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Your reasons aren't your causes
Most of us feel we know why we do what we do. Ask someone why they made a choice and they have an answer ready. Very largely, though, we act for reasons we're not completely aware of, and the reasons we can state are not necessarily the causes of our actions.
That gap matters for decisions. A decision that feels deliberate can be driven by an automatic response, with the careful-sounding explanation arriving only when someone asks why.
Whether that leads to a bad decision depends on the person and the situation. The feeling of having reasons is there either way.
How do people invent reasons for choices?
In a 1977 paper titled "Telling More Than We Can Know," Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson described a study in which shoppers chose among four identical pairs of stockings laid out in a row. Shoppers picked the pair on the right far more often than the pair on the left. When asked why, they named differences in quality, texture, or color, and none of them mentioned position. When the experimenters asked directly whether position could have mattered, shoppers denied it.
Can people explain choices they never made?
In 2005, Petter Johansson and Lars Hall ran a study they called choice blindness. Participants picked the more attractive of two photographed faces, and the experimenter then used sleight of hand to hand them the other photo. Most participants did not notice the swap. Many went on to give detailed reasons for preferring a face they had not chosen.
What does the brain's interpreter do?
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated, working with Roger Sperry's research group in the 1960s. When an instruction was shown only to the right hemisphere, a patient would carry it out, such as standing up and walking. The speaking left hemisphere had never seen the instruction, yet it supplied a fluent explanation for the action, such as going to get a drink. Gazzaniga named this explanation-making system the interpreter.
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