making them ineffective and not capable of being selected for by evolution. Psychoanalysis Ernest Jones introduced the term "rationalization" to psychoanalysis in 1908, defining it as "the inventing of a reason for an attitude or action the motive of which is not recognized"—an explanation which (though false) could seem plausible. The term (Rationalisierung in German) was taken up almost immediately by Sigmund Freud to account for the explanations offered by patients for their own neurotic symptoms. As psychoanalysts continued to explore the glossed of unconscious motives, Otto Fenichel distinguished different sorts of rationalization—both the justifying of irrational instinctive actions on the grounds that they were reasonable or normatively validated and the rationalizing of defensive structures, whose purpose is unknown on the grounds that they have some quite different but somehow logical meaning. Later psychoanalysts are divided between a positive view of rationalization as a stepping stone on the way to maturity, and a more destructive view of it as splitting feeling from thought, and so undermining the powers of reason. Cognitive dissonance Leon Festinger highlighted in 1957 the discomfort caused to people by awareness of their inconsistent thought. Rationalization can reduce such discomfort by explaining away the discrepancy in question, as when people who take up smoking after previously quitting decide that the evidence for it being harmful is less than they previously thought. See also References Bibliography Further reading Psychoanalytic terminology Informal fallacies Defence mechanisms Cognitive biases Justification (epistemology)