This principle helps explain why people behave differently from what pure logic would predict.
More quotesA person buys the expensive trainers because the cushioning is technically superior. They also happen to look terrific in the mirror, carry the right logo and have been admired by someone attractive. Asked for the reason, the ankle receives a detailed engineering lecture. Consciousness is an in-house historian. It inherits a decision and writes the official account from whatever documents reached the archive. Hunger disappears from the supermarket explanation. Familiarity becomes “strategic fit”. The crowded restaurant was chosen for its menu, obviously, and the visible queue played no part whatsoever.
Researchers can be just as vain. When participants cannot identify a cause, there is a temptation to populate the darkness with a clever unconscious mechanism and collect applause for finding it. Hidden does not mean proven. The ghost in the attic still needs footprints.
So the awkward position is the useful one: people often lack access to what moved them, and observers often lack access too. A verbal explanation is neither sacred confession nor disposable noise. It is one piece of evidence gathered after the machinery has run. Change the surroundings. Vary the default, timing, price, crowd or bodily state. See whether the decision follows. Ask people to predict their own behaviour before testing it. The gap between prediction, action and explanation will usually teach more than another confident “why”.
“I don’t know” sounds weak only in cultures addicted to instant reasons. It may be the first accurate sentence in the conversation.