i. do we actually know why we do things?

how often can people truly decipher their motives? a person can hear this question and believe that it is fairly easy for them to answer; “i ate ramen today because i am hungry, and ramen is cheap,” “i watched the conjuring last week because it was the day before halloween, and people watch horror movies around halloween,” and so forth. 

what about more complicated motives? “i did not apply for the position because i wasn't particularly interested in it.” what if you knew, without a doubt, if you were to apply for this position, you would get it? then your actions might change. perhaps you simply did not want to face rejection. “i did not want to tell my friend that i dislike her boyfriend because it is none of my business.” what if you knew that your friend would absolutely appreciate your honesty and take your advice to heart? then the action might change because perhaps the true motive was to simply avoid conflict. 

do we actually know why we do things? how often do we understand our motives, and how often do we invent them? sometimes these motives are not so bad; i see no issue with simply not wanting to tell a friend your thoughts on her boyfriend because you are avoiding causing offense. unfortunately, though, we have to discover our true motives to properly assess our decisions.

ii. why introspection might be unreliable

in richard nisbett and timothy wilson’s 1977 paper, Telling More Than We Can Know, they argued that individuals often tend to lack direct awareness of the cognitive processes responsible for their judgements and may, therefore, explain those judgements using plausible assumptions. in the 2005 choice blindness experiment by Petter Johansson and colleagues, participants chose between photographs of faces. researchers covertly presented some participants with the face they had not chosen. some participants failed to notice the switch and nevertheless explained why they had supposedly preferred that face. the explanation was not merely a dishonest excuse! participants believed they were describing their own choice! i wonder how often we employ this same process without realizing it. perhaps we make a decision based on some feeling we cannot quite identify, and only afterward do we construct an explanation that seems reasonable. we may eventually become so accustomed to that explanation that we forget there was ever any uncertainty about it

iii. the stories we tell ourselves

there is a notable distinction between explaining the motives behind a particular decision versus explaining the type of person we believe ourselves to be; people, typically, tend to have some understanding of their own character. we also tend to interpret our behaviors in ways that agrees with it. 

consider somebody who thinks of herself as a particularly generous person. she gives money to charity and explains that she does so because she cares about the suffering of others. this may very well be true. but suppose that she also enjoys being recognized for her generosity, and would donate considerably less if nobody could know about it. does this mean that she never cared about the people she was helping? certainly not. it might simply mean that her motives are more complicated than she originally believed.

the difficulty is that admitting this complication could threaten an idea she has about herself. perhaps she does not want to discover that she is somebody who cares about being admired. perhaps she has spent years believing that her generosity is entirely selfless. it would be much easier to continue accepting the original explanation.

i suspect that we do this in much less obvious ways, too. we may call ourselves independent because we dislike admitting that we need other people. we may insist that we are indifferent to somebody's opinion because acknowledging how much it matters would be embarrassing. eventually, these explanations become part of how we describe ourselves, and the distinction between what we actually feel and what we believe we ought to feel becomes rather difficult to identify.

this raises a question! if our understanding of ourselves is partly constructed from the explanations we give for our behavior, how much of what we call our personality is an observation, and how much is a story we have learned to tell?

iv. can we ever identify a true motive?

there is, however, a problem with attempting to uncover hidden motives. we cannot assume that because an alternative explanation is possible, it must be the correct one.

returning to the example of somebody who did not apply for a position, perhaps that person really was uninterested in it. even if the guarantee of acceptance would have changed their decision, this does not necessarily prove that fear of rejection was the original motive. removing the possibility of rejection changes the circumstances of the decision itself.

i think we should be careful about this because it is remarkably easy to become suspicious of every explanation a person gives, including our own. somebody who helps a friend might be motivated by affection, but they might also enjoy feeling useful. these are not mutually exclusive explanations. there is no particular reason to believe that every action must have one definitive cause.

perhaps the more useful question is not whether we can discover a single true motive, but whether we can become better at recognizing the different influences on our decisions. we might ask ourselves what we would do if nobody were watching, or if we knew that we could not fail. the answers would not establish anything with certainty, but they might reveal something that our original explanation overlooked.

and that is already quite valuable. we do not need to understand every detail of our own psychology to recognize that our first interpretation might be incomplete.

v. reasoning in defense of desire

friedrich nietzsche makes an interesting argument in Beyond Good and Evil, Part I, §6. he suggests that philosophical systems, despite their apparent concern with objective truth, can also reveal the personal drives and moral commitments of the philosophers who construct them. in this sense, a philosophy may tell us something about its author that the author did not necessarily intend to disclose.

this idea extends far beyond philosophy. when we construct an elaborate argument to defend a decision, we tend to imagine that we began with evidence and eventually arrived at a conclusion. but what if, sometimes, the conclusion came first? what if we already knew what we wanted to believe, and our reasoning was employed afterward to make that belief appear justified?

imagine somebody who wants to end a friendship but feels guilty about doing so. they might begin examining every unpleasant interaction they have ever had with this person, gathering evidence that the friendship was unhealthy or that they had been treated unfairly. perhaps some of this evidence is perfectly legitimate. nevertheless, it is possible that the desire to leave the friendship came before the argument explaining why leaving was necessary.

the argument itself does not have to be incorrect. somebody can arrive at a perfectly reasonable conclusion for reasons they do not fully understand. discovering an emotional motive behind an argument does not automatically disprove it.

it does, however, complicate our confidence in our own reasoning. we often imagine that intelligence makes us less susceptible to self-deception, but i contemplate whether it can sometimes make us more effective at it. a person who is particularly good at constructing arguments might also be particularly good at defending a conclusion they have no intention of reconsidering.

perhaps the question we ought to ask ourselves is not simply whether our explanation makes sense, but why we are so interested in believing it.

vi. the comfort of having no choice

jean-paul sartre explores a related problem in Being and Nothingness through his concept of bad faith. broadly speaking, bad faith involves a kind of self-deception in which a person denies or misrepresents aspects of their own freedom or situation, often to escape the discomfort of acknowledging responsibility for their choices.

consider how frequently people say that they had no choice. sometimes this is a perfectly reasonable description of a situation. people are constrained by circumstances they cannot control, and it would be absurd to pretend that everybody has complete freedom over their lives.

however, there are also occasions when saying that we had no choice is considerably easier than admitting that we made a decision we are uncomfortable with.

suppose somebody remains in a relationship they are unhappy in. they might explain that leaving would be too difficult, that they have already invested too much time, or that their circumstances make separation impossible. these concerns may be entirely real. nevertheless, there might still be an element of choice involved, and acknowledging that possibility would require them to confront why they have decided to stay.

i tend to find the notion of bad faith unsettling because it suggests that we may not simply be confused about what we want. sometimes we may be unwilling to acknowledge what wanting something says about us.

there is comfort in believing that our decisions were inevitable; if there was no alternative, then there is considerably less to regret. we do not have to wonder whether we were cowardly or selfish, or whether we sacrificed something important because we were afraid of what might happen.

but perhaps this comfort comes at the expense of understanding ourselves. by insisting that we could not have acted differently, we may avoid examining the very motives that influenced our decision.

vii. is self-deception necessarily a bad thing?

having considered all of this, i am not entirely convinced that self-deception is always harmful. i can imagine circumstances in which a slightly inaccurate understanding of our own motives makes life considerably more bearable.

suppose somebody makes a decision that they later come to regret. perhaps they tell themselves that they did the best they could with the information available to them. this may not be entirely accurate. perhaps they ignored something important, or perhaps they suspected that they were making a mistake and proceeded anyway. nevertheless, the explanation might allow them to move forward rather than spend the rest of their lives punishing themselves for something they cannot change.

i do not think that discovering a less flattering motive should necessarily lead us to condemn ourselves. a person who enjoys being admired for their generosity is not therefore incapable of genuine kindness. similarly, somebody who avoids conflict is not necessarily dishonest or cowardly. our motives can be mixed without our actions becoming meaningless.

there is also something rather unreasonable about demanding perfect honesty from a mind that may not possess complete information about its own workings. if we accept that introspection has limitations, then we should probably also accept that a certain amount of misunderstanding is unavoidable.

perhaps we should be equally suspicious of the person who insists that every one of their motives is selfish. this, too, is an explanation that can become an identity. believing that we are fundamentally bad may be no more accurate than believing that we are exceptionally good.

the important distinction, i think, is between having an incomplete understanding of ourselves and refusing to reconsider that understanding when we encounter evidence against it.

viii. can we ever be completely honest with ourselves?

i began by wondering whether we actually know why we do things, and i am not sure that there is a particularly satisfying answer. we certainly know something about our motives, but it seems unlikely that we possess the sort of privileged access to our own minds that we often assume.

we have developed instruments capable of observing galaxies billions of light-years away, and theories that describe physical processes far beyond anything we can experience directly. yet even the ordinary act of explaining why we made a particular decision can become an exercise in uncertainty.

of course, the fact that our understanding is incomplete does not make the pursuit of understanding pointless. in science, an explanation is not valuable because it is impossible to question. it is valuable because it can be examined, challenged, and revised when new evidence becomes available. i wonder; should we approach our own motives in much the same way?

perhaps complete self-knowledge is not something we can ever reasonably expect to achieve. there will always be influences we fail to recognize, and explanations that seem perfectly convincing until something causes us to reconsider them.

there is a meaningful difference between being unable to know ourselves completely and being unwilling to try. we can acknowledge that our motives may be less admirable than we would like without assuming that they must be. we can recognize that an explanation is comforting without immediately deciding that it is false.

perhaps being honest with ourselves does not mean arriving at a final, indisputable account of who we are. perhaps it means being willing to discover that we were mistaken.

after all, if we cannot tolerate being wrong about ourselves, how could we ever hope to understand ourselves at all?