Temple of Illusia

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Exercise #1 – Rationalization
Separate the class into small groups, and tell students that the lesson will be focusing on the effects of belief. Pass out copies of handout #1, explaining that this handout provides several scenarios combining a belief and an action. They are to imagine themselves in the scenario and provide an explanation for how belief and action go together.

Once the majority of the groups have completed the worksheet, solicit several sample answers, particularly for scenarios 5, 6 and 7.

Tell students that they may have left out several possible answers. On the board, write the following:

    * You were wrong about what you believe.
    * You don’t hold your belief as strongly as you thought.
    * You don’t understand your belief and what it entails.
    * You acted hypocritically.

The students very likely didn’t come up with many of these. Explain that there’s a reason for that: They were being asked to imagine themselves in the scenarios, and it’s very difficult to believe these things about oneself. Instead, they offered rationalizations for each behavior. Rationalization is a form of self-deception, which is a powerful psychological impediment to good reasoning. When we rationalize, we justify our behaviors and convince ourselves that they are self-consistent, so that we don’t have to face up to uncomfortable possibilities like the ones on the board.

Most self-deception is brought on by cognitive dissonance, which occurs when you can’t reconcile your beliefs with the evidence in front of you. In this case, the students were asked to imagine that they had beliefs that did not accord with their own actions. They came up with rationalizations in order to ease the cognitive dissonance caused by this inconsistency.

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