113.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, E. J. & Walk, R. D. (1960) The “visual cliff.” Scientific American 202(4):64–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gigerenzer, G. & Selten, R. (2002) Bounded rationality: The adaptive toolbox. MIT press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J. & Wheatley, T. P. (1998) Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(3):617–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glimcher, P. W. (2011) Understanding dopamine and reinforcement learning: The dopamine reward prediction error hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 108(Suppl. 3):15647–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N. & Bryant, P. (1997) Words, thoughts, and theories, vol. 1. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Graybiel, A. M. (2008) Habits, rituals, and the evaluative brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience 31:359–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greene, J. (2014) Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin.Google Scholar
Greenwald, A. G. & Banaji, M. R. (1995) Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review 102(1):4–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Griffiths, T. L., Lieder, F. & Goodman, N. D. (2015) Rational use of cognitive resources: Levels of analysis between the computational and the algorithmic. Topics in Cognitive Science 7(2):217–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haidt, J. (2001) The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review 108(4):814–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harmon-Jones, E., Brehm, J. W., Greenberg, J., Simon, L. & Nelson, D. E. (1996) Evidence that the production of aversive consequences is not necessary to create cognitive dissonance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70:5–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harmon-Jones, E. & Mills, J. (1999) An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In: Science conference series. Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology, ed. E. Harmon-Jones & J. Mills, pp. 3–21. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10318-001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heider, F. (1958/2013) The psychology of interpersonal relations. Psychology Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, J. & Henrich, N. (2010) The evolution of cultural adaptations: Fijian food taboos protect against dangerous marine toxins. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277(1701):3715–24. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.1191.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ho, M. K., MacGlashan, J., Greenwald, A., Littman, M. L., Hilliard, E. M., Trimbach, C., Brawner, S., Tenenbaum, J. B., Kleiman-Weiner, M. & Austerweil, J. L. (2016) Feature-based joint planning and norm learning in collaborative games. In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, eds. A. Papafragou, D. J. Grodner, D. Mirman & J. Trueswell. Cognitive Science Society. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2016/index.html.Google Scholar
Ho, M. K., MacGlashan, J., Littman, M. L. & Cushman, F. (2017) Social is special: A normative framework for teaching with and learning from evaluative feedback. Cognition 167:91–106.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hume, D. (1739/2003) A treatise of human nature. Courier Corporation.Google Scholar
Huys, Q. J., Lally, N., Faulkner, P., Eshel, N., Seifritz, E., Gershman, S. J., Dayan, P. & Roiser, J. P. (2015) Interplay of approximate planning strategies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(10):3098–103.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Icard, T., Cushman, F. & Knobe, J. (2018) On the instrumental value of hypothetical and counterfactual thought. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting, Madison, WI, pp. 517–22. Cognitive Science Society. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2018/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S. & Olsson, A. (2005) Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome in a simple decision task. Science 310(5745):116–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, J. T. & Banaji, M. R. (1994) The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology 33(1):1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D. (2011b) Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kelleher, R. T. & Gollub, L. R. (1962) A review of positive conditioned reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of behavior 5(S4):543–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kelman, H. C. (1958) Compliance, identification, and internalization three processes of attitude change. Journal of Conflict Resolution 2(1):51–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keramati, M., Smittenaar, P., Dolan, R. J. & Dayan, P. (2016) Adaptive integration of habits into depth-limited planning defines a habitual-goal–directed spectrum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(45):12868–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kleiman-Weiner, M., Ho, M. K., Austerweil, J. L., Littman, M. L. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2016) Coordinate to cooperate or compete: Abstract goals and joint intentions in social interaction. In: Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Papafragou, A., Grodner, D. J., Mirman, D. & Trueswell, J.. Cognitive Science Society. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2016/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Knowlton, B. J., Mangels, J. A. & Squire, L. R. (1996) A neostriatal habit learning system in humans. Science 273(5280):1399–1402.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Knox, R. E. & Inkster, J. A. (1968) Postdecision dissonance at post time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8(4, Pt. 1):319–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kool, W., Cushman, F. A. & Gershman, S. J. (2018) Competition and cooperation between multiple reinforcement learning systems. In: Goal-directed decision making: Computations and neural circuits, ed. Morris, R., Bornstein, A. & Shenhav, A., pp. 153–78. Elsevier Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-812098-9.00007-3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kool, W., Gershman, S. J. & Cushman, F. A. (2017) Cost-benefit arbitration between multiple reinforcement-learning systems. Psychological Science 28(9):1321–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kunda, Z. (1990) The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 108(3):480–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Langer, E. J. (1975) The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32(2):311–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.2.311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lazarus, R. S. (1982) Thoughts on the relations between emotion and cognition. American Psychologist 37(9):1019–24. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.37.9.1019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2007) The architecture of human kin detection. Nature 445(7129):727–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lieberman, M. D., Ochsner, K. N., Gilbert, D. T. & Schacter, D. L. (2001) Do amnesiacs exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change. Psychological Science 12(2):135–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lombrozo, T. (2017) “Learning by thinking” in science and everyday life. In: The scientific imagination. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Losch, M. E. & Cacioppo, J. T. (1990) Cognitive dissonance may enhance sympathetic tonus, but attitudes are changed to reduce negative affect rather than arousal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 26(4):289–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marr, D. (1982) Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2011) Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(2):57–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, G. A. & Buckhout, R. (1962/1973) Psychology: The science of mental life. Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Morris, A. & Cushman, F. (2017) A common framework for theories of norm compliance. Social Philosophy and Policy 35(1):101–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, A., Phillips, J. S., Icard, T., Knobe, J., Gerstenberg, T. & Cushman, F. A. (2018, April 26). Causal judgments approximate the effectiveness of future interventions. PsyArxiv: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/nq53z.Google Scholar
Morris, G., Nevet, A., Arkadir, D., Vaadia, E. & Bergman, H. (2006) Midbrain dopamine neurons encode decisions for future action. Nature Neuroscience 9(8):1057–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neisser, U. (2014) Cognitive psychology: Classic edition. Psychology Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ng, A. Y. & Russell, S. J. (2000) Algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, ed. P. Langley, pp. 663–70. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.Google Scholar
Nickerson, R. S. (1998) Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology 2(2):175–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nisbett, R. E. & Wilson, T. D. (1977) Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review 84(3):231–59. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norman, D. A. & Shallice, T. (1986) Attention to action. In: Consciousness and self-regulation: Advances in research and theory IV, ed., R. Davidson, R. Schwartz & D. Shapiro, pp. 1–18. Plenum Press.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, T. J. (2015) Productivity and reuse in language: A theory of linguistic computation and storage. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, J. & Cushman, F. (2017) Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(18):4649–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Railton, P. (2014) The affective dog and its rational tale: Intuition and attunement. Ethics 124(4):813–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Read, S. J. & Marcus-Newhall, A. (1993) Explanatory coherence in social explanations: A parallel distributed processing account. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65(3):429–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richerson, P. J. & Boyd, R. (2008) Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Roesch, M. R., Calu, D. J. & Schoenbaum, G. (2007) Dopamine neurons encode the better option in rats deciding between differently delayed or sized rewards. Nature Neuroscience 10(12):1615–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schachter, S. & Singer, J. (1962) Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review 69(5):379–99. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046234bCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sharot, T., De Martino, B. & Dolan, R. J. (2009) How choice reveals and shapes expected hedonic outcome. Journal of Neuroscience 29(12):3760–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sharot, T., Velasquez, C. M. & Dolan, R. J. (2010) Do decisions shape preference? Evidence from blind choice. Psychological Science 21(9):1231–35. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610379235.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shenhav, A., Botvinick, M. M. & Cohen, J. D. (2013) The expected value of control: An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function. Neuron 79(2):217–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shultz, T. R. & Lepper, M. R. (1999) Computer simulation of cognitive dissonance reduction. In: Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology, ed. E. Harmon-Jones & J. Mills, pp. 235–65. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10318-010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steele, C. M. (1988) The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In: Advances in experimental social psychology, vol. 21, Social psychological studies of the self: Perspectives and programs, ed. L. Berkowitz, pp. 261–302. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J. & Lynch, M. (1993) Self-image resilience and dissonance: The role of affirmational resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64(6):885–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sutton, R. S. (1991) Dyna, an integrated architecture for learning, planning, and reacting. ACM SIGART Bulletin 2(4):160–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, R. S. & Barto, A. G. (1998) Reinforcement learning: An introduction, vol. 1. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sutton, R. S., Precup, D. & Singh, S. (1999) Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning. Artificial Intelligence 112(1–2):181–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tedeschi, J. T., Schlenker, B. R. & Bonoma, T. V. (1971) Cognitive dissonance: Private ratiocination or public spectacle. American Psychologist 26(8):685–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tetlock, P. E. (2002) Social functionalist frameworks for judgment and choice: Intuitive politicians, theologians, and prosecutors. Psychological Review 109(3):451–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thagard, P. (1989) Explanatory coherence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12(3):435–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorndike, E. L. (1898) Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. The Psychological Review Monograph Supplements 2(4):i–109.Google Scholar
Tinbergen, N. (1963) On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 20(4):410–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2014) A natural history of human thinking. Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Davis-Dasilva, M., Camak, L. & Bard, K. (1987) Observational learning of tool-use by young chimpanzees. Human Evolution 2(2):175–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trivers, R. (2000) The elements of a scientific theory of self-deception. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 907(1):114–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Veen, V., Krug, M. K., Schooler, J. W. & Carter, C. S. (2009) Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance. Nature Neuroscience 12(11):1469–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vinckier, F., Rigoux, L., Kurniawan, I. T., Hu, C., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., Daunizeau, J. & Pessiglione, M. (2019) Sour grapes and sweet victories: How actions shape preferences. PLOS Computational Biology 15(1):e1006499.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Von Hippel, W. & Trivers, R. (2011) Reflections on self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(1):41–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whiten, A., McGuigan, N., Marshall-Pescini, S. & Hopper, L. M. (2009) Emulation, imitation, over-imitation and the scope of culture for child and chimpanzee. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364(1528):2417–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, T. D. (2004) Strangers to ourselves. Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zanna, M. P. & Cooper, J. (1974) Dissonance and the pill: An attribution approach to studying the arousal properties of dissonance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29(5):703–709.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bem, D. J. (1967) Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena. Psychological Review 74(3):183–200.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Egan, L. C., Santos, L. R. & Bloom, P. (2007) The origins of cognitive dissonance: Evidence from children and monkeys. Psychological Science 18(11):978–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Squire, L. R. (2004) Memory systems of the brain: A brief history and current perspective. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82(3):171–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sloman, S. A. (1996) The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 119(1):3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar