WE ALL tend to rationalise our bad decisions and try to hide our mistakes, even from ourselves. Now it turns out that the psychological machinery to do this exists even in young children, and evolved a surprisingly long way back in our primate ancestry.
When things go wrong for us, we have a choice – give up on a cherished self-image (“I’m irresistible to women,” say), or keep it and play down the situation (“I didn’t really like her anyway…”). Over the past 50 years, hundreds of studies have revealed the many tools at our disposal which cope with this…
