Trying to understand why we do the things we do—or fail to do the things we want or intend to do—is a deeply engrained habit of thought. It seems obvious. It feels useful. When our ancestors roamed the savanna, they had a practical reason for trying to determine cause-and-effect explanations for what was going on around them: survival. And there are plenty of domains and situations in modern life where it’s also important to determine cause and effect. On a personal scale, for example:
- If I don’t shop for groceries, I won’t have any food to eat.
- If I don’t leave enough space between my car and the one in front of me, and it stops suddenly, I’m likely to run into it.
- When I eat too much citrus fruit, I get a rash.
Trying to come up with cause-and-effect explanations for our behavior is far less straightforward, but that doesn’t stop us. We think we can figure out why we do—or don’t do—the things we do. But we’ll never have access to all the necessary information since much of our behavior is initiated by the unconscious part of our brain.
We’re also under the illusion that having an explanation will make a difference. In fact having an explanation is so important to us that anything that seems to fit with our pre-existing beliefs will do, whether or not it’s accurate. Most of the time, we won’t be able to come up with a definitive explanation, and even if we did, so what? By itself, understanding something has no direct impact on our behavior.
Searching for an explanation for our behavior is often just a diversion from doing something about it. Sometimes we think we can’t take action until we after we figure out the why of what we’re doing or not doing. As I said, this habit of thinking feels useful. It has that in common with rumination. Both habits of thought seem like problem-solving but are really mental distractions that keep us stuck.
In truth, when we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to unconscious processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a makes-sense story. Explanations are all based on what makes it into our consciousness, but actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is that listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time. —Michael Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology, UC Santa Barbara
Essentially an explanation is a story about how or why something happened or is the way it is. It may be more—or less—accurate, but it’s still a story. And it’s often a story about dysfunction. If we want to effect behavior change, we have to let go of the old story, anyway, and craft a new one. The only way we can make that happen is by focusing on what we’re doing instead of on what we think about what we’re doing.
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